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For cinemagoers across the world The Kite Runner provides a defining vision of Afghanistan's beauty and suffering as well as a haunting human story of friendship and betrayal that is likely to achieve Oscar success.

Afghans, however, are not allowed to see it.

The Ministry of Information and Culture banned it today after deciding that the Hollywood movie could stir dangerous tensions between religious sects.

The film, on release in British cinemas, is based on the bestselling novel by the US-based Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini. In a story about the troubled friendship between two Kabul boys it relates Afghanistan's suffering through 30 years of invasion, civil war and Taleban misrule.

The story's central event is the rape of one of the boys, from the Shia ethnic group, by an older boy from the Pushtun majority. The trauma is crucial to the plot because the protagonist is tortured by guilt for years afterwards at not being able to prevent his friend's rape by an older bully.

Discussing sexual matters in Afghanistan is considered shameful, let alone depicting them on film, and a depiction of rape by a Pushtun boy of a Hazara could prove explosive, Kabul's film censors fear.

In another scene that could cause controversy in Afghanistan, a boy is forced to perform an erotic dance by a Taleban commander.

The country does not suffer the bitter sectarian divisions of other Islamic nations, although there was terrible cruelty during fighting between Pushtuns and Hazaras in the civil war of the 1990s. Tensions remain. Kabul's censors fear that the film could reopen old wounds.

Paramount Vantage, the US studio behind the film, has insisted that the rape scene has been handled sensitively. Before the film was even released the scene had already caused controversy in Afghanistan and forced the child actor who plays the Hazara boy to leave Kabul for a refuge in the United Arab Emirates.

Ahmad Jaan Mahmoodzada, father of Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada who plays Hassan, has said in media interviews that he was not informed about the rape scene until just before it was shot.

Kabul has a few cinemas that show Bollywood and occasionally Western films and a booming market in bootleg DVDs, but neither will be allowed to show The Kite Runner.

Latif Ahmadi, the head of the state run Afghan Film, told Reuters news agency that it would be banned: “Because some of its scenes are questionable and unacceptable for some people and would cause sensitiveness and would cause trouble for the government and people.”

The timing is particularly sensitive because now is the Shia holy month, when tensions between sects sometimes run high.

In a land where smuggling and circumventing weak officialdom is something of a way of life, the ban may not be effective, however. Pirate copies of The Kabul Express, another banned film that was deemed anti-Hazara, fetched high prices last year with the publicity arousing viewers' interest.

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