Mark Luce has a habit of being in foreign lands around the time of major civil upheavals. He graduated from high school in Tripoli in 1969, not long before Colonel Gadhafi overthrew Libya’s king. He fled Iran, where he was teaching English, during the 1979 Islamic revolution. Several leading sheikhs died during the time he was working in the United Arab Emirates, and in 1996 he left his post as director of a business school in Albania just before a nationwide pyramid scheme wiped out much of the population’s savings.
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Back then Afghanistan was at peace and the recipient of a bounty of developmental aid from a variety of countries, notably the U.S. and USSR. But it was hardly prosperous or politically stable. Soviet-educated Afghans had been returning home to teach and were producing more high school graduates than ever, few of whom could find jobs. Midway through Luce’s two-year stint, King Mohammed Zahir Shah was deposed, and the influence of the communists grew. Luce saw the writing on the wall when a riot erupted at his school, pitting student supporters of an Islamic group against two communist teachers. “I had one student who had been thrown out of Paktia province for communist agitation,” he says. “He had his head shaved without water in the public square, which was a big disgrace. He was telling me all these crazy things, like ‘Rockefeller has a factory. And it’s got millions of people in it. And it’s called Belgium.’”
In 1973 Luce came back to the States, where he earned a master’s degree in Persian and Arabic, then took on a series of teaching jobs around the Middle East and in the United States. But he kept his eye on Afghanistan, where the communists continued their ascendance. In 1978, after another coup, the Islamists declared a jihad against the Soviet-puppet government, and the following year the Soviet army invaded, initiating ten years of war and chasing almost five million refugees out of the country–about a fourth of the population and about a third of refugees worldwide.
Recognizing the future historical value of the posters, Luce asked his Afghan and Pakistani friends to grab them whenever they could. Illustrated in bloody red and Islamic green, and accented with Koranic verse and anti-Soviet slogans, the posters are broad caricatures of good versus evil. A Russian bear drips blood as it steps on the throat of an Afghan woman. A giant Soviet bomb plummets toward a family huddled in front of their ruined village. A veiled woman hoisting a Kalashnikov above her head is superimposed on a map of Afghanistan. Many of the posters are signed by the same artist, A.H. Ashna. A typical Ashna poster, done to commemorate the ninth anniversary of the communist takeover, shows a Russian tank bulldozing its way down a wrecked street in pursuit of a squalling child.
The project seemed simple enough, but it turned out to be a mine field of a different sort. Military officials who were to teach Afghans to clear mines complained that Luce’s project wouldn’t work. The French were kicked out of the program for espionage–for collecting information on mine technology. And the UN objected to depictions of people getting blown up. Luce says officials told him, “‘We don’t want them to be bloody and gory. We don’t want a program that’s going to scare people, so they’re afraid of going back.’ And people said, ‘Hey, it’s totally perverse to try to have a land-mine-awareness campaign that’s bloodless. These people have seen worse in real life.’”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Robert Drea.
