Alixandra Fazzina and Homa Khaleeli - Caught in conflict: Women in Pakistan
‘We nearly died getting this story,” Alixandra Fazzina tells
me calmly. The war artist turned award-winning photographer is flicking through
the haunting images she took during her five years in Pakistan. Despite
covering countries such as Somalia and Yemen – and being held hostage for four
days by militiamen in Liberia – Fazzina says Pakistan is the most difficult
place she has worked. And it is only now she has left that she can safely
reveal many of the stories people told her.
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She is lingering over a picture of an 82-year-old woman
praying. Sajda, she says, was tortured by the Pakistani army. Her village,
close to the Afghan border, was on the frontline of the Taliban insurgency in
the Swat valley,
and when the fighting engulfed her home, the elderly woman was too frail to
escape. “She had two bullet holes in her,” Fazzina says, “but couldn’t leave to
see a doctor.” When the 2009 military offensive against the Taliban began,
Sajda was arrested by the army, who believed her son had joined the Taliban.
Her home was destroyed and she was detained for seven months. “She was
tortured,” Fazzina says. “We saw the marks on her back.”
The photographer found her after being tipped off by a
network of human rights lawyers and trekking to her remote village, accompanied
by a young female translator. Dressed in a burqa and speaking only a little
Pashto, Fazzina managed to disguise the fact that she was a foreigner, but the
presence of two strangers still attracted attention in the isolated community.
“I think it’s only because we were two women that we got away with being
there,” she says.
But when night fell, they found themselves surrounded. “It
was getting dark when the gunmen came,” Fazzina says. “There were probably
about 40 or 50 of them.” The men watched the pair from the roofs of surrounding
houses as they hurriedly left. “We had to walk away from the house with all
these guns pointed at our backs,” Fazzina remembers. “We thought we were going
to get shot, but we didn’t want to run in case it raised suspicion. My
translator was praying the whole way.”
After walking across a valley and crossing a river, they
finally reached their car and driver, whom they had left on a narrow mountain
road. “A military patrol came past and we thought, ‘Phew, we are safe,’”
Fazzina says. “But the next minute, insurgents with guns came out from behind
the rocks and tried to stop the car as we sped away.”
It was not her first brush with the Taliban. She points to a
picture of two women in abayas, taken outside Al Asif Square in Karachi, a
Taliban stronghold. She started photographing Afghan refugees there soon after
arriving in Pakistan.
“Apparently they had a meeting about me,” Fazzina says as she describes being
followed by Kalashnikov-wielding gunmen with kohl-rimmed eyes. “They said,
‘Should we kidnap her? Shall we kill her?’” In the end, she says, “they
obviously thought I was harmless”.
It’s a mistake often made about the slight 40-year-old mother
of one, and one she has come to rely on for protection. She is drawn to the
stories of people caught up in conflicts, often ones that have been largely
ignored by the rest of the world. This is why she was interested in Pakistan:
the military conflict launched against insurgents there has barely registered
with the outside world.
On top of all this is the fear of crime –kidnapping, for
instance, is big business in Pakistan. Yet Fazzina counters these dangers not
with armoured vehicles or bodyguards, but by remaining under the radar. She
tells me (somewhat reluctantly) about a “dressing-up box” of clothes that,
along with careful attention to local fashions and body language, help her to
blend in. The quiet, personal nature of many of her photographs is testament to
the hours she spends building a relationship with her subjects, through
conversations and “endless cups of tea”; she followed some families for the
whole five years she was in Pakistan. She talks with gratitude and admiration
of her translator, Hina, who, with a PhD in human rights law, was as determined
as Fazzina to tell the stories of the women they met.
Her focus was on the women of Pakistan, she says, because
they are often the most vulnerable to the upheavals caused by war and conflict.
The army’s 2009 offensive in the Swat valley resulted in the
world’s largest movement of refugees since the Rwandan genocide. As almost
3 million people fled, Fazzina heard stories of the mass kidnappings of 200
women. “It transpired this was as brides for Taliban fighters,” she says. “It
was very similar to what’s going on in Iraq at the moment.”
Determined to let the world know about the news, Fazzina
tracked down some of the families whose girls had been taken, but found no one
willing to talk. “I have done stories about the rape of women in Afghanistan, but there
it was reasonably easy to talk to the women because they thought it was an
atrocity.” In Pakistan, it was much more difficult, she says, because of
conservative views about women’s honour. “Once they talk about it, everyone
knows and their family will not be able to get them married.”
Eventually, after hearing of the death of a Taliban commander she
knew had been involved in the kidnappings, she managed to track down his
teenage widow. “She was a lovely, bubbly young girl, just a cool teenager, who
had been going to school,” Fazzina says. “She said this marriage had screwed up
her life. After the drone strike that killed her husband, she escaped. She
wanted to go back to school, but she had a baby. She would never be able to
marry again and she was only 16.”
Fazzina believes the psychological trauma of the insurgency
has taken a severe toll on Pakistan. “I saw the country fall apart in the time
I was there. It’s like the whole country had gone silent. The Taliban have won
in a lot of respects.”
Despite this, she says she would have remained in Pakistan
if a crackdown against foreign NGOs and journalists had not seen her visa
renewal refused. “I fell in love with Pakistan,” she says, simply. “I don’t
think I have been anywhere that I have loved working so much. We were met with
so much warmth. Despite everything, the people there have so much strength. Now
when I watch the news from Pakistan, it breaks my heart that I am not there.”
• To hear Alixandra Fazzina talk more about her images
from Pakistan, go to theguardian.com/video
