A timely tribute. After his film shot in Afghanistan in July 2021 on the last moments of Kabul before its fall into the hands of the Taliban, the great reporter Paul Comiti returned there three weeks after the change of regime and the establishment of an Islamic authority. The journalist died in mid-January, and his last documentary Return to Kabul under the Taliban emirate airs Tuesday evening at 10:50 p.m. on Canal +. In the Afghan capital, he had found the French photoreporter Véronique de Viguerie, already present at his side in July.
A “very involved” and particularly sensitive journalist
The photoreporter tells of Paul Comiti’s workmate at the microphone of Europe 1. “He was a very whole person, who left no one indifferent, and sometimes difficult to manage so much he was involved in his film. Sometimes a little on edge, a little skinned alive, but very funny”, she says in the show Media culture. “I learned a lot by his side”, continues Véronique de Viguerie. “He was someone who gave himself entirely, without limits in his work.”
The French journalist particularly remembers the sensitivity of Paul Comiti, through an episode during a filming in Kabul: “We had met young girls who had survived an attack in front of their school, where they had lost several of their friends. At one point, Paul started crying and he kept apologizing. He was so taken up with emotions that he was this kind of character to crumble, full of empathy in the face of the misfortunes that passed through the others”.
Taliban in communication operation
Upon their return to Afghanistan, Paul Comiti and Véronique de Viguerie set off again in search of the Afghan witnesses they had met in the summer of 2021, and who were fighting the Islamists. Among the most astonishing elements of the documentary, the journalists managed to follow Taliban leaders in their daily lives, including in moments of relaxation such as in carousels or restaurants. Images all the more astonishing that the journalists had not been able to approach these same men during their report shot in the summer.
A sudden change in behavior with Western journalists that Véronique de Viguerie explains by the fact that the Taliban “were in a campaign of seduction, in any case of communication, to try to pass for people quite frequentable by the West” . The photoreporter adds that there was “this desire to be legitimized and to be seen as people with whom one could have imagined almost normal relations”.
The documentary nevertheless brings a perspective on this desire for “normalization” on the part of the Taliban, especially when it comes to women’s rights, particularly flouted by the regime. Broadcast Tuesday evening on Canal +, the film Return to Kabul under the Taliban emirate is also available on the MyCanal channel platform.