Thousands of Afghans have fled the death and destruction of southern Afghanistan by abandoning their ancestral homes. They are now displaced, living in a sewage-soaked camp in Kabul, having forsaken their land for survival and their family’s future. Among a maze of mud walls, shielded by leaking
On a hill overlooking Kabul, with little access to electricity, women have made their own houses, brick by brick, from the land beneath them. They have created what is known by Afghans as “The Hill That Women Built.”
BLANCO, New Mexico—Chris Velasquez sees the impacts of gas development in the San Juan Basin of northern New Mexico through the eyes of a rancher. He and his dad ran cattle, until recently, on a grazing allotment called the Rosa, rolling high desert lands punctuated
“As much money as they take out of here, this place should look like New York,” Ken Wiwa says, gesturing at the passing landscape as his car, chauffeured by his father’s driver, Sonny, speeds southeast from Port Harcourt towards Ogoniland along the area’s only major
El Paso, Texas—Wire fencing encases the sides of the Rio Grande where the river slices through El Paso on the U.S. side and Ciudad Juarez on the Mexican side of the border. Its purpose: to keep out illegal migrants who each year routinely swim across
The highland village of Santiago Atitlan continues to hold monthly masses to commemorate the 14 citizens killed and 24 injured when soldiers fired into a crowd that had gathered to protest an earlier shooting of a resident by drunken soldiers. A 30-year conflict between the
Note: The pictures for this story are copyrighted and not available for web publication. Islamabad—-In the coded signal sent to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to announce India’s recent nuclear detonations, Indian scientists invoked the name of Shakti, a Hindu goddess. “Shakti is successful!,”
We had just finished our first cup of tea, when Hilda Bernstein rose and left the kitchen. Several minutes passed. Hilda was eighty-one years old and had acquired an artificial hip not long ago, and she negotiated the staircase of the small townhouse outside Oxford,
By Andrew Meier with photos by Mia Foster SUKHUMI — One afternoon not long ago in the beleaguered capital of Abkhazia, a tiny self-proclaimed republic on the Black Sea, its reigning satrap, Vladislav Ardzinba, paced his spartan office, nervously awaiting a call from Moscow. On
Note: The pictures published with this story are copyrighted and not available for reproduction. MONROVIA, Liberia — The Liberian civil war strikes many Westerners as a incomprehensible jumble of tribes, feuding warlords and senseless mayhem. How else can one describe what began as an
Story by Andrew Meier with photographs by Mia Foster Tiraspol may be the bleakest of cities in the former Soviet Union. A gray town of some 50,000 beleaguered souls, it has not witnessed the destruction visited upon the Chechen capital, Crozny, nor the chromosomal damage
The billboard signs along the roadways of northeastern Bosnia say it all. Superimposed on a map of the country is the outline of a key with “Brcko” on it. The old river city, historically a crossroads between Europe and the East, holds the key to
Story by Andrew Meier with photos by Jacqueline Mia Foster You’ve won the war, now win the peace.” The words come to me from an old hand in the tangled politics of the Caucasus. We are sitting in a well-appointed foreign embassy in the capitol
The directive from the U.S. ambassador to Croatia set off alarm bells at the CIA. Peter Galbraith wanted his station chief to confirm for Croatian intelligence that the United States did not object to Iran establishing an arms pipeline to the Muslim-led government of neighboring
Story by Andrew Meier with photos by Mia Foster TAJIKISTAN – It had been a lovely afternoon drive through the mountain passes of this small Central Asian state. As we made our way along the craggy reaches of northeastern Tajikistan, the greatest threat had been
The woman piled her books and magazines on the grass in front of her apartment building in the Sarajevo suburb and set them alight. In the crazy logic of her world-turned-upside-down, this meant Serb thugs wouldn’t need to torch her apartment, as they had just
As dusk falls on the Chechen capital, Grozny, in southern Russia, the sounds of dogs barking, neighbors chatting, and the theme song to a popular Brazilian soap opera mix with the sounds of automatic gunfire and distant explosions. But the conversations continue, soup is served,
By the evolving standards of the new South Africa, Themba Khoza might seem to be what he says he is: “the main man,” filled with promise, living out a dream that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Born in Zululand and raised
By Bill Berkeley and Photos by AP/Wide World Photos By the benighted standards of East Africa, the spectacle of refugees is all too grimly familiar. In a dense labyrinth of makeshift huts with scrap-metal walls and roofs fashioned from black plastic sheeting, children in rags,
By Bill Berkeley and Photos by Mary Jane Camejo Sitting cross-legged on a wooden bench in an abandoned school tucked amid the steep mountain slopes of central Rwanda, 13-year-old Reveriani Rurangwa delicately runs a finger along the smooth, shiny scar that wraps around the side
