There are people wandering around with both their hands hacked off".
The civil war, during which thousands of people had their hands hacked off as a punishment for voting, ended in 2002.
The most beautiful face in the exhibition is carved of volcanic rock and belongs, unfortunately, to one of the many Buddhist sculptures that had their heads or hands hacked off long ago, probably by invaders or looters.
Noticing that the shopkeeper, who she assumes is an Afghan, has had three fingers on one of his hands hacked off, she constructs an elaborate fantasy about what happened to him — based on her knowledge of history but not on any knowledge of his history — which culminates, in her mind, in the two of them making love under a chinar tree in Kabul.
"The mutilated body, head and hands hacked off for grisly trophies, lay limp in the brush like a bloody sack… For me, this killing was probably the saddest event in all my years of sharing the daily lives of mountain gorilla," Fossey wrote in a 1981 article in National Geographic.
He too was found dead with his hands hacked off, and although no one claimed responsibility for the killing, it was widely believed to be the work of the clandestine group.
They spoke, too, about slave labor in captured diamond mines, episodes of cannibalism, of rape, of severed heads displayed on stakes and of captured villagers lining up, waiting to have their hands hacked off.
One part of the documentary showed a miner from Sierra Leone whose hands were hacked off and whose wife and children were burned to death in 1998 by militias that Mr. Taylor is accused of supporting.
Abraham, whose hands were hacked off by the Revolutionary United Front during an attack on Waterloo in January 1999, was carrying a large nylon bag on his head, steadying it with the stumps of his arms.
