Le prix Carmignac du photojournalisme est une initiative soutenue par la Fondation Carmignac.
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2° Edition
Pachtunistan: Lashkars
The Pashtun populations of Pakistan’s tribal areas found themselves on the front line of the terrorist threat after September 11, 2001. The 2nd Carmignac Photojournalism Award was granted to Italian photographer Massimo Berruti, who has been based in Islamabad for the past three years.
Mahnbanr, Qilagai tehsil, Swat Valley, Pakistan, March 2011. Said Bacha, elder of the Lashkar and sworn enemy of the Taliban, returns home after attending a grand jirga (assembly) in the tehsil (sub-district) of Kabal.
Color was distracting me, pulling me away from my goal,” he said of his reportage, which is entirely in black and white. From January to April 2011, he documented the lives of the Lashkars (“army” in Persian, which gave rise to the word “lascar”), Pashtun civilian militias fighting against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
Beyond their glowering pride, young and old alike posed in their homes or were silhouetted against vast snow-covered landscapes. They highlight the suffering of a people forced to fight against an often indiscernible terror with extremely limited means.
His journalistic approach and strong gaze means absorbing all the facts as they happen, without fear of facing situations of extreme distress or violence. He manages to encapsulate both outright confrontations and inner battles, even within the same image.
"I wanted to use my images, however tragic they may sometimes be, to reveal how these people suffer in their daily lives from the terrorism perpetrated by the Taliban, but in particular I wanted to show how they resist with their minimal resources and continue to live despite everything. I am not sure that I have completely achieved this aim with my photos, as terrorism is a complicated, often impalpable, affair that involves wide-ranging interests, sometimes from outside the country where it occurs."
Pakistan, Imam Dheri, 2010: The armed lashkar members, headed by Idrees Khan, are performing pehra, day light patrolling, along the Swat River. Imam Dherai is native town of TTP head Maulana Fazalullah, who raised the Swati Taliban and established the regime in the valley and built a seminary (madrassa) that was destroyed by Pakistan Air Force during an air strike.
Today, the human rights situation remains critical: the UN Human Rights Committee continues to report hundreds of cases of enforced disappearances, while Amnesty International documents the violent repression of peaceful protest movements.
In the Pashtun tribal areas, the press faces a double threat: armed groups and state repression. The province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was recently identified by Freedom Network, an RSF partner organization, as the most dangerous in Pakistan for journalists. A tragic example is the May 2024 killing of journalist Khalil Jibran, who was shot dead in an ambush in Landi Kotal, in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa district.
