Foreign journalists shot in Afghanistan by police

[nangyale]

Foreign journalists shot in Afghanistan
One Associated Press photographer killed and another wounded after attack in Khost province on eve of presidential election

• Emma Graham-Harrison in Kabul
• theguardian.com, Friday 4 April 2014

AP journalist Anja Niedringhaus, who was killed in Afghanistan, was an internationally acclaimed German photographer. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP

An Afghan police officer has shot dead a foreign photographer and badly injured another in the country's violent east, as they were covering preparations for the country's presidential election.

The man opened fire on Anja Niedringhaus and Kathy Gannon from the Associated Press in a police headquarters in Khost province, after the women arrived with a convoy of election materials on Friday.

Niedringhaus died almost immediately from wounds to her head, a health official said, and Gannon was taken to hospital with less serious injuries, and was in a stable condition. Both were veteran correspondents with long experience covering Afghanistan.

AP journalist Kathy Gannon sits with girls at a school in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2011. The photo was taken by her killed colleague Anja Niedringhaus.

It was the third attack on journalists in Afghanistan in less than a month. Swedish-British radio reporter Nils Horner was killed in downtown Kabul on 11 March. Less than two weeks later the leading Afghan reporter Ahmad Sardar was gunned down with his wife and two children at a Kabul hotel where they had gone to celebrate the Persian New Year.

The AP journalists had travelled to Tani district as part of a government convoy from the provincial capital, but in their own car. They were waiting in the vehicle at the entrance to the police compound when a police lieutenant named as Naquibullah came over and opened fire on them. No one else was injured.

"He has been arrested and is under investigation," said a spokesman for the provincial governor Mubarez Zadran.

The assailant was from another part of Afghanistan and had been working in Khost province for about a year, he said.

A photograph taken by the killed AP journalist Anja Niedringhaus of Afghan men loading a truck with election materials to be delivered to polling centres in Khost province. Photograph: AP

A Taliban spokesman said the insurgent group was not involved in the attack. "This appears to be a private issue, it has no connection with the Taliban and we are not claiming responsibility for it," Zabihullah Mujahid told the Guardian.

The AP paid tribute to both journalists. "Anja and Kathy together have spent years in Afghanistan covering the conflict and the people there. Anja was a vibrant, dynamic journalist, well-loved for her insightful photographs, her warm heart and joy for life. We are heartbroken at her loss," said executive editor Kathleen Carroll, from New York.

• Mokhtar Amiri contributed to this report

 

[A.Rafay]

RIP!

 

[Parul]

Rest In Peace!

 

[nangyale]

Anja Niedringhaus gave underprivileged people a voice
AP photojournalist killed in Afghanistan produced work that went beyond the normal wire service, says a former colleague

AP photographer Anja Niedringhaus shows off her long lens at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. Photograph: Reuters

Anja Niedringhaus deserves to be remembered as one of the best photojournalists of the past two decades, and one of the most dedicated.

We met in Sarajevo 20 years ago, during the war, when she was effectively my boss. A few years later I ended up managing her, but that didn't matter; she wasn't really bothered by authority.

Anja was a joy to work with. She was an extremely talented photographer but combined that with being a very thorough journalist. She would take on any injustice – whether out in the field in Iraq, or back in the office – and would do it with gusto.

Anja (right) was completely lacking in cynicism and had an infectious laugh that you couldn't help but be touched by. But her work was no laughing matter. She worked relentlessly for 20 years, and never stopped.

More recently her work changed. She did some work in Afghanistan that added an extra dimension, doing photography that went beyond the normal wire service. She had a big exhibition in Berlin a while back.

Anja always understood why she was doing what she did. She believed it was important.

I know her family and her closest friends will feel her loss, but so will people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia. She gave underprivileged people a voice. She never lost sight of that: that the reason we do this job is so that at least people can't say they weren't aware, that they didn't know what was going on.

I remember during the early days in Bosnia one thing that infuriated us was how cheap the vehicles were that we had to use. Basically we had one decent vehicle and lots of cheap ones; when the bosses showed up, I was all in favour of making them travel in one of the inferior ones, but she insisted on giving them the good car. She always insisted on giving people the best. And ultimately she gave them her life. Odd Andersen (AFP photojournalist based in Berlin)

 

[nangyale]

The AP's Kathy Gannon prepared this report on the election issues before she was shot and injured in Khost yesterday. Her companion, photographer Anja Niedringhaus was killed.

SECURITY: A spike in attacks ahead of the elections has highlighted the poor state of security in Afghanistan. While most people said it has hardened their determination to go to the polls, fear dominates their lives and the lives of their children. Stories abound of children whose artwork is seldom without helicopter gunships or soldiers with guns. Security has been turned over to the Afghan National Security Forces ahead of the final withdrawal of U.S. and NATO combat troops at the end of this year. Many candidates say that improving security is the top concern.
CORRUPTION: According to Transparency International, Afghanistan is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, along with North Korea and Somalia. According to most Afghans, corruption seeps into every facet of their life. Errands as simple as paying bills often require bribes. The most immediate worry of many Afghans is that fraud will again mar polling results. The 2009 election was declared deeply flawed by local and international election monitors.
ECONOMY: Lack of jobs and widespread poverty has most Afghans wondering where billions of dollars in international aid that poured into Afghanistan after the collapse of the Taliban have gone. The Asian Development Bank said the Afghan government twice missed its revenue targets last year. Foreign aid contributes upward of 90 percent of the government's overall budget. But there is some good news with the Asian Development Bank revising Afghanistan's growth rate this year upward to 5.3 percent. Much of that growth is in the country's agricultural sector.
WOMEN: Afghan women have come a long way since the Taliban ruled the country and they were forced indoors and into the all-encompassing burqa (It should be noted however that most women still wear the burqa in rural areas where an overwhelmingly conservative culture prevails.) But today girls are in school and women are in the workforce, some holding seats in parliament. Still, many women activists worry that the government's determination to protect their rights is waning. They worry going forward that their gains might be sacrificed in favor of an agreement with the Taliban. They have been rallying behind women candidates, and look to the next president to move forward with legislation that enshrines their rights.
FUTURE US ROLE: Afghan President Hamid Karzai's deteriorating relations with Kabul's Western allies has Afghans worried that a further deterioration could leave them isolated once again. Karzai has refused to sign a Bilateral Security Agreement with the United States, which is needed if a residual force of about 12,000 to 15,000 U.S. and NATO troops is to remain behind in Afghanistan next year. Every candidate has vowed to sign it, but Washington says the longer it takes to get the pact inked, the fewer troops it is likely to keep in the country. The billions of dollars in international aid that come to Afghanistan are also tied to the nation's relationship with the United States and other Western countries.

 

[nangyale]

Cheerful and Unflappable: Remembering the Photographer Anja Niedringhaus
By Christoph Reuter


AP
German photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus spent her life documenting wars, but she never allowed the difficult job to get the better of her. One of SPIEGEL's own war correspondents commemorates the work of a longtime colleague killed in Afghanistan on Friday.

Most often, we found ourselves waiting somewhere together -- between barbed wire and sandbags for a general or the next patrol. Once, after a bombing attack shortly before sunrise in Wazir Akbar Khan, Kabul's diplomatic quarter, she snapped a picture for the Associated Press showing smoke rising out of the rubble. Our own photographer offered to give her a ride back in a car, but she declined. "It's such a beautiful morning," she said. "I'm going to walk." The air was clear and the weather was perfect for taking pictures along the roadside.

Anja Niedringhaus, 48, was a masterful war photographer, unshaken in a world that is inhabited almost exclusively by men. She won prizes for her work and also had a strategic instinct for being in the right place at the right time.
There was also another facet to her -- one that you don't find very often in the world's crisis zones. It is easy to go to a war zone, she once said, but its is far more difficult to escape it unscathed. Many war reporters and photographers become bitter, some become forlorn and others just turn cynical. But not Niedringhaus -- not even after 20 years of reporting in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Pakistan. She had served as a photojournalist for AP since 2002.

Anja always had a healthy inner balance and didn't allow herself to be hardened by the things she saw, not to mention experienced. She liked to call her camera her "little protector." What she meant is that the horrible things she witnessed were always seen through the lens, which somehow kept them abstract. Perhaps even more important was the way in which she viewed things. "War photographers. How I hate being called that!" she would say.

Documenting War's Absurdities

Her favorite photos, which she sometimes sent around by email, frequently showed the absurdities of war, those tender moments that showed the human side of people uneasy about going to war. Like the American soldier in Fallujah who had a G.I. Joe doll strapped to his backpack. Or the German soldier on the steppe near Faizabad in remote northeast Afghanistan, who sat quietly on his cot outdoors, with four candles burning in a small box to celebrate his 34th birthday.

Anja had an eye for detail and there was far more to her photos than just combatants and victims. After photographing one injured American soldier being loaded into a medevac helicopter, she tracked him down again months later to see, and document, his recovery and how he was finding his way back to "normal life" with a skullcap.

As war correspondents, our paths crossed repeatedly: first in Iraq, then in Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif and Kunduz in Afghanistan and then later, randomly, at the Afghan Embassy in Berlin, where we were both applying for journalist visas. There was a lot to talk about and stories to tell, many of them sad or strange. Like that of the detained donkeys, clueless NATO officers or the time unwitting British diplomats invited a man known for espousing the virtues of pedophilia to cocktail reception. We laughed so hard that we were asked to leave the embassy. We returned later, quietly and repentantly, and were granted our visas.

Everyone his or her own survival strategy. Anja's was her laughter, her wit and her weakness for humor. For a while in Sarajevo, she took in a stray dog and named it Butros Butros after the former United Nations Secretary-General. She was also fond of saying that her most famous image was captured on a whim. After weeks of lousy meals, she accepted an invitation to the US Army's Thanksgiving dinner in Iraq. As she tried to leave, she found that all the doors had been locked and that security people were standing everywhere. She suddenly noticed the untouched turkey on a table. Sensing it might be an important moment, she rushed to stand next to it. George W. Bush suddenly appeared and, as he lifted the turkey on a platter, she snapped the perfect shot.

First German Woman to Win Pulitzer

Anja received a number of awards for her work and, in 2005, she became the first German woman to win the Pulitzer, a prize she shared with nine colleagues for images they shot for AP in Iraq. She was delighted to win America's top journalism honor, but it didn't change her in any way. Soon, museums began contacting her to offer Anja exhibitions of her work. "They say it's art," she said. "But I don't think of my work as being art." Instead she said she sought to portray reality as precisely as possible through her work, asking, "who, if not us," is going to do that?

In 2006, she was accepted to the prestigious Nieman Fellowship for journalists at Harvard University. A short time later, she had dinner with a man she had often photographed and who was fond of her: Warren Buffet. He is among the richest people in the world, but despite his wealth, he has remained relatively down to earth. Buffet congratulated her and then at some point asked if she knew yet how she was going to pay the five-figure tuition that is also required of fellows. She hemmed and hawed and said she didn't really know. She shared the story later, laughing, and said it had been an awkward moment. Buffet, for his part, had been amused and wrote her a check.

Life was good to Anja Niedringhaus in the same way that she was good to the people she knew. And that was no small number. She often looked after people -- after colleagues, after me, after injured people in a helicopter and after an AP photographer who had been arrested as a suspected terrorist. She even flew to Baghdad to negotiate his release.

Sometimes she spent weeks or months at a time in some of the world's darkest places, photographing soldiers, the injured and the victims of attacks, like the time when a grenade hit a car filled with people in Sarajevo. "The remains of an entire family were splattered on the car windows," she would later recall in an interview.

When she wasn't in a war zone, Anja would disappear into the opposite extreme, like the farm near Kassel, Germany, where she lived together with her sister. She spoke with tremendous joy of the finer aspects of rural living, even sharing recipes for ham and sauerkraut. And she defended with verve the fact that she kept a second apartment in luxurious Geneva, the official site of her employment, even though she only visited it for short periods of time. The city might be a little sedate, but that's not the worst thing you could say about a city, she said. "A deathly boring city? Magnificent!" Then she gave one of her big, liberating laughs, that seemed to come from the depths of her soul.

A Love for Afghanistan

In one of the last emails she sent to me this winter, Anja wrote that she wasn't interested in going to Syria, saying the country was too fragmented. "With the exception of a few breaks, I was in Afghanistan for most of the past year and I want to go back home this spring. Somehow I just can't get away." It's a tough country, but Anja liked Afghanistan -- it was a place that could become loveable at unexpected moments, especially when she had a chance to get beyond the German or American troops and experience the people. She only barely escaped an explosive on a street last fall and yet she still maintained her fondness for the place.

A few weeks ago, she returned to Afghanistan to photograph people in the run-up to Sunday's presidential election. She took shots of women registering to vote, nervous policemen with tea kettles, school children under a campaign poster, a man holding up a framed carpet depicting President Hamid Karzai.

At the time of her death, Anja had been traveling together with AP's longtime Afghanistan correspondent in a convoy carrying election workers to Khost in the far eastern part of the country. They weren't there to cover war -- they were there to report on the peoples' fragile hope that normal life might someday return to the region.
In the Tani district, where election ballots were to be distributed, they waited at the entrance to a police compound, part of the routine. Anja often photographed Afghan police, these poorly armed men in blue-gray uniforms who were charged with keeping order in places where it doesn't even exist. Officers who, in numerous instances in recent years, have opened fire or foreigners out of hatred.


At the post, a policeman lifted his Kalashnikov, cried out "Allahu akbar" and began firing at the car carrying the journalists. Kathy Gannon, 60, survived, but Anja died instantly.

Translated from the German by Daryl Lindsey

 

[dawn_news]

ECONOMY: Lack of jobs and widespread poverty has most Afghans wondering where billions of dollars in international aid that poured into Afghanistan after the collapse of the Taliban have gone. The Asian Development Bank said the Afghan government twice missed its revenue targets last year. Foreign aid contributes upward of 90 percent of the government's overall budget. But there is some good news with the Asian Development Bank revising Afghanistan's growth rate this year upward to 5.3 percent. Much of that growth is in the country's agricultural sector.


Wtffff 90% of budget is aid.

Basically huge amount of aid is needed for basic services like army and police.

 

[ziaulislam]

afgahnistan has received 90 billion dollars in civilian AID in past decade compared to about 3 billion dollars civilian AID we received.
yet there isnt even a single Tertiary care public hospital in whole Afghanistan, not a single dialysis unit(the first one being built by pakistan to be competed soon) that is run by public sector!
i always wounder where did that 90 billion dollars go.
i mean if even 10 bilion dollrs would have been sent rightly, it would have changed Afghanistan.
afgahnistan has great potential in agriculture. heir fruit can earn them a lot of revenue,in addition to the poppy ofcourse

 

[halfilhal]

Would you like to get bombed like Afghanistan to receive your remaining 87 billion dollars?