Fawad Nadri

* 1968

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  • "Mainly, as I said - women's rights. Normally it's as if half of it doesn't exist. If she doesn't study, she's not allowed to... Within three years - what they signed and what they showed on live TV - because everybody reckoned that really the Taliban had changed, within twenty years. But when they came, it was actually nothing, no change, it was even worse. And time showed: first women at home, no rights, no work. If, God forbid, somebody gets sick, from the family - mother, daughter, sister - then actually you can't go anywhere, to any doctor. Not even outside. At home! To die! So a woman would be born and stay in prison at home all the time and just give birth to children and have no right - so please, I'm saying that either these people had no mother, no grandmother, no sister, no aunt in their family, that they don't see that relationship, that respect, that you are supposed to protect them, you are supposed to provide for them, their mother and grandmother. Not to put them out of society, that they are not allowed to go anywhere. That's the worst thing for me and I know that's not going to change between them."

  • "I was in Dobruška. We came directly to Dobruška, where we had a language school for nine months. Luckily I had two wonderful teachers, both in Czech. And that teacher helped me so much! She said to me, "Fawad..." When school was over, we were supposed to go to Prague, after the language course. She said to me, "Fawad, if you go to Aghanistan now during the holidays to visit your family, you'll come back, you'll forget Czech, you won't understand people in Prague. Come on, I'll send you somewhere to work." I said, "No, I want to go to my mother."I listened to her — luckily, I did. She sent me to work at the Země Živitelka agricultural fair in Budějovice, and that basically…" ("Say what you learned there.") "I can tell you. I learned colloquial Czech and how to drink. In Budějovice — I have to take my hat off to her, I really do — I have to thank her. I learned perfect colloquial Czech from those guys. Over two months, it was honestly the best thing for me… When I came to Prague afterward, I could really understand people, we could sit down and talk. Colloquial Czech — because we had learned everything formally."

  • "It was like the lottery. For two years (it was) true that if someone was 18 years old, they could go to college, they could apply for the entrance exam. Then our generation, the year we started, the year before that they were still announcing that whoever finishes 12th grade, high school (school), is 18 years old, automatically has to go to the military for three years. Only when he finishes the military service, only then he can go to college. I was lucky - I was seventeen years old, and actually the day we finished high school, I didn't go to school to get my report card. Because we had an echo that they had surrounded the school and sent everybody straight to the army... The trucks stood around in front of our school, they surrounded the whole thing and loaded only the twelfth grade who had finished. They all ended up on the truck and on the general staff. And without that, they did - before the family knew that you didn't come home at night, the next day you were already in the combat zone. Without any preparation. (And you were fighting the mujahideen.) Yes! But the young ones had no experience. The young ones didn't know anything. Once you ended up right in the war zone, that's why most of the young people... mostly our classmates all ended up because they were never in a situation in their life where they had to fight against anybody. (Did they fall?) They fell! Because the young ones had no experience. Our classmates mostly died like that, unfortunately. They were killed - not died - they were killed."

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    Praha, 07.11.2024

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    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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    Praha, 06.05.2025

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    duration: 36:34
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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Most of my classmates were killed in the Soviet war

Fawad Nadri shortly after his arrival in Czechoslovakia in 1985
Fawad Nadri shortly after his arrival in Czechoslovakia in 1985
photo: Archive of the witness

Fawad Nadri, an Afghan businessman living in the Czech Republic, was born in Kabul on July 10, 1968. He comes from a well-to-do middle-class family. His father was in the “carpet business”, but during the Soviet occupation after 1979 he joined the Communist Party and became the director of a state enterprise engaged in carpet export. The son graduated from high school in 1985. Unlike most of his classmates who were killed in the Soviet war, he managed to avoid being brutally recruited into the Soviet-controlled Afghan army and thus did not have to fight against the guerrilla mujahideen from among his own countrymen. He was admitted to a college of economics. As part of a government programme, he was then sent to study in Czechoslovakia, then a “friendly socialist country”, in September 1985. He attended a nine-month language course in Dobruška and from 1986 to 1992 studied at the Institute of Tropics and Subtropics at the University of Agriculture in Prague. In 1991, his parents and sister left Afghanistan and settled in Germany. Fawad stayed in Czechoslovakia, and after the Velvet Revolution began importing leather and textiles into the country, gradually adding other business activities. In 2005, during the coalition’s Operation Enduring Freedom, which also involved the Czech army, he founded the Czech-Afghan Joint Chamber of Commerce, which promoted trade and cooperation between the two countries. He headed a programme under which Afghan pilots and military technicians came to the Czech Republic and underwent training in Hradec Králové. The Czech-Afghan Joint Chamber of Commerce was later followed by the newly established Czech-Slovak-Afghan Chamber of Commerce. In connection with the activities of both chambers of commerce, he visited Afghanistan again, the last time in July 2021, just before its retaking by the Taliban. Fawad Nadri is a married father of two and lives in Prague.