Afghanistan's past is being 'rewritten'

Why Afghanistan's past is being 'rewritten'

By Bilal Sarwary BBC News, Sarubi and Charikar

 

Afghanistan's government is rewriting history, literally.

The education ministry has endorsed a new history curriculum for school students that deletes nearly four decades of the country's war-torn past.

The government says textbooks based on the new curriculum will help bring unity in a country traditionally polarised along ethnic and political lines.

But critics accuse ministers of trying to appease the Taliban and other powerful groups by erasing history that portrays them in a bad light. They say the government is trying to win over the Taliban before Nato and US forces leave the country.

Afghanistan is entering a hugely uncertain time post-Nato, during which tricky arrangements with the Taliban and other players are expected.
'No mention of the misery'
The past 40 years in Afghanistan have been some of the most turbulent of any country in the world.

The suffering of people in the Shomali plains is not mentioned in textbooks

But the bloody coups of the 1970s, the 1979 Soviet invasion, the Moscow-backed communist regimes in Kabul and countless human rights excesses committed by secret police have all been erased from the history curriculum, critics say.

Nor is there much mention of the bloody civil war between mujahideen factions that tore Kabul apart in the 1990s, leaving an estimated 70,000 people dead.

That conflict gave rise to the Taliban - but there is not much mention of them either, or the US-led forces that drove them from power and have stayed for more than a decade.

An Afghan journalist, who did not wish to be identified for security reasons, told the BBC he was surprised the civil war and the Taliban regime had been wrapped up in just a few lines.

''There is no mention of the misery [the war] brought. No mention of Kabul being the killing zone. The books say Mullah Omar was removed in 2001, without saying who Mullah Omar was.

"There is no mention of the US and Nato presence. It is as if someone is trying to hide the sun with two fingers."

The education ministry denies suggestions that foreigners had any role in devising the new curriculum, and US military officials say they had no discussions on content in the books, some of which were paid for with US money.

But a spokesman for the US military in Kabul, David Lakin, added: ''Our cultural advisers reviewed the social studies textbooks for inappropriate material, such as inciting violence or religious discrimination."

The BBC visited two schools just outside Kabul where the new books have been introduced.

At one - Sarubi High School, 75km (40 miles) from Kabul - I sat in on a class and listened as a teacher asked one of his grade six students to read from his glossy new history textbook.

The chapter was on Sardar Mohammad Daud Khan, prime minister from 1953-63 and the country's president 10 years later.

The chapter talks about Daud Khan's rise but is silent on the full details of how he overthrew the monarchy of his first cousin, Mohammed Zahir Shah.

The following chapters, too, make no mention of the numerous bloody coups that unsettled the country's political landscape, the Moscow-backed regimes including that of President Najibullah, the civil war that began after his resignation or the rise in 1996 of the Taliban and their subsequent fall.
'Children will never know'
"What happened in Sarubi during the Soviet invasion?" I asked 11-year-old Muslim, who was listening diligently to his classmate.

Students will find few references to the rise and fall of the Taliban

''The Russians wanted to remove Islam from Afghanistan. A lot of people got killed, villages were bombed. Millions were forced to take refuge in Pakistan,'' the boy says.

"How do you know? This information doesn't exist in your history book."

"My parents and teachers told me," he says innocently.

The teacher, who also requested anonymity, says the new textbooks will deprive knowledge of the past to an entire generation.

"Since internet penetration is low and contact with the outside world is limited, children in Afghanistan are more dependent on textbooks than anywhere else in the world," he said.

"But now that the government has decided to delete the past 40 turbulent years from history books, millions of children will never know why and how the Afghanistan we live in came to be."

Like Sarubi, the Shomali plains north of Kabul also suffered the excesses of the Soviet Red Army and then the Taliban.

The bustling town of Charikar, just off the main road, was until 12 years ago a picture of devastation. Accused of supporting the Northern Alliance, the town bore the brunt of Taliban violence.

"Thousands of trees were cut down, fields and vineyards burnt, houses destroyed and people killed," Abdul Qodoas, a history teacher at Mirwais High School, said.

But the Taliban's "scorched earth" policy finds no mention in the new history textbooks either.

'For students it is important to study every political regime whether its rule was good or bad," Mr Qudoas said.

"One of the primary objectives of studying history is not to repeat past mistakes. If students will not learn about past violence, how will they avoid it in future?"
'Deception'
Education Minister Farooq Wardak says the decision to delete part of history from the books is based on the larger interest of the country.

The fear is that children are being denied the truth about key historical events

"There are hundreds and thousands of issues over which there is disagreement in the nation," he told the BBC.

"My responsibility is to bring unity not disunity in the country. I am not going to encourage a divisive education agenda.

''Now, if I am writing something over which there is no national consensus - I am taking the disagreement, even the war to the class, and school of Afghanistan. I will never do that.''

But for many others, what has been done to the curriculum is simply "deception". How can you move forward if you brush your past under the carpet and don't confront it, such critics argue.

"Kabul was destroyed during the civil war, thousands of people were killed," said a female member of parliament, also on condition of anonymity.

"During the Taliban rule atrocities were committed on females. They were prohibited from working or going to school. Hundreds of women were stoned to death for alleged adultery. None of this finds a place in textbooks. Are we not hiding the truth from the children of this country?"

As India's kids starve, $1.5 billion worth of grain rots

'This is a case of criminal neglect by the government,' opposition leader says  watchman sits next to stacked sacks of rotten wheat at Dera Mir Miran village in the northern Indian state of Punjab on June 27.

By Mayank Bhardwaj

NEW DELHI  — Every day some 3,000 Indian children die from illnesses related to malnutrition, and yet countless heaps of rodent-infested wheat and rice are rotting in fields across the north of their own country.

It is an extraordinary paradox created by a rigid regime of subsidies for grain farmers, a woeful lack of storage facilities and an inefficient, corruption-plagued public distribution system that fails millions of impoverished people.

And it is an embarrassment for the government led by the Congress party, which returned to power in 2009 thanks in large part to pledges of welfare for the poor, who make up about 40 percent of the 1.2 billion population.

Quite why the authorities could not simply offload the mountains of grain for free to fill empty stomachs is puzzling, but the explanation lies in the complex regulations that govern procurement and distribution.

"This is a case of criminal neglect by the government," said D. Raja, national secretary of the Communist Party of India, an opposition group. "The ruling party has been the worst manager of the demand-supply of food grains."

Officials say that, in all, about 6 million tons of grain worth at least $1.5 billion could perish. Analysts say the losses could be far higher because more than 19 million tons are now lying in the open, exposed to searing summer heat and monsoon rains.

for the record stockpile of wheat that has accumulated after half a decade of bumper harvests in the world's second-largest producer of the grain.

Here there are thousands of sacks of decomposing wheat, occupying an area the size of a football field and towering in some places to the height of a house. Tarpaulins cover most of the mounds, but many of the bags are torn, spilling blackened grain blighted by fungus and insects.

"The wheat has been lying there for the past five years. It smells very bad," said Hakkam Singh, who works as a watchman at the open field. "Nobody steals it, but people use it to feed fish and poultry farms."

At another dump, on the outskirts of Punjab's Amritsar city, locals told Reuters that officials sometimes dip into the sacks of rotting grain to mix it with fresh wheat for distribution to the poor who hold ration cards.

In India the government buys rice and wheat from farmers at a guaranteed price, a support system akin to the subsidies that led to Europe's notorious butter mountains and milk lakes.

The government has raised the price it pays to buy wheat by more than 70 percent since 2007, which only encourages more production. As a result, stocks are now at an all-time high of about 50 million tons, 12 times more than the official target.

"It's related to pure economic security for the farmers," said Purnima Menon, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in New Delhi. "They make a safe choice of crops."

Rajiv Tandon, a senior adviser for health and nutrition at aid organization Save the Children in India, said that to diversify the country's food basket farmers should be offered incentives to grow vegetables and other cash crops.

'Dumped by a graveyard' However, he said root-and-branch modernization is needed. The farm sector was transformed by the introduction of high-yielding seeds, fertilizers and irrigation during the Green Revolution nearly half a century ago, ending a dependence on imports, but it has seen only incremental reform ever since.

Storage is one of the biggest problems of all.

"For the last 25 years the storage capacity has not been upgraded at all," Tandon said. "Part of the grain is officially stored outside store houses, where the chance of rotting is high. There are often not enough sacks and tarpaulins, and sometimes it is dumped by a graveyard or cremation centre."

Grain stocks officially deemed as stored in government warehouses now stand at a record 82.4 million tons. However, that is about 20 million tons more than actual capacity, which means grain lying in the open is being passed off as "stored".

State-run Food Corp. of India (FCI), the main grain procurement agency, buys about one-third of total wheat output to run welfare programs and keep stocks for emergency needs.

What to do with the rest is a conundrum for the government, which is reluctant to sell wheat for less than the inflated support price it paid to farmers because it would put further strain on an already hefty fiscal deficit.

Recently it offered 6 million tons of rice and wheat to state administrations for the poor at cheaper rates, in addition to 55 million already earmarked for financial year 2012/13. But there were not many takers because state governments are grappling with budget overruns themselves.

Exporting wheat is not an attractive alternative.

After buying wheat from farmers and adding freight, storage and transport costs, the free on board (FOB) price is around $346 a ton. However, Indian wheat would only be competitive in the export market at around $260, which implies a loss - effectively a further subsidy, and this time to consumers in other countries - of $85-90 per ton for the government.

The brimming granaries forced India to lift a four-year-old ban on private exports last September, but lower global prices have scuppered those plans.

Traders say that even if India went all-out to export wheat it could at best sell 6-7 million tons a year because of transport bottlenecks and doubts about the quality of the grain.

Tainted? New Delhi is considering the export of up to 3 million tons of wheat to sanctions-hit Iran, but traders say Tehran will not be falling over itself to buy because of concern that Indian grain may be tainted by fungal disease.

Last month the government decided to offer 3 million tons of wheat to local biscuit makers and flour millers at $205 a ton against the $225 it paid to farmers in 2012.

A worker displays rotten grain on the outskirts of Amritsar in the northern Indian state of Punjab on June 28.

"Subsidizing our bread and biscuit makers is easier than subsidizing consumers of other countries," said a senior government official, who did not wish to be identified due to political criticism of a solution to the surplus that benefits private companies rather than the poor.

In China, a large portion of wheat stocks are channeled into the country's rapidly expanding animal feed sector, replacing more expensive corn. However, India has an exportable surplus of corn and its meat consumption is far lower, so there is little demand for wheat as a replacement for other grains.

government-supported survey published earlier this year found that 42 percent of India's children under 5 are underweight, almost double that of sub-Saharan Africa. The finding led Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to admit that malnutrition was "a national shame".

The cause of this widespread malnutrition cannot be tied mechanically to a lack of staples like rice and wheat.

Indeed, many families living on less than $2 a day are fuelled and filled by subsidized carbohydrate-rich food like wheat chapatis. These lack the much-needed protein and other nutrients that come in more expensive food. Poor hygiene and contaminated water are also to blame because they cause illnesses like diarrhoea, which prevents nutrient absorption.

Still, there are real grain shortages in the poorest states.

Here the problem is an inefficient and corruption-prone distribution system. Eighteen months ago investigators said millions of dollars worth of grain meant for poor families had been siphoned off and sold locally and abroad in a scam involving hundreds of government officials.

In 2010 the Supreme Court urged the government to distribute grain free to the hungry rather than let it go to waste in warehouses and open fields, but that hasn't happened.

This is because state governments are reluctant to buy extra grain for distribution under the food welfare program and, even if they were, only people with under-the-poverty-line ration cards would be entitled to buy it in subsidized shops.

"The problem of rotting grains and the poor going hungry lies in the system itself," said Biraj Patnaik, principal adviser on food issues to the court.

The government is now planning a food security scheme that will guarantee cheap grain to 63.5 percent of the population.

However, critics see this as political gimmickry. They doubt that the new scheme will be less corrupt, more efficient or better targeted than current programs, and they suspect that the government will not be able to afford a plan that may cost as much as $12 billion in additional subsidies a year.