Taliban not monsters, freed Canadian says

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This article was published 03/12/2001 (9012 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

QUETTA, Pakistan — A Canadian writer freed from a Taliban jail has had a decades-long fascination with Afghanistan, which drove him to invent a new identity and risk his life to get a glimpse of the country’s latest saga.

Ken Hechtman started his journey home from Quetta late yesterday after spending a week under arrest for straying across the border into Taliban territory without the proper papers. His release Saturday was negotiated by two Canadian diplomats and no ransom was paid.

The Montreal computer programmer, who admitted his journalistic career began on Sept. 11 after the terrorist attacks in the United States, defended his Taliban captors in an interview with Canadian reporters yesterday and condemned the U.S. attacks on the desolate country.

Hechtman’s views on the subject — and his brief foray into the war-torn country — have been years in the making.

“When I was 13, 14, I grew up on the stories of the Russian war, of mujahedeen fighting the Russians,” he said at a hastily arranged interview in an alley at a local university.

“I was always fascinated with these people and I always wanted to see them. I always wanted to come here and write about a war in Afghanistan.”

And so he did — taking care to fashion a new identity as a Christian to disguise his Jewish heritage in the fiercely anti-Israeli region.

After filing 10 stories for the weekly Montreal Mirror and a Canadian alternative Web site, Hechtman was nabbed by Taliban officials who suspected he was a spy working for the Americans.

They found maps, a cellular phone, telephone numbers and detailed information about the whereabouts of mujahedeen camps in the area in his possession.

Hechtman aroused further suspicion, he believes, because he arrived the same night the United States began air strikes on Spin Buldak, 15 kilometres across the border from Chaman, Pakistan.

Unimaginable

“They were convinced that I was the one who had called it in,” said Hechtman, who was sporting a full beard but had shed the traditional Afghan clothing he had been wearing when released Saturday.

Hechtman’s story borders on the unimaginable.

A Taliban official who conducted a short hearing in Spin Buldak into his case, invited Hechtman, who was defending himself against charges that would have carried the death penalty, to pick a name out of a hat.

“(The) guy starts grinning, asks ‘What does he win? Oh. He gets to shoot you just as soon as this formality of a trial is over. Let’s get started.”‘

Hechtman then ended up with shackles on his feet, variously sharing a small cell with up to six others — heroin smugglers, a carjacker, and commandos — in a mud-hut jail. He observed the Muslim Ramadan fast so as to not offend the others, he said.

Despite the bizarre experience, Hechtman said he was well-treated by both the Taliban and the other inmates. He said the jail experience wasn’t as bad as some of the eight others he has had in the United States during a period in which he was active in political demonstrations.

He went even further, saying that the Taliban, under attack for harbouring the al-Qaida network believed responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, has been unfairly demonized.

While he would not condone the Taliban’s repressive religious lawmakers, “the rest of them are not monsters,” he said, adding that the U.S. air strikes are unjustified.

“I think they’re dropping bombs on the wrong people. It’s not the illiterate Afghan farmers who cannot find New York City on a map who attacked them. And they have to know this.”

Just before Hechtman was arrested, the Foreign Affairs Department issued a warning to Canadian journalists that Taliban followers were planning to take hostages to exchange them for ransom.

“Obviously, I didn’t think they would take me prisoner,” he said.

“But the idea that they would kidnap people who came into their country and use them as human shields — they don’t work like that.”

“Absolutely, they’re being demonized.”

The assignment, which he did on a freelance basis for about $300 Cdn a story, was Hechtman’s first war-reporting experience.

— Canadian Press

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