hankyoreh

Hundreds of people crowd the international airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Monday. (AFP/Yonhap News)

I heard about Afghanistan from the news.

One of the articles gave a fascinating description of the president fleeing the country with a pile of cash as the capital fell. It was like a scene out of a TV show.

Other articles offered a detailed analysis of the US international strategy approach or speculated about what China must be thinking, given its concerns about political shifts in Afghanistan, which borders its Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. One article almost seemed like it was lauding homecoming heroes, as it reeled off a list of the Taliban’s achievements on its way to victory in its long battle against a major power.

In those articles, it was difficult to see the faces of Afghan people.

Instead of living expressions, we were left to speculate about their feelings from the silhouetted image of a dead body plummeting to earth after dangling from an airplane wheel in an attempt to flee. We know more details about the deaths there than about the lives.

It was at that point that I read the letter you wrote.

You talked about the girls who had been forced to marry men from the Taliban. You talked about the women who had been killed because of the way they dressed.

You talked about the poets and comedians who had died under torture; about the imminent collapse of the arts; about the babies dying without milk; about the nine million girls being driven out of schools; and about the women who had finally been able to attend university, only to now be threatened with the loss of that hard-won higher education opportunity.

You talked about how the peace agreement with the Taliban is not lawful and how you could not fathom the world’s silence. You pleaded with me and the other readers of the letter to tell our countries’ media about the things happening in Afghanistan so that you can continue fighting.

I am writing this response now simply to answer your call.

I read your letter on Sunday, which happened to be the National Liberation Day holiday in Korea. It marks the day that Korea was liberated from Japanese colonization. As I read your words, I thought about the appeal made on Korea’s behalf in a speech by Yi Oui-tjyong, who was sent to The Hague as a special envoy to raise awareness of the injustice of the Eulsa Treaty of 1905.

Risking his life to visit The Hague, Yi insisted that while Japan continued to emphasize “peace,” peace was not possible for people faced with gun barrels and that the promise of “equal opportunities” had transformed instead into a brutal and inhumane rule. The barbarity of the world that he decried is exactly the same as what you are facing now.

Any Korean who studied history knows that Yi’s appeal was irrefutably just. We remember how it was met not with a reasonable rebuttal but with an incomprehensible lack of any response — the harsh quiet that you referred to as the “world’s silence.”

Korea was simply too distant from the rest of the world. The cosmopolitans in The Hague did not know much about it, and they would have had no way of knowing where any sort of appeal on Korea’s behalf would reach or what kind of meaning or influence it would hold.

I’m actually in the same position. I don’t know very much about Afghanistan. I’ve never been to Afghanistan, and I’ve never met any Afghan people.

I also don’t know what meaning it would hold for me to answer your letter from Kabul in a response here in Seoul, all the way on the opposite side of the Asian continent.

But the feelings of sadness so keenly felt in your letter were very familiar to me as a Korean, and I could not simply overlook them.

In this world, there seem to be darker realms that we cannot wrap our heads around. You can’t hear a sound coming from these places.

The silence is not the result of some agreed-upon injustice; it comes from apathy, a disregard that means things are not even perceived in the first place. In my decision to answer you, I am fighting the lure of apathy.

No rulers can achieve legitimacy by suppressing people’s right to live humane lives. The demand for life is the only truth shared among the different laws, religions, and languages of the world.

Because of them, I am supporting you in your battle not with guns but with these small words. I support you and your people’s right to live.

These words cannot stop the bullets flying toward you. Obviously, they cannot turn back the enemy that is advancing in your direction.

But the same is true for the weapons in the hands of your government over the course of the war. I know some people despise an overly naïve attitude, but they too would undoubtedly ask for the world’s help with the same naïve hope the moment their own lives were endangered.

I especially believe in the power of hope. Whenever Aug. 15 comes around each year, we commemorate an event where that naïve hope became a reality.

By Son A-ram, novelist

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]