U.S. College Supports Afghan Media Archive Effort

By Susan Domowitz
Washington File Staff Writer

Williams College and Afghan institution preserve material

Washington -- An irreplaceable film archive of recent Afghan history is being digitized and preserved for future generations of Afghans and scholars worldwide.

The project is a collaborative undertaking between Williams College in Massachusetts, and the Afghan Media Resource Center (AMRC) located in Peshawar, Pakistan.

The Afghan Media Resource Center was founded in 1986 with the assistance of the College of Communications at Boston University. The goal of this collaboration was to train Afghan journalists to cover the war against the Soviets inside their country. During the war, AMRC sent teams of video cameramen, photographers and print journalists -- all Afghan -- inside Afghanistan to cover the war. AMRC video and audio materials were broadcast by the BBC, CNN, and other major media outlets between 1987 and 1995.

The AMRC archive focuses on historic political and military events but goes beyond the headlines with images of ordinary Afghans engaged in the day to day activities of work, play, and school -- farming, fishing, herding, playing games, praying, going to school -- offering a unique window into a period of Afghan history nearly lost in the Taliban's rise to power. The Afghan journalists' record of this tumultuous period in Afghan history allows outsiders to see these events through Afghan eyes.

The AMRC archive is vast: 3,000 hours of videotape; 100,000 photographic slides and negatives; 1,600 audiotapes, and countless written press releases. According to AMRC Director Haji Sayed Daud, nearly everything in Afghanistan since 1992 has been looted and destroyed. This is the only documentation from that time, he says, that covers Afghanistan broadly and inclusively. "We covered all Afghanistan. These archives document all parties, all ethnic groups," he notes.

The archive is housed in Peshawar, Pakistan, where dust and high temperatures (summer temperatures exceed 43 degrees Celsius), pose a threat to the photos and audio and video recordings. Worse than the climatic conditions, though, was the constant threat of catastrophic destruction by political forces sympathetic to the Taliban.

Looking for a way to protect the archive last year, Daud commissioned a feasibility study by Stephen Olsson, a documentary filmmaker from the United States, who had helped set up the Center's training program in the late 1980's. Olsson suggested a plan for digitizing crucial parts of the archive, and recommended that AMRC establish a partnership with a university that could provide a repository for a substantial part of the archives.

In January 2001, Professor David Edwards of Williams College heard about the plight of the AMRC archive, and suggested that Williams College assist in preserving the collection. As part of the agreement that was eventually worked out between Williams College and the AMRC, Edwards brought a delegation of AMRC staff members to Williams College in the summer of 2001 for training in photo scanning, non-linear video editing, database design, and other techniques used to digitize the archive.

Over the summer of 2001 at Williams College, the AMRC staffers, who came to the U.S. for training, were joined by a group of Williams alums and current students as well as Williams staff members specializing in information technology.

Together this Afghan-American project team digitized 300 videotapes, 640 slides, 300 contact sheets, and 2,000 negatives. They also collected stories and background information related to the material in the archive so that future users would have the necessary contextual information to make sense of the archive -- to see, feel, and ultimately understand the dimensions of the conflict.

Approximately one third of the total video footage, and one fifth of the photo archives have been brought to Williams College for the initial phase of preservation. Williams College is now in the process of shipping the digitizing equipment to AMRC in Peshawar, Pakistan, where the rest of the archives will be digitized over the next two to three years. Eventually, Edwards hopes, the whole AMRC collection will be housed in Kabul. The AMRC archives, he says, are a symbol of the rebuilding of Afghanistan: "I would see [the archives'] return to Kabul as symbolizing the return of a free press to Kabul," and to Afghanistan.

The portion of the AMRC archives currently at Williams College covers the period 1987 to 1989 -- a period, Edwards says, that witnessed the breakdown of a nation state, and the collapse of civil society. "The value of the archive for the future is what it tells you about the past, how Afghanistan got into the situation it's in now" -- how the Taliban entered and civil society was replaced with religious extremism.

During this period, Edwards says some Afghans lived more or less normal lives, while the lives of other communities in other parts of Afghanistan were brutally overturned. "There was no connection any more between the capital and the provinces. The Soviets were in control of the cities, but they really exercised no control over the countryside. So you didn't have, in any sense, a functioning nation-state."

While the Panshir Valley, under the control of Ahmed Shah Masood, was a place with functioning schools, administration, taxes, printing presses and newspapers, other areas of Afghanistan, controlled by various warlords, had none of these civil institutions.

The real value of these archives, according to Edwards, is as an historical document for Afghans. "There will come a time when Afghans are going to want to assess their history, to make sense of it," he says, and the archives will help them do just that.

Highlighting the relevance of the AMRC archives to current efforts to rebuild Afghanistan, AMRC Director Daud says the archives contain video footage of traditional "jirgas" (consultative councils) in Afghanistan, "with Afghans sitting and talking and listening to each other." In a country destroyed by decades of war and violence, and struggling to find a way to rebuild, these models from the past assume new significance.

The digitized part of the collection, which should be available in 2002, will be fully searchable by scholars, students, journalists, and others interested in Afghan society and the history of the Afghan conflict. Edwards wants to make the archives as widely available and accessible as possible.

In March 2002, the Asia Society in New York City will open an exhibit of photographs and videos from the archive, documenting the last days of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The exhibit will continue through August 2002.

Daud, in Peshawar, says it is possible that the AMRC could eventually exhibit some of the archive photos in Afghanistan, and that through the photos, international donor agencies could see the Afghan people as they see themselves: "These photos show that the Afghan people support peace and freedom, that they hate terrorism, and they welcome international assistance to rebuild their country."