Mohammed Harun Arsalai is an Afghan political activist and journalist. We connected on twitter and discussed his work on Bay Area Intifada and Documenting Afghanistan. Bay Area Intifada is a leftist political organization that focuses on political organization and media campaigns. It centers different global affairs such as the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Documenting Afghanistan is an independent media outlet that focuses on various social and political issues in Afghanistan.
HER CAMPUS: Tell me more about Documenting Afghanistan and Bay Area Intifada.
MHA: Bay Area Intifada started in late 2012. Occupy The Movement (a sociopolitical movement that focused on mainly on wealth inequality) was collapsing across the country mostly because of state and police repression. There was a lot of violence they used to crack down on our encampments … A lot of us were getting arrested just for walking down the streets, banned from going downtown at all anymore, so it was becoming very difficult to organize. We were losing all our control over public space so we couldn’t really have meetings all the time. Also, the movement started splintering off into a lot of tenancies, a lot of it was infighting. There was a lot of liberals and a lot of annoying people that were involved that kept coming around who were very loud and aggressive and even violent sometimes when they would stop people from engaging with the police and putting up barricades and stuff like that whenever there were demonstrations. There was also a lot of fighting amongst the radical left. There was a large split between people. Mostly between “occupy” and “decolonize”. Decolonize had a lot of good people doing a lot of great work, but they were very heavy on identity politics. We weren’t thinking clearly, to be honest we should have been working more closely with them earlier on before things started to split. We had a group of us who fell in between these camps. And Bay Area Intifada grew out of that in a sense. It was an important project for its time, still is if used correctly, but there are so many new pages doing what we did better. The BAI project started as a political struggle to bring more militancy and direct action into people of colour organizing- raising awareness about the Israeli incursion of Gaza in 2012 is set that off and that is where the name Intifada comes from.The grouping was vast and difficult to keep together since it had so many different people involved. It slimed down after some time and we turned into a media project for action alerts, communiqués, information about gentrification and stuff like that rather than the white the perspective of white people which just dominated everything else. It was a decolonization narrative, it was a mix of anarchists, socialists, and islamists. It was difficult to hold these people together in a cohesive way.
HER CAMPUS: What inspired Documenting Afghanistan?
MHA : Documenting Afghanistan started last year officially. This project also has to do with international media that much like white activists and social movements is supposedly there to help but also ends up being dominated by white supremacy. I’m running into this problem again. I feel like I’ve been dealing with this problem since I started organizing. We wanted to empower people to at least tell these stories themselves. So part of what I’m trying to do is train people as journalists, and we’ve been asking for donations and applying for grants, and it’s difficult but the project is starting to pick up. We are providing skills share and opening the project up to international media and local journalists to help them get jobs and have them work with us. A lot of the problems we face is that a lot of international journalists who cover a story will stay for a day or two and then leave. They end up leaving the people who helped them get that story in danger, and they never follow up. We have all these drone strikes and US ground incursions in Afghanistan. We’ll hear something in the local press, and then it disappears. But if we are able to make some noise about it, we force them to acknowledge what happened. So that’s what we need to do: we need to go in and start documenting these human rights abuses. What year is this? We have news from every corner of the planet, but Afghanistan is still a black hole of information.
HER CAMPUS: What inspired you to become a journalist ?
MHA: I started writing when I was in college. I was in and out of college. I never made it through college, but I like to write. I was also much more interested in being more hands -on and getting stuff done, and that’s what attracted me to activism. I started getting involved in the antiwar movement. It was natural for me to oppose the US going into Afghanistan under any circumstance, really. Then I started to realize how bad it was, with all these white people who were on the microphone like “we stand with the people of Afghanistan,” and we were like, “I’m standing right next to you – whitey!” I didn’t recognize it, and I was around all these white people, and I didn’t even recognize it as racism until much later. When you start understanding white supremacy, you start to have a correct understanding of the way the world works. So this is where the journalism started. I also had to start writing a lot about Bay Area Intifada and the various political works of the folks involved or around us.
HER CAMPUS: Who are your greatest influences as a journalist?
MHA: I do a lot of promoting because there’s so many people out there doing important work. I started a writer’s group, and I try to help other writers where I can. If I get somewhere, I want to bring others with me. I’m not in this to get super popular. I just want to make a living and focus on important issues. But as far as exact influences, I’m inspired by the people around me and how dedicated they are to their work. And Emran Feroz is a good friend of mine– we work together and he’s a co- founder of Documenting Afghanistan. A lot of my favourite writers are women for sure. I don’t think we have enough of them in the investigative field or on the ground in Afghanistan. And they’ll also say that we have white women standing on our heads. Afghan men have it difficult, but it’s even harder for Afghan women. So we want to knock down these hierarchies. Bobby London is an amazing writer, and I follow her work closely. Budour Hassan is also an amazing writer based in Palestine. Just incredible work out of both these women in struggle.
HER CAMPUS: What are some of the challenges you’ve faced as a journalist?
MHA: We face challenges all the time, mostly being broke (laughs). If you spend a lot of time in the field you’re not with your family, or you’re constantly putting yourself at risk. In Afghanistan it’s very easy to get kidnapped if you don’t have the resources these huge media outlets do — they have compounds, guards, and bulletproof cars. I live there off and on but just having a US passport is a risk on top of being a journalist. The police will try to get money from you, or there’s a lot of ethnic issues, like if you speak Pashto they accuse you of being Pakistani, and the implication is you’re a Taliban member. Even taking a picture on the street is an issue.
HER CAMPUS: What advice would you give to aspiring journalists?
MHA: There’s not a lot of money in this. If you want to make money, finish school. You can get a job a lot easier if you finish school. If you even suck at what you’re studying, you can get a job if you finish school. But I do it because I enjoy it, — it gives me satisfaction to raise awareness about different issues when I’m not on the streets. Real politics is in the streets for me. You should also start writing now. There’s a lot of different projects that you can take on when you’re in school and write about different issues in your own community. Also, network.It can also be very difficult to write about when a US bombing happens — you have to talk about it. It sometimes feels like you’re profiting off of the war, which can be a really gross feeling. I rationalize it by remembering that we’re trying to raise awareness and create change through media.