Transcript from 'Start the Week'

Presenter Andrew Marr: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, a Pakistani journalist, has made one of the most moving and upsetting films I've seen for a long time - it's on Afghan women. Two years before the invasion of Iraq, of course, there was the Afghan war, and you begin your film with the echoing sound of George Bush and others talking about how the Afghan people were going to be freed and liberated. There was a lot said then about the position of Afghan women, in particular that they were going to be allowed back into education, the days of the Taliban keeping them down were over, and many people like Cherie Blair hailed this as a great liberation. And you went back to Afghanistan - because you have been there before making films - to look at the condition of Afghan women, and there are many, many withering moments in the film: like the women who have burned themselves and are dying of their injuries. But let's start with the moment when you put on the blue burkha - I think it's described at one point as 'the pepper pot'- I mean it's the absolute all-embracing burkha, to go out begging.

Sharmeen: Yes, well one of the things, as you rightly said, was that there was a lot of talk about liberating the women in Afghanistan. But I think it is a flawed concept to think that you can liberate a people, who have for centuries lived in a certain way. It wasn't just the Taliban - yes, the Taliban took it to a whole different level of subjugating women - but Afghan women have never been free. So to think that they will suddenly take off their burkhas and start running off on the streets was absolutely flawed. Just the premise of that. I think that one of the things that has left the sphere of politics now is any talk about Afghan women, because this failed miserably. One of the reasons why I went begging on the streets of Kabul with a widow was that that is the reality of millions of women in Afghanistan.

Andrew Marr: How many war widows are there?

Sharmeen: Between 1.5 to 2 million widows, who have absolutely no support from the government. The government that the West has propped up. One thing is that if you have gone in there to liberate the women, well at least give them a reason to support that liberation. And the fact is that without men, you are nothing in that society. So this woman spends morning to night begging on the streets while men proposition her, they hurl abuses at her...

Andrew Marr: I find that particularly odd because, after all, these are the widows caused by Afghanistan's wars against the Russians and the West and all the internal wars. You would have thought that a traditional society, as well as a modern society, would show such people particular respect, but far from it?

Sharmeen: It's far from it and one of the reasons is that the fabric of Afghan society is very torn. It's been five years since the war has been going on over there but nothing seems to have been fixed. The widows are the most ignored in Afghan society. They are at the bottom of the rung of the ladder, because they have no one to speak for them. They have no man in their lives. If you don't have a man in Afghanistan, who's your father, your brother or your son, you are nothing and they just slip through the cracks and they have no ways of supporting themselves.

Andrew Marr: there is another extraordinary moment when you bump into some young men - school teachers as it happens- and they say to you, in effect, of course women have to be veiled otherwise we couldn't control ourselves, we would just leap at them as them as we saw them down the street.

Sharmeen: Yes, and the moment of realisation for me was then, because usually when you think about men in Afghanistan, you think of turbaned men with long beards keeping their women at home. It's when you see someone who speaks in English, who is educated- or supposed to be educated - who also tells you that "I don't even want a photograph of my wife. I don't want to show my friends that. I want to keep my woman inside the home- we can't control ourselves when we see women walking down the streets". That's the mentality that these people have.

Andrew Marr: And there is a particularly acute problem and horrible problem, which is the number of women setting fire to themselves with kerosene.

Sharmeen: Yes, it's amazing that the suicide rate for women has doubled in the last two years. Heart Hospital has seen hundreds of women going through it, who have burnt themselves to death. And when you talk about pouring kerosene on your body and lighting a match - you know that it's the last option you have, because that way to go is the worst way to go. You can commit suicide by taking rat poison or jumping in a river - but by the very fact that these women burn themselves, they're making the point that 'we've suffered in our lives and we do not want to die quietly'.

Paddy Ashdown: I found this film almost unbearable to watch, Sharmeen. It was extremely painful. I just hope that every commander who goes to Afghanistan, or Iraq for that matter, does watch it and let me tell you why: because they will almost inevitably all be men and the truth of it is that in these countries - Bosnia and Kosovo by the way are much the same- you know men do not see the other half of the country, the female half. They just don't see. I remember taking Shirley Williams to Kosovo with me and she was able to talk to the Kosovar women in ways that I could never do and she discovered something, which even though I had been there many times and thought I knew the country reasonably well, I simply had not seen. I think it's a really important film, really important. Second point however, and it is one of the key lines in your film, is that it will take ages to alter the psychology of Afghan men. That is absolutely true. A nation seems to be built of two things: one is the hardware of the nation which is its institutions, and the other is the software of the nation which is what seems to be going on in peoples' heads. You can change the institutions relatively quickly: five years, ten years perhaps, but it's going to take much longer to change what goes on in men's heads in Afghanistan and other countries like this. The only bit I disagreed with you on was that I thought it was a bit unfair to blame Cherie Blair and Laura Bush for not having changed Afghan men's attitudes, which have been the same for thousands of years.

Sharmeen: Well one of the things that I'll say is that right now in the North, which is relatively safe, there is not an act of war going on over there, there is no incentive for women or men to change their lives. In Afghanistan, you have to change the male mindset in order for the women to be affected. There are no industries that have been put up in Afghanistan. Every single thing is imported into the country, including wheat from the United States, milk from Pakistan, and so you know, you are not building a society at all, and if you do not build a society, women will always be subjugated and these promises will always be false.

General Sir Michael Rose: I would just like to follow up on Paddy's point, in a way, which is that what you showed us was a deeply moving and disturbing picture of what is actually happening on the ground, in particular, amongst women in Afghanistan. What you didn't show us in the film, you would have done it, I am sure, but time precluded you from putting it in the film, is what is the response of the British DIFID, for example, or those who are responsible for the American charitable organisations, but most of all from the Afghani government themselves, who of course purport to be something completely different from what you showed in the film.

Sharmeen: Well one of the things is that they believe that because they have women in Parliament now, that because they have so many NGOs in Kabul, that people are working towards liberating these women, or helping their cause. Well you can have as many women as you want in Parliament, but if they are not allowed to speak, or allowed to leave, it is just a window dressing and you can have as many NGOs as you can in Kabul, but if they do not have long sustaining projects taking place, nothing is going to turn around.

Michael: What do they say when you show them these sorts of facts and the evidence?

Sharmeen: Well there is a war going on, they say, we have far more important things to worry about'

Michael: That's a cop-out, that's the ultimate cop-out.

Sharmeen: Exactly.

Michael: As Paddy stated, you have to start these processes while the war is still going on

Andrew Marr: You are very critical of the NGOs aren't you? Because there is all this money pouring into Kabul - you say it is 'NGO central'- there is all this government world humanitarian organisations there and yet you show for instance, a girls' school where you actually do see Afghan girls learning, laughing, running around, having a good time and it has no money going into it.

Sharmeen: Exactly and that is what is worrying because you have to give these people something to be hopeful for. You can't keep saying that there is a war going on, that we have far more important things to worry about. There is no war going on in the north. What about the projects in the north? Why aren't there any sustainable projects taking place over there? I mean what was heart-breaking was [to see] four thousand girls studying in one school. Imagine that in a public school in England? Four thousand girls studying in one school and they don't have the money to put up a building for these people so they run it in shifts. Now should that not be priority number one for our allies? Some good is being done but billions of dollars have been poured into Afghanistan. Where has that money gone? Where has the reconstruction taken place? Where have the industries been set up? I mean can we put a list together that shows that these are the things that the billions of dollars addressed? Well no - where has the money gone? You know what you see in Kabul? You see fat NGO cars driving on the streets. You see a parallel life between the ordinary Afghans and the NGO workers. There are restaurants where Afghans are not allowed to go in. There are signs on those restaurants that say 'no Afghan citizens allowed'. What kind of an example are we setting that country?

Richard Littlejohn: On a more trivial level, I was interested in what you said about wearing the burkha, because we have had the debate over here whether women should be allowed to wear it on the streets of Britain and some of the argument is that it is liberating - that women like to wear the burkha because it is liberating. Now from what you are saying, there is nothing liberating at all about it- it's a protective device - women are absolutely terrified, which is why they hide behind the burkha. And what frightens me is that we are importing that same mindset and culture into our own democracy.

Sharmeen: Well I think the important thing here in England is that you have a choice. People have a choice; they are not forced to wear the burkha. In Afghanistan, I don't think that there is a choice. I think that it is so engrained into society and in life that people wear the burkha. I have nothing against wearing the burkha- if I lived in Afghanistan, I would wear the burkha by the way...

Andrew Marr: Because you would feel threatened otherwise

Sharmeen: It's too scary. The way men look at you, and the way they come and want to touch you if you are not wearing a burkha, and the look they have in their eyes when they see an unveiled woman - that is too frightening in many ways and I do think that many of those women do wear the burkha as protection.

Broadcast on Radio 4, Mon 30 April

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