Thomas Erdbrink thanks Silver Nipkow Disc to the Afghan ‘fixer’: ‘His help was necessary’ | Displays
Everyone talks about his bravery for traveling to Afghanistan, but journalist Thomas Erdbrink says he owes the Silver Nipkow Disc mainly to “fixer” Alem Poya. The 36-year-old, who has since found refuge in the Netherlands, drove Erdbrink through a chaotic country.
Alem Boya and his wife Zahra Ibrahimi, 29, have been living in a center for asylum seekers in Zeist for three months now. There’s no hope of owning a home yet, but the two haven’t mentioned it yet. “I finally feel some peace again. I’m grateful to be here,” says Boya. On Thursday he will attend the Silver Nipkow disc performance in Amsterdam, which was presented to journalist Thomas Erdbrink and director Roel van Broekhoven with whom he has worked in recent years.
Until the Taliban seized power nearly two years ago, Pouya and his wife lived the good life in Kabul. He worked in the local media, and she was an administrative assistant at a university. After the Americans left the country, everything changed. Life is becoming increasingly difficult, especially for women. I lost my job and my freedom. I wasn’t allowed to go out without my husband, I wasn’t allowed to study, I wasn’t allowed to wear what I wanted. Suddenly I’ve been home all day. In fact, I lost everything,” says Zahra El-Ibrahimi.
During that period, her husband, Dutch journalist Thomas Erdbrink, helped produce a four-part documentary series on the closed and orphaned country. They went into the interior of Afghanistan, visited Taliban fighters, but also went to a secret girls’ school and met a lively newsreader who now lives and works in Pakistan. His help was necessary. “It’s the people in the field who do the real work,” says Erdbrink.
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The sequel to Our Man with the Taliban
In his speech after the Nepko ceremony, he thanked Foreign Minister Wubke Hoekstra, who had recently given the go-ahead for the evacuation of a group of Afghans, including mediator Alim Boya, to the Netherlands. Alem has been on the eviction list for some time for his work on VPRO MetropolisErdbrink explains.
He is glad that his colleague is now in the Netherlands, but he also knows that his interpreter still lives in Afghanistan in constant fear. He will try to come here illegally. We can have a say in that, says Erdbrink, but according to him we should not forget that it was also a political choice to deploy Dutch soldiers to Afghanistan for twenty years. He believes we are now witnessing the consequences of those policy choices on the part of the West.
Erdbrink, who has lived in Iran for twenty years and is fluent in Farsi, says he is “fascinated” by the stories of ordinary people. How do they live with the political decisions being made for them? Whether in a park in Amsterdam where a project developer wants to build a new apartment tower or in Iran, where people try to live by government rules of life.” The same goes for Afghanistan, where he depicted daily life under the Taliban’s rule of power.
Erdbrink does not yet know if he will make a sequel to Our man is in the Taliban. Since I was last in Afghanistan, in November last year, the Taliban have gotten tougher. I can work there, it’s not impossible, but then the story has to go through the development. It is painful that it is only pushing developments in the wrong direction.”
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