Afghanistan

In April 1992 the Afghanistan government of President Najibullah fell – 2.5 years after the Soviet troops that had supported it had withdrawn.

Optimists declared peace had come, finally, after 14 bloody years of Soviet occupation and civil war.

That October, Perth photographer Nic Ellis and a reporter colleague Cyril Ayris went to Afghanistan to record the Australian participation in the massive mine-clearing exercise that was underway.

Mines remained the single biggest obstacle to the resettlement of people from the vast border refugee camps, and to the peace process as a whole. Mines had been laid in their millions, first by the Russians to protect their convoys and outposts and then by the Mujahideen to thwart Russian troop movement.

Entire villages, orchards, fields, canals and road verges – everywhere people travelled – were ringed by swathes of mines and booby traps. This explosive legacy of liberation had killed more than 200,000 people, with tens of thousands more having lost arms, legs and eyes. So large was the problem that a whole cottage industry had sprung up to make artificial limbs.

The cruel irony of the tragedy was that the horror of the mines was manifested largely as a consequence of peace. Some three million refugees camped along the Pakistan border saw the fall of the Najibullah Government as a signal to return to their homes. One of the biggest refugee movements of the 20^th century was just gaining momentum as hundreds of thousands loaded their few belongings onto trucks and carts and pushed for home – and walked straight into the minefields.

Initially the United States, Britain, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Italy, France, Turkey and Australia responded with trained de-miners. But by late 1992 only a nine-man Australian team remained to teach Afghans the required skills. A new war, the Gulf War, had drawn off the rest.

The Australians comprised two Perth men – a career soldier Major Graeme Membrey, and army reserve Sergeant Mick Durnin, a policeman in civilian life.

Both had been caught up in the tragedy: "The first mine victim I saw was a man on a donkey who had just lost both his hands," said Membrey.

Durnin, a big man whose black bushy beard and bear-like hugs had endeared him to all, admitted to Nic Ellis that the devastation and injuries had affected him deeply.

The sheer size of the human tragedy took time to absorb. One of the first stops for Ellis was a building tucked away in a back street in the eastern city of Jalalabad. It was layered inside with dust and grime like a long-deserted factory. But on entering, he passed room upon room of men lying in filth or sitting propped on benches, registering but brief interest in the Westerner who had entered their world. It was a hospital.

He met a young boy named Shakila sitting upright in a filthy bed in a small dim room he shared with an old man. Half his left leg was missing, the stump at the knee painfully swollen due to a sliver of steel still embedded there – a year after the lower half of his leg had been blown off.

He told, through an interpreter, of how he had been walking to his village when he stepped on a mine. His family had wrapped his shattered legs in rags and taken him to Kabul on a donkey.

When Kabul fell under Mujahideen rocket fire seven months earlier he had been evacuated to Jalalabad – to this hospital that had nothing more sophisticated to offer than basic first-aid. There were Western doctors across the border in Pakistan, but Shakila's parents were too poor to raise the money (then about $500) to take him there.

But Shakila did not complain. He accepted the pain ... and some crayons Ellis produced from the bottom of his camera bag. He carried such simple tokens to offer as gestures of appreciation for being allowed to intrude on their lives with his camera.

The British fought and died for ‘the road to Kabul’ in their thousands during Queen Victoria's reign, and the Russians and Mujahideen battled for it throughout the Russian occupation.

Even just two weeks before Ellis' arrival, the traffic island that marked the start of the route had been the site of a public beheading – swift and public punishment in a country where justice, like everything else, had been reduced to fundamentals.

The road had also become the conduit for one of the biggest refugee movements of the century; it witnessed the desperate ebb and flow of an entire population caught between returning to their former homes and being thrust back to the border camps by mine fields and Mujahideen.

The bus, carrying 24 men, one woman and a baby, left Jalalabad at 7am. The only protection being carried by Ellis was a letter written in Arabic by the Governor of Jalalabad to "whom it may concern" requesting protection and assistance.

From the bus, shaking over the pitted road surface, Ellis passed abandoned anti-aircraft guns, armoured personnel carriers,  mortars and missiles scattered at drunken angles along the edges.

Law and order no longer existed.  A man and his village was as strong as their weapons.

Every village passed through had been blasted into near oblivion. Every bridge had been destroyed, so the bus had to lurch through riverbeds. Once fruitful orchards were dead through neglect. There were graveyards every few kilometres where scraps of coloured cloth fluttered to mark graves.

And at regular intervals were Mujahideen checkpoints where fighters manned, repaired and commandeered tanks. Some squatted behind machine guns. Everyone carried a Kalashnikov rifle.

Seven hours after leaving Jalalabad the bus pulled into Kabul, its passengers and their luggage coated in grey dust.