我孫子市国際交流協会

Further to the first lecture titled "Afganistan and Angora" on August 8, 2009, we planned a second talk show focused on Afganistan especially for those who had missed it or who wished to know more about the current status of the life and people in the battlefront.

A simply handmade human-killing landmine with 100 grams of gunpowder is produced at a cost of only 100 yen or so. A landmine towards tank containing 1 kilogram powder has much stronger killing power, he explained.

He showed some real plastic landmines without powder, which shocked everyone.

Usually a landmine is burried 15 centimeters deep in the earth and explodes when it is stepped on.

A mine-detective dog smells gunpowder so sharply and trained so strictly that once it smells powder in the ground it steps aside by one meter and sits down. The notorious cluster bombs, dropped in the Vietnum war, had resulted in breaking out many deformed babies because of defoliants involved.

Carrying water-backet is painstaking chore for women and children in Afganistan. Water sources locate mostly at the bottom of a ravine, so they must go and back several kilometers everyday. The daily work forces children to stay away from school.

Ninety five percent of opium is cultivated in Afganistan. Opium popies grow even at sterile soil and opium, its refined powder, can be sold at tens of times higher prices of grains.

Afgan women always wear their folk wear, Boorkha(Buruka) when going out not to expose their skin. Through the meshed part in the face, the wearer can see outside but hardly be identified from outside.

Taking this advantage that the wearer hardly can be identified as either man or woman or if carrying a bomb inside the wear, Taliban members sometimes kill themselves by carrying and blasting a bomb inside the burka.

Looking at brighter aspect in this country, Japan has devoted economically in constructing roads, airports, hospitals, and schools (so far constructed 500 schools and 650KM of roads).

Mr Shimegi, showing slides, talked calmly all the time about the wartime hard circumstances in Afganistan, which was persuasive and impressive to the audience.