Afghanistan

A history of violence dominates the narrative of Afghanistan. Its ‘wars’ have been glorified and its image as ‘the graveyard of empires’ has been reinforced over decades by scholars’ orientalist point of view, interventionist powers that seek to control the region and the unyielding eye of the media. In their stories of fierce warring tribes, decades of intermittent war and the cruelty of the fundamentalists, the suffering of the ordinary people of Afghanistan as victims of acts of violence beyond their control, is rarely fully and publicly acknowledged. This exhibit of ‘Memory Boxes’ challenges the deep-seated culture of impunity and public amnesia of the impact of violence on civilian lives.

The Inheritance of Death

More than four decades of violence and conflict have either killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians. While many Afghans feel a profound sense of victimhood and suffering as a consequence of these protracted wars, there has been little official effort to develop a policy of public memorialisation or remembrance of the lives shattered by the various cycles of armed conflict. The Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization (AHRDO) began an ambitious memorialisation project in 2011. The Memory Box Initiative, has collected and documented several thousand objects, narratives and stories of victims from different conflict periods across the country. Objects of memory serve as the entry point to people’s histories that provide a safe space for victims' narratives to contribute to public acknowledgement of victims’ suffering, countering the deep-seated culture of impunity and public amnesia of the true cost of war on ordinary citizens. AHRDO is continuing to build on the Memory Box initiative, by establishing the Afghanistan Centre for Memory and Dialogue in February 2019. The Centre serves as the first Memorial Museum of victims of war where Memory Boxes are put on display for the public.