Return to Transcripts main page
CNN Saturday Morning News
U.N. Starts a Massive Relief Effort for Fleeing Afghans
Aired September 22, 2001 - 11:37 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: The U.N. has started a massive relief effort for fleeing Afghans. The reports we have are, many are heading into Iran and Pakistan as refugees.
And CNN's Nic Robertson also had to flee Afghanistan. He was told his safety could not be guaranteed. He filed this report for us.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
NIC ROBERTSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Packing up and leaving, never easy. This time, harder than ever. Wahid (ph), our cook, his ample meals sustained us through many long nights.
(on camera): I remember we didn't want to come.
(voice-over): Our departure forced by the Taliban because they can no longer guarantee our safety.
From behind curtains, hiding us from prying eyes, we glimpsed the now-emptying streets, leaving no doubt here that this is a city filling with fear.
Past the ministry of information, pockmarked by shells of a bygone battle, out of town and onto the bumpy highway, roads so broken by 22 years of war and neglect at times you feel at sea.
A grinding poverty permeates this land. Mountains, rocks, dust, drought, and war. It's as if, as some Afghans say, their land was forsaken by God.
Of all the regrets, leaving the poor with no one to report their fate hurts the most.
(on camera): There's so many people here who are caught up in Afghanistan's ongoing conflicts that really don't seem to be anything of their own making. It's a sad feeling, leaving.
(voice-over): I've been coming to Afghanistan regularly since my first visit in 1996. It was a violent time. The Taliban had taken control of Kabul, but I'd fallen in love with the wild, rugged beauty of the mountains and the soft hospitality of this equally wild and rugged people. And I found I couldn't stay away.
I'd come this time, along with my cameraman, Alfredo de Laura (ph), to cover the trial of eight Western aid workers accused of Christian proselytizing. Since the world first heard the Taliban's harsh policy towards women and non-Muslims, the strict Islamic movement, whose name means "student," had learnt nothing of international diplomacy.
Barely a month seemed to go by when they weren't making headlines in confrontation with the Western world, recently blowing up several huge ancient statues of Buddha because they were un-Islamic.
More notably, of course, sheltering suspected international terrorist Osama bin Laden.
It seemed only a matter of time before some more cataclysmic confrontation developed. I didn't expect we'd run into it on this trip.
Within minutes of the second plane slamming into the World Trade Center, we'd been put on standby by CNN headquarters in Atlanta. An uncomfortable feeling was already growing in my stomach.
The Taliban foreign minister responded quickly, within five hours of the attack, rebutting suggestions bin Laden was involved. I knew then it wouldn't be long before we were being told to leave the country.
First to go, diplomats and some journalists and international aid workers. The first to suffer, those 4 to 5 million Afghans who rely on aid to get by.
Earlier this year, Alfredo and I had been to a massive camp of Afghans driven out of their homes by four years of drought. More than 100,000 in this tent city dependent on daily humanitarian handouts, many hundreds of thousands of others elsewhere.
The story now, though, on the Taliban, not the poor. In Kabul, we gauged fear and apprehension by empty trading stalls. Our filming covert, because the Taliban forbid pictures of living things.
TV crews are a rare sight, and such is the diet of the Taliban's anti-Western views here, we are primed for suspicion of something more sinister. Our nights stretched out. One memorably so, when the Taliban's in-country enemies launched a daring nighttime helicopter missile raid from front lines some 30 miles north of the capital.
The pressure for us to leave, when it came, fell like a hammer, not because it was a surprise, but because our trusted local staff left in fear. Initially, Taliban officials told us we could stay if we accepted they couldn't protect us. What journalist would walk away from the hub of such a humanitarian, political, diplomatic, and military story?
Alfredo and I chose to stay, moving to Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual and ethnic heartland. There we found new staff and began petitioning the foreign minister to allow us to stay, a request he would later reject. The pressure to report growing also as the Taliban received ultimatums to hand over bin Laden. As our hours in country grew shorter, our time on air felt as if it were growing immeasurably longer. Alfredo filing for CNN's Spanish network. We were working round the clock.
Too much glass in the windows for my liking in case of a missile attack, but we got our backup systems ready, spare batteries and a generator to keep us on air, a high-tech link with the rest of the world, a tiny box digitizing our TV picture and beaming it to Atlanta by satellite. The humble videophone, de rigeur for frontline reporters intent on getting the story out.
The obvious failing, however, no matter how high tech, if there's no reporter, there's no story.
Nic Robertson, CNN, 80 miles from the Afghan border.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
