Home > Central Asia >> Afghanistan

Afghanistan: A woman's lot

Sydney Morning Herald - November 22, 2008

Paul McGeough, Kabul – Who would be a woman in this god-forsaken country? There are no meaningful statistics but anecdotal evidence of sexual and domestic violence – and the widespread use of rape as a weapon – indicates that hopes for the emancipation of Afghan women, which were high in 2001, now hang by a slender thread.

International human rights officials in Kabul are privately explosive about what they see as a marked slide in human rights generally, but for women in particular – especially in light of demands by officials that they must play the glad game. "Can't be all doom and gloom," a senior foreign official regularly exhorts his frustrated staff.

Amid the many mistakes in Afghanistan, there have been two constants. One is the Western obsession with winning a war while forgetting the welfare of the Afghan people – particularly women. The other is reducing the equation to a simplistic contest between the "good" President Hamid Karzai and the "bad" Taliban.

American generals demand thousands more troops to protect the population in the south and in the east from the Taliban. But little is said about a dire need to protect the population from bullying local power brokers who are beholden to Karzai.

The Taliban make big sections of the country ungovernable. But in the areas in which Kabul at least has nominal control, the social default is to a tribal-fundamentalist ideological mix that is enforced as much by people the President supports as those he fears.

For women, this pincers grip has knocked their rights to the bottom of the agenda. "Karzai operates like a mafia crook. His regime is corrupt, brutal and repressive and it is based on the President's umpteen deals with the devil – fundamentalists, warlords and criminals," a senior human rights figure told me privately this week. "But Karzai never acts alone. His regime was supposed to be different to the Taliban ... and the Australian and the French and all the other governments [still] back him."

Karzai lurches from one crooked or corrupt power base to the next – one day pardoning brutal rapists and saying nothing about it; the next celebrating the execution of small-time criminals while the Mr Bigs of the criminal and political worlds are untouchable.

When 18-year-old Firishta's arranged marriage became unbearable, she ran back to her father's home in Samangan, a province in the north of Afghanistan. But the young woman was pursued by her father-in-law, who was enraged by the dishonour she had brought on his name. He took to Firishta with an axe, murdering her as her family looked on. Later he told the police: "I am not sorry." In that case the police, at least, intervened as might be expected.

When they acted in the case of a 13-year-old boy who was among the victims of a spate of rape cases in adjacent Sar-e Pol province, it was not quite as the boy's uncle Ali Khan had envisaged when he complained in the local press about a lack of police action. "The police chief beat us up, threatened us with death and insulted us in the presence of my sister and her paralysed husband," Ali Khan said.

Each such case is ignored or provokes hand-wringing about the cultural complexities of Afghanistan; about endemic corruption; and about the indifference of local authorities, either because they are hostage to warlords and the mosque or because they share an ingrained Afghan notion that women are second-class citizens.

But none of that quite explains the conduct of Karzai or those around him in a horrific gang-rape case, which has been playing out in the north since the time of the 2005 presidential and parliamentary election campaigns and, more recently, in Kabul.

The victim, 45-year-old Sara, is now too scared to emerge from her home in tiny Moho, in the Roydoab district of Samangan province. Dilawar, her 50-year-old husband who also goes by a single name, has fled the village, fearful that as the head of his household he will be targeted for daring to challenge the might of local warlords. But at the same time, the wispy-bearded Dilawar refuses to succumb to the silence that usually envelops Afghan families for whom rape brings shame and dishonour.

Instead, he has enlisted human rights activists and officials to back a fight that he is taking to the gates of the presidential palace, armed with only his courage and the tattered, pink carry bag in which he holds his precious documents.

Dilawar's and Sara's son, Islamuddin, then aged 22, had not been seen since he was pulled from their home by a man they identified as Commander Karim, a local warlord who they claim attempted to frame their son for an affair that he – the commander – was having with the wife of another commander in the district.

Sara twice challenged the commander in public on the disappearance of their son. For that, she was brutally punished.

Karim and three of his militia lieutenants – who were brothers – took her from her home and dragged her to an animal pen about 200 metres away, where they raped her in front of more than a dozen witnesses. Sara was then mutilated with a bayonet before being chased naked through the village and finally left to find her way home alone.

Laying out his documents on a conference table in the Kabul office of the Afghanistan Human Rights Organisation this week, the farmer Dilawar told me that local authorities refused to act against the men until he had petitioned the parliament, the President, the United Nations and other human rights organisations.

Commander Karim had enough political and militia clout to avoid conviction despite the evidence of 17 witnesses, says Lal Gul, the chairman of the human rights organisation. But in 2006 the three brothers were convicted and each was sentenced to 11 years in jail. Subsequently, this decision was upheld by an appeal court and later confirmed by the Afghan Supreme Court.

One of the brothers died in jail. But when Dilawar returned briefly to the village in May this year, he was unnerved to see the other two – Noor Mohammad and Khair Mohammad – swaggering in the village bazaar. They had been released after serving little more than two years of their sentences, apparently in response to a petition to Karzai from their mother.

Sara and Dilawar have complained loudly and publicly since May; in August they won the backing of senior United Nations officers in Kabul who firmly denounced the rapist brothers' early release.

In the face of local indifference, Karzai's office might have been expected to be jealous of the President's international reputation when it came to kid-glove treatment for rapists. But his staff has been inordinately slow in explaining how his distinctive signature was appended to the brothers' pardon documents.

The pardon papers misrepresent a key fact. They state that the brothers deserved mercy because they had already served four years in jail, twice as long as they actually had been behind bars. And reflecting the absence of any distinction between rape and adultery in Afghanistan's Sharia law, they cite the brothers' crime simply as adultery.

When challenged, the initial response from Karzai's office was to fob off senior human rights officials, claiming that the pardons related to a different rape – not that of Sara. In the face of persistence, they promised an investigation.

That was in August. In the interim there has been only silence while the human rights lawyer Lal Gul represents the case as an example of the ability of warlords and their political patrons to act outside the law as they influence the highest levels of decision-making in the land. In the pardon process, Gul and his foreign counterparts in Kabul detect the hand of a member of one of the Samangan warlord families who is on Karzai's staff. "But," one of the internationals added, "Karzai knew exactly what he was doing when he signed the papers."

The official added: "Sara's case so illustrates how power and leverage work in this country. Some can protect themselves and their families but if you are at the bottom of the pile you are totally exposed."

Arguing that Karzai has no genuine commitment to women's rights, 28-year-old Sabrina Sagheb, an MP, snapped: "The President does not believe in democracy – he uses its elements to defeat democracy. How would he respond if one of his family were treated like this? How can he do it?"

Dilawar has already sold half of his small plot of land to raise funds for the case. But why press on in such a hostile environment? "This was an animal crime and the men who raped my wife must be properly punished," he said resignedly. "I want justice."

More than 80 per cent of Afghan women are illiterate. Three out of four girls under 16 are forced to marry, often to settle family debts. School attendance in Afghanistan has risen impressively to about 5 million. But the World Bank says girls comprise just 35 per cent of the total.

An average 60 per cent of girls under 11 – more than a million – still do not attend classes and in five of the country's 34 provinces, at least 90 per cent of school-age girls are kept away.

Schools for girls in areas where the Taliban is active are torched and teachers are intimidated. In Kandahar last week, eight exuberant teenage girls on their way home from school were sprayed with acid by two men who came alongside them on a motorcycle. One of the girls was blinded and, despite its denials of responsibility for the attack, a Taliban objective was achieved: the next day, local families pulled all 1500 girls from the Mirwais Minna school.

Much is made of the reach of public health facilities that are improving slowly. But when French military medics this year opened a clinic at Dawalat, just 60 kilometres north-east of the capital, there was just one woman among the first 1000 patients.

The all-enveloping burqa remains a common sight in Kabul, as women move through the markets like anonymous shadows and women who dare to be role models run the risk of being gunned down.

At the end of September Malalai Kakar, who was celebrated for her gun-toting courage as the chief of the women's police in Kandahar, was assassinated by the Taliban as her 15-year-old son drove her to work.

The head of the local Women's Affairs Department suffered the same fate two years earlier. In 2005, the 24-year-old Shaima Rezayee, who shed her burqa for the glamour of hosting a popular TV music show, was murdered in Kabul.

In the western city of Herat, a female prosecutor has had so many threats she has been lumbered with eight bodyguards and is too scared to allow her children to attend school.

The father of a doctor who has received threats disguises himself as a woman before daring to visit international human rights officials in Kabul – and the only useful advice they can offer is that he and his family should join the middle-class and professional exodus from Afghanistan.

It is sickening to sit through an interview with Sabrina Sagheb, the youthful female MP. Initially she wants to celebrate the equal rights granted to women in Afghanistan's new constitution and the gift of 25 per cent of seats in the parliament. "We are free," she declares. Then, between long, pensive silences she volunteers that women remain a lesser gender; that violence is a great challenge; and that rape, especially of children, is on the rise. "It's horrible," she says.

At the end of 30 minutes' conversation, she denounces Karzai as a criminal: "He is one of those who break the law."

The fear among foreign rights activists here is that the weight of constant attack will wear down local women's groups. "I worry that their ability to hold on to their ideals and objectives is diminishing all the time," a foreign official told me.

[Paul McGeough, the Herald's chief correspondent, is on assignment in Afghanistan.]

See also:


Home | Site Map | Calendar & Events | News Services | Links & Resources | Contact Us