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Place of mourning becomes place of music
May
14 2004 at 09:00AM Kabul
- Tens of thousands of people poured into Kabul's stadium, once used
by the Taliban as an execution site, on Thursday night to watch a
concert by an Afghan singer who has returned home after years in exile.
The
extremely popular crooner Farhad Darya, who has lived in Europe
since the early 1990s, performed his first concert since he returned
to Kabul earlier this year to an audience of men and women.
More
than 30.000 Kabul citizens, most of whom remember the stadium as
the site of public executions during the Taliban regime, attended
the concert of traditional and patriotic Afghan music.
Shamsullah,
a 45-year-old school teacher who was once forced to witness the
Taliban chopping off the hand of a criminal at the stadium, said
the show was a sign of "all these changes in our lives".
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'People
are happy, they are dancing, we have a concert' |
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"I
can't believe it, exactly in the same place, two years ago I was witnessing
a very sad incident - a man, even if he was criminal, had his hand
chopped," the teacher who was accompanying two of his teenage
sons said. |
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"I can't believe it, exactly in the same place, two years ago
I was witnessing a very sad incident - a man, even if he was criminal,
had his hand chopped," the teacher who was accompanying two of
his teenage sons said. "Look
now, we have fun - people are happy, they are dancing, we have a
concert," he said.
Another
man, who said he witnessed the execution of a woman who murdered
her husband, said: "That was the darkest period of our life
under the Taliban - but now it is over, you see we have music."
"I
was forced to come here to see them (Taliban) killing people - now
I eagerly came to see a concert, that's fantastic," Imal Ahmad,
a student at Kabul University said.
The
Taliban, whose fundamentalist regime was deposed by a United States
military offensive in December 2001 for harboring al-Qaeda chief
Osama bin Laden, executed people in public under extremist Islamic
laws.
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'I
eagerly came to see concert, that's fantastic' |
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The
Kabul concert is the first of a series of shows Darya will perform
around the country to raise money to build a recording studio for
Afghan singers. - Sapa-AFP |
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