Sharbat Gula has become famous after publication of a photo taken in a Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan by photographer Steve McCurry.
Le Monde with AP, AFP and Reuters
What does it matter if the Cliché has been retouched : it is one of the most famous looks of the history of photography. The expression of Sharbat Gula and his emerald eyes, in Cover of National Geographic, in June 1985 , have symbolized for the West the consequences of the war from 1979 by the USSR in Afghanistan.
His wander ended, Thursday, November 25: in a News Release , Rome announces that” Afghan SHARBAT Gula is coming to Rome “. The Italian Government had “facilitated and organized its transfer. (…) In response to demands of civil society and, in particular, NGOs present in Afghanistan.”
Sharbat Gula has become famous after the publication in 1985 of a photo taken the previous year in an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan by photographer Steve McCurry. “The space of a few seconds, everything was perfect, the light, the background and the expression of his eyes,” said McCurry in his unprecedented book, released in France in 2013. In 2002, Steve McCurry had found his trace And immortalized it again, holding the photo that had made it an icon.
Stopped and expelled from Pakistan
This mother of four children, illiterate, says to the Pakistan orphan, four or five years after the 1979 Soviet invasion, like millions of Afghans who had fled the fights on the other side of the border.
In 2016, she had been arrested near Peshawar with fake papers, incarcerated before being returned to her country, Pakistan accentuating, at the time, the pressure on Afghan refugees to leave her territory .
On his return to Afghanistan, she had been received by President Ashraf Ghani at the presidential palace, then by former President Hamid Karzai. “I want to create a charity or hospital to treat all the poor, orphans and widows,” she explained to the BBC in 2017 . “I would like peace to come to this country, so that people do not become homeless. May God repairs this country.”
Since their return to power in mid-August, the Taliban has set up an exclusively male government and restricts the right of women to work and study, attracting many sentencing abroad. Italy, which was with the United States, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Germany, one of the five most engaged countries in NATO’s “Resolute Support” mission in Afghanistan, has evacuated thousands of Afghans from the country after the American withdrawal in August.