The first time Masuda Sultan weeps on camera, she is in her relatives' house in Quetta, Pakistan, far from her own home in Queens. She is listening to a cousin describe what happened to her family when American gunships attacked their village in Afghanistan two months earlier. "This is the daughter she lost," Sultan says as she points to snapshots. "This couple had four kids. There's only one mother-in-law left in the whole family."
Sultan cries again when her cousin's husband speaks. "One of his sons yelled out that there were many sheep lying out here," she translates. "When they went to find out, they found out it was humans, their family, and they were shot." In these moments caught on video, Sultan learns that 19 members of her extended family were killed Oct. 22 in Chowkar-Karez, the farming village where they sought refuge after fleeing their homes in Kandahar. "One woman was four months pregnant," Sultan says.
Sultan, 24, brings the documentary, "From Ground Zero to Ground Zero," to MIT tonight for a screening and discussion sponsored by Amnesty International USA. She is the founder of Young Afghan-World Alliance, the brainchild of the trip she took to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan last summer instead of starting law school.
Born in Kandahar and raised in New York, Sultan is at once the Gotham girl who thinks New York is the center of the world and the refugee child raised on her parents' yearning for their homeland. She is as comforted by the smells of street vendors' hot dogs and pretzels in her hometown as she is by the still-familiar aroma of dust and baking bread in the Afghan city she left at age 5.
These twin sensibilities, which have informed her work since Sept. 11, carry the film. Sultan speaks English without an accent. She wears jeans and T-shirts, and, though she is Muslim, doesn't cover her head. The arranged marriage she agreed to at 17 ended in divorce two years later. Though she says she will never again wed a man she doesn't first care about deeply, she still believes love can follow marriage.
On camera in Afghanistan, she fidgets with the scarf over her head. She is a nervous American, not an Afghan native, when she hurries the crew into the car as a crowd gathers around them. She is a naive American, not a war-toughened Afghan, when she wonders what her fate would have been had her parents stayed in Afghanistan. She is also the prodigal daughter, fluent in Pashto, who loves an Afghan song about the sound of a woman's bangle bracelets. She returns to the room where her mother gave birth to her and runs into relatives on her old street who knew her when she was little.
Sultan is just the kind of person Jon Alpert, cofounder of New York's Downtown Community Television Center, wanted to accompany him to Afghanistan - "Somebody," he says, "who could explain what might be happening in Afghanistan through her own personal experience but who would seem so American people wouldn't be prejudiced against her."
Alpert found Sultan at a benefit screening of "Kandahar" for Women for Afghan Women. On the sunny morning of Sept. 11, stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway, Sultan had seen smoke coming from a World Trade Center tower. Three nights later, she was handing out sandwiches to rescue workers, warily confessing to one that she was Afghan-American. "At that time," she says by telephone from New York, "because of all the tension, just saying it was a big deal." Soon she was going around the city, talking about Afghanistan and raising money to rebuild the country. On Dec. 22, four days after Alpert approached her - and over her parents' objections - Sultan was on her way to Afghanistan.
The Afghanistan to which Sultan returns is much changed from the country she visited last summer, when she and an aunt, escorted by a male relative, left their American passports in Pakistan, donned burkas, stopped speaking English, and slipped into Afghanistan to visit family. The documentary that shows Sultan's anguish at learning of the deaths of her relatives also captures her exhilaration at seeing girls in school and hearing music in a bazaar - activities forbidden under the Taliban.
The heart of "From Ground Zero to Ground Zero" remains the story of Sultan's family. She had not read newspaper stories in November that reported the deaths in Chowkar-Karez. She did not know this was the village where her relatives had fled. In Quetta, children show Sultan their scars from bullets. In Chowkar-Karez, she sees rubble and earth pocked with bomb craters. One man demonstrates how women rolled on the ground, leaving trails of blood as they tried to dodge gunfire from a low-flying helicopter.
Sultan seeks, but does not find, answers at the American military base at the Kandahar airport, where the Marines remind her of classmates at Queens College. "I want to say thank you for ousting the Taliban and keeping America at home safe," she tells one. "But my family was killed."
These days, working with Global Exchange and Peaceful Tomorrows, Sultan presses Congress to provide humanitarian aid to innocent Afghan victims of American bombing.
"I do think American people in general are good, and even those people in the helicopters shooting were good-hearted, but something just went wrong," she says. "They probably didn't intend to kill civilians. But they did.
"And they had to know these were children and women. The fact that the helicopters were flying so low and with all the night vision, they had to have known."
GRAPHIC: PHOTO, 1. Afghan-American Masuda Sultan brings film to MIT. / GLOBE PHOTO / JOE TABACCA 2. Masuda Sultan amid the ruins of her native Afghanistan. -- Yoshie
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