From the November/December 2001 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Compass Points
Tolerance Is Not Enough

by Suzanne Fisher Staples

n the late 1970s I was based in India, working as a newspaper reporter. The most important and terrible story I covered was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

When I think of Afghanistan, images of people flood my mind. I remember a man, employed by a European friend, who drove me back to my hotel in Kabul one night after dinner. He wore gloves because Secret Police interrogators had torn off his fingernails one at a time. They said he hadn’t informed on the foreigners he worked for in enough detail.

I think of a group of refugees walking across the border into Pakistan, some in bare feet in a light snow. Several of the women carried dead infants in their arms.

I remember a seven-year-old boy in a makeshift medical camp along the Afghan-Pakistan border. His face was horribly scarred, his eyes were gone, and his right arm was a bandaged stump. He said he and his brothers had tried to pick up what they thought were toys and watches — actually, antipersonnel devices dropped from Soviet helicopters by the hundreds of thousands over Afghan mountain passes and farmlands.

A little girl told me she had watched her mother die in her village in Afghanistan. “She opened her mouth to speak, and blood came out,” she said.

In my drawer sits a photograph of me sitting with a war council of tribal elders led by Ahmed Shah Massoud, the commander of Afghan resistance fighters known as the Northern Alliance, who was assassinated in early September by hit men disguised as Saudi journalists. “You will hear of this war for many years,” Massoud told me. Even then — in 1981 — I knew he was right.

The dominant image of Afghanistan is the most inhospitable landscape most of us can imagine. It is peppered with caves and inaccessible mountain passes. Even before five years of drought and twenty years of war, Afghanistan was a desolate tribal land of high desert mountains and plains. There is virtually nothing to eat, because the natural forage is dried up and the irrigation systems have been destroyed. It is not simply fear of an American attack that has millions of Afghans on the move.

Among the many things I learned living in that part of the world is that Christians and Jews and Muslims have a lot more in common than they have differences. The Koran is much like the Bible and the Judaic scriptures in its prescriptions for how people ought to behave toward one another.

From hours of sipping tea around fires in camps all over rural Pakistan and Afghanistan, I have also learned that relatively few Muslims are fundamentalists. They abhor terrorism and are more often victims of it than we are. Muslim terrorists are not regarded as religious martyrs but as fanatics who use religion to justify political acts.

The Soviet-Afghan war was of great strategic importance to the United States. At stake: Soviet access to the major shipping lanes from the Gulf of Arabia, the most important conduit for Middle Eastern oil to the West. And yet it was difficult to get news of it into American newspapers. Most of our stories were cut to one- or two-inch columns for the “World News in Brief” sections. Our editors told us that Americans weren’t interested because they had difficulty seeing the relevance of such a remote and strange country.

I began to realize that news reports seldom let Americans see what people from cultures very different from ours are really like. News reports about battles and politics and economics rarely show individual faces — and when people remain faceless, it’s easy not to care what happens to them.

I began to think then of story as a way of providing insight into the lives of people from other cultures, because story is based on the stuff of the human heart. Story shows what we have in common, not what separates us. That was when I decided I wanted to write fiction.

Stories can show us that the people of Afghanistan are more like us than not; that they are not equipment and targets, but people — most of them decent and moderate — just like us. They are afraid when they hear gunfire outside their houses in the middle of the night, just as you and I would be.

We in America pride ourselves on tolerance, but we must learn quickly that tolerance is not enough. It is diversity that must be embraced and celebrated if this madness is ever to stop. Diversity can fill us with surprise and touch us with familiarity. It is the richness of life, and is not to be feared.