I started taking these photographs of children in Afghanistan when I was working as a human rights officer in a field office of the UN Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) in 2005. Working in a field office meant regular trips out into the villages and districts of the provinces I worked in, to investigate human rights complaints or to monitor and report on the human rights situations there. The road trips were a real chance to get to experience the people, culture and countryside that make up Afghanistan. As a female officer, I also had the privileged opportunity to see the largely invisible lives of Afghan women and girls – these experiences were certainly the most rewarding for me.

One of the most striking things about the Afghan climate and landscape that I observed in my two years there was the prolific and almost year-round presence of rose bushes. They seemed to be never tended, never watered or pruned and yet they grew up like weeds everywhere. Coming from a country where roses are probably the most precious and pandered of garden flowers, this used to make me marvel. I began to think that Afghan children seemed to be just as marvellous, beautiful and hardy. The incredibly harsh climate in Afghanistan meant that usually everyone and everything was covered in either dust in the summer, or mud in the winter. So it was with the roses, and so it was with these strikingly diverse, cheeky and hopeful Afghan children.

These pictures evoke bittersweet memories of Afghanistan for me. So often the smiles of these children would lift me out of the depressiveness and frustration of the human rights violations I dealt with every day. The spark in their eyes gave me hope for Afghanistan’s future. Maybe though you can see too in some of their eyes signs of the misery they have been through, and their awareness of the difficulties they are yet to face growing up in their homeland. They continue to need all the help their new Government and the international community can provide to ensure they have a future worthy of their clear potential.

Biography:

Leanne Smith has been practicing law and public policy across a variety of fields since graduating from the Australian National University, primarily international law and human rights law. She has worked as a clerk to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory, for Human Rights NGOs in Indonesia, for the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) on anti-discrimination and indigenous issues and for the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions. She then joined the Australian Foreign Service where she worked on policy and legal issues including: disarmament; human rights and refugee law; Pakistan/Afghanistan relations; law of the sea and corporate planning. Leanne spent three years (2001-2004) as the Australian Second Secretary in the Balkans covering FRY (Serbia and Montenegro), Kosovo, Macedonia and Romania. From 2005-2007 Leanne was seconded from the Foreign Ministry to the UN in Afghanistan where she worked first as a human rights field of ficer for UNAMA and then for OHCHR and UNDP as an international technical adviser to the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.