Money allows a former mujahideen commander to do pretty much what he wants with young dancing boys in Afghanistan, and even to talk about it publicly.

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/124334-frontline-the-dancing-boys-of-afghanistan

Power is Power

“The boy should be attractive. Who’s good for dancing, around 12 or 13 and good-looking. I tell their parents I will train them.” Dastager is riding in a car, the Afghan desertscape stretching far beyond the window. He explains that boys and their parents agree to Dastager’s terms because he pays them. “You look for poor boys who have nothing?” asks Frontline correspondent Najibullah Quraishi. “Yes,” nods Dastager. “They’re poor.”

This explanation—so simple and so awful—covers a lot of ground in The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan. Money allows Dastager, a former mujahideen commander, now a wealthy businessman who travels with bodyguards who are also on the local police force, to do pretty much what he wants, and even to talk about it publicly. Turned around to face the camera poised in the back seat of his car, he looks forward to meeting the new boy he has in mind, a child named here Shafiq. As the boy approaches the car (his face digitally blurred), Quraishi narrates: “Dastager said that Shafiq was 11.But to me, he looked no more than nine.”

Shafiq is about to enter into the world of bacha bazi (which translates as “boy play”). As the program points out, such traffic was banned by the Taliban and remains illegal today, but its wealthy, well-connected practitioners see it as a necessary emblem of power and privilege. As Mestary, puts it, he started keeping “boy partners” while he was a senior commander with the Northern Alliance: “Every commander had one. There’s competition amongst the commanders, [and] without one, I couldn’t compete.” Now that he’s married he says, he might still have sex with a boy, but only after asking his wife: “In Afghanistan, men don’t listen to their wives,” he says, “but I’m a cultured person, I discuss it with my wife first.”

The Frontline camera follows Dastager along to parties, where bacha bazi boys dance for crowds of men, and are frequently sold or traded to men who keep “stables.” (Quraishi confides to his audience that he’s lied to Dastager about the nature of the project in order to gain access.) Some of the boys wear women’s clothes and learn to sing love songs. Slavery being illegal, the actual numbers of bacha bazi owners remains unknown, the secrecy helped along by government officials and law enforcement representatives also involved in the sales/trading rings and parties.

Thirteen-year-old Abdullah says his parents and friends don’t know what he’s doing. When Quraishi speaks with Abdullah, his owner and a sort of manager, Rafe, stand nearby. “I had a passion for it,” he says by way of explaining how he started dancing. At 15, Imam is already a “veteran” performer (he first appears as he sings these lyrics: “You rally make me want to lose control”). Imam says he plans to have his own stable of boys when he turns 18 (the film doesn’t examine the pathology of bacha bazi per se, but it does suggest the business is a cycle premised on money and tradition, or at least a horrific sort of habit). As the boy dances for a gathering of men, his owner Golhom appears appreciative and attentive (he wipes the boy’s face with a towel, tenderly), then sends him home with Dastager for that night. The Frontline camera remains on the sidewalk as Dastager ushers the boy into his car, which then pulls away, disappearing into the night.

Quraishi supplements his interviews with bacha bazi boys, owners, and a blond-bearded pimp called The German, by speaking as well with Radhika Coomaraswamy, U.N. special representative for Children and Armed Conflict. She describes the difficulty of prosecuting offenders; the one instance of punishment documented here has to do with a boy’s murder. Quraishi visits with the victim’s mother and brother, and together they look at photos of Hafiz’s bloody corpse. He was trying to get out of bacha bazi, she says, but was killed with a gun supplied by a local policeman. The murderer was convicted, then released after just 16 months. “If only these people were punished,” the mother observes, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen. Whoever commits these crimes doesn’t get punished. Power is power.”

Covering such heartbreak and abuse has unexpected effects on Quraishi and the Frontline crew, and changed the documentary’s shape as well. Originally scheduled to air last year, The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan was postponed until now, as one of the profiled boys escaped his owner and was relocated—events put in motion when Frontline producer Jamie Duran “consulted with “Western authorities” and got help from Mestary (“He seemed to have become more sensitive to the damage done by bacha bazi”). It’s a strangely heartening and necessarily vague story, involving help as well from the “Afghan government.”

Quote:


Jesus Christ...what a hell-hole Afghanistan is. I'm writing an article at the moment about Afghani women and self immolation; the more research I do, the more I realise what a cesspool of corruption and horror that place is. It's heartbreaking.

I've seen a doco on this subject. I found it to be a little bit sad, but certainly not horrifc. Horrific was seeing young women stoned to death for crimes against alan at the hands of the taliban.

The Afghans are largely about as tribal as there is in this modern world, but if you were brought up in that environment, it probably wouldn't be such a big deal.
If a reciprocated doco were shown to them, about say, women telling them what to do and having ultimate control over their money, they might find this to be quite horrifc. I do  

The kids are trained to dance, and it seems that they usually have the ambition of being the next "big thing" within that specific bent of Afghan society. It's not too different to the ambitions of people in certain sections of our society, which is probably at least as widespread as the dancing boy practice, as well as being officially legal.

Before thinking that you should jump up and save these people, you should think about saving yourself first. They may not be as much in need of saving as you might imagine, and it might be you that actually needs the saving.i

muso wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2010 at 8:50am:



It has given rise to no civilisation. Neither the land nor the people have ever been cultivated. Other civilisations marched through the place on the way to somewhere else, perhaps.

Soren wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2010 at 10:14am:


Well I was thinking of the Aryans and the Indus Valley civilisations.

The original homeland of the Aryans encompasses Northern Afghanistan and Tajikstan. The Rig Veda keeps referring to Soma, which is a 'herbal stimulant' which was grown only in those regions. The Rig Veda described the fact that it grew in the mountains and its method of preparation.

When the regions became too arid, there was a considerable volksvanderung from this region, which provided the archaic origins of the Indo European language. Arguably a number of civilisations ultimately sprung from that migration including the Vedic.

So when I say 'given rise', I was talking in that context.

Is there ANYTHING foreigners do that we will not well-meaningly, reflexively defend by hinting or implying that perhaps we are worse?

aikmann4 wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2010 at 3:40pm:


Mate, I don't care whether they vote liberal or labor. They're Afghanis. Who fvckin cares?

As long as we get those pipelines going we can get in there and give the damned place a shake-up.

I like a dancing boy as much as anyone else - as long as you're firing a Stier at his feet to keep him going. They're bone-lazy otherwise.

If you ask me, they'd be better off voting in the Shooter's Party. That'll get the place going.

Indeed. Actually, just 'thinking' would go an unusually long way in this case.

The Enterprise of Nations
by David S. Landes
Critics have tried to explain away the West’s centuries-long economic domination of the globe; they would do better to study its lessons.
http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?AID=1613


A taste:
"The older centers of hither and farther Asia—the Islamic world, India, and China—lacked the cultural and institutional foundations on which entrepreneurship rested. Worse: They tended to cling to tradition in a world of disturbing and disagreeable challenge. Both China and the Arabic Middle East offer case studies of this resistance to innovation and the subsequent national revenge against those they blamed for the economic disparities that ensued. Both impoverished themselves by insisting on their cultural, moral, and technical superiority over the barbarians around them, by refusing to learn from people they scorned as inferiors, by simply refusing to learn. Pride is poison, and as the proverb puts it, pride goeth before a fall."



Just so.

Barbarians, like the Afghans, are barbarians because they would not learn. They think they know all there is to know. They would not learn because they think it is beneath them.  Not for them 'enlightened self-interest'.