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CNN Saturday Morning News
Attempting to Report in Taliban Territory
Aired September 22, 2001 - 08:33 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: Now to Afghanistan, which appears to be moving into the eyesight of the U.S. military. About 26 million people live in the landlocked nation. It is mostly mountainous, many 25,000 feet high and more. Also heavily covered in desert.
Eighty-four percent of its people are Sunni Muslim. Fifteen percent are Shiite.
CNN's Nic Robertson was there until midweek of this past week.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
NIC ROBERTSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Packing up and leaving never easy, this time harder than ever. Raheed (ph), our cook, his ample meals sustained us through many long nights.
(on camera): The moment 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 glimpse 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 its equally wild and rugged people and I found I couldn't stay away.
I'd come this time, along with my cameraman Alfredo DeLaura (ph), to cover the trial of eight Western aide 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 aide workers. The first to suffer, those four to five 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 nightmare helicopter and 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 it if were growing immeasurably longer. Alfredo filing to CNN's Spanish network. We were working around 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 video phone, de rigueur for front line 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, 18 miles from the Afghan border.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
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