The Youngest Refugees
of the War on Terrorism
First-time filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid ’01
of Karachi, Pakistan, is the producer of a one-hour documentary,
Terror’s
Children, to be aired on the Discovery Channel this spring.
Funded in large part by Smith College’s Kahn Liberal Arts Institute,
the film explores the lives of seven displaced Afghani children
who fled to Karachi after September 11.
Photo by Sharmeen Obaid ’01.
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With her film, Obaid wants
to show the world “the other face of war and
terror, the one that specifically is that of the children.” To do so she
spent much of last summer interviewing refugee Afghanis and filming them in the
camps, markets and Islamic religious schools (madrassas) in Karachi. But it
was
this generation of Afghani children growing up in a foreign country, “living
in refugee camps and subjected to abject poverty,” who became her main
focus.
In the last year of her studies at Smith,
Obaid, an economics and government major, was a student fellow
with the Kahn Institute. She decided on the idea
for her documentary while conducting research in 2000–01 for the Anatomy
of Exile project organized by Peter Rose, Kahn Senior Fellow and Sophia Smith
Professor of Sociology and Anthropology. Obaid’s research for the Exile
project was an exploration of the migration process of the Hindus and Muslims
as a result of the British partitioning of the Indian subcontinent in 1947.
Obaid
describes herself as a Muslim Pakistani woman who grew up in a relatively
affluent household in Karachi, a port city and commercial
capital. Her father
is a textile exporter and is currently the honorary consul general for Sri
Lanka in Pakistan; her mother is a social worker and heads the fund-raising
efforts
for SOS Children’s Villages in Karachi, an international chain of charitable
social welfare organizations providing care and shelter to homeless and abandoned
children.
Obaid recalls returning home after September
11, 2001, and being struck by the massive influx of refugees who had
fled from Afghanistan and
the war
on terrorism
and were now highly visible in the city. She spent part of December 2001
speaking with and getting to know the refugees, especially the children.
“I saw for myself what it was like
to be a refugee in a third-world country,” she
writes in a background narrative that accompanied her film proposal. “At
first, it was very hard; no one spoke my language and people were wary
of a young woman prying into their lives. But slowly a few of the children
and their families
opened up to me and told me about their lives in Afghanistan and then
Pakistan.”
Despite being a novice producer and the
only woman on her film crew, Obaid forged ahead with her
proposed project in a country
where the majority
of people consider
women to be second-class citizens. She filmed for eight weeks.
Photo by Sharmeen Obaid ’01.
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Obaid
kept her head covered at all times, as is customary for all
Afghani women above the age of 14, but not her face. Men told her she
was not
attired “according
to the wishes of Islam,” and she was harassed for being a woman
working outside the home. Ultimately, she hired armed guards to protect
her while she
worked, and undaunted, she pressed on.
“The world should know that while
the war on terrorism continues…there
is an entire generation of Afghani children growing up in refugee
camps and madrassas in Pakistan who are desperate and frustrated,” she
says. “In 10 to
20 years, if they fall into bad company, these will be the next generation
of terrorists.”
Obaid, who is now in graduate school at
Stanford, will return to Smith this spring to deliver a presentation
coinciding
with the television
broadcast of Terror’s
Children. Watch for more details as they are announced on the Web
site: www.smith.edu/kahninstitute. -- JME |
