Given the rigid confinement of women, a surprising number try to escape. But any woman on her own outside the home is assumed to be guilty of the crime of “zina” – engaging in sexual activity. That’s why “running away” is itself a crime. One crime presupposes the other.
When she is caught, as most runaways are, she may be taken to jail for an indefinite term or returned to her husband or father or brothers who may then murder her to restore the family honor.
The same thing happens to a rape victim, force being no excuse for sexual contact – unless she is married to the man who raped her. In that case, she can be raped as often as he likes.
In Kabul, where women and girls move about more freely, many are snatched by traffickers and sold into sexual slavery. The traffickers are seldom pursued or punished because once a girl is abducted she is as good as dead anyway, even to loving parents bound by the code of honor. The weeping mother of a kidnapped teenage girl once told me, “I pray she does not come back because my husband will have to kill her.”
Many a girl kills herself. To escape beatings or sexual abuse or forced marriage. To escape prison or honor killing, if she’s been seduced or raped or falsely accused. To escape life, if she’s been forbidden to marry the man she would choose for herself.
Suicide also brings dishonor, so families cover it up. Only when city girls try to kill themselves by setting themselves on fire do their cases become known, for if they do not die at once, they may be taken to hospital. In 2003, scores of cases of self-immolation were reported in the city of Herat; the following year, as many were recorded in Kabul. Although such incidents are notoriously underreported, during the past year 150 cases were noted in western Afghanistan, 197 in Herat, and at least 34 in the south.
The customary codes and traditional practices that made life unbearable for these burned girls predate the Taliban, and they remain in force today, side by side with the new constitution and international documents that speak of women’s rights.
Tune in to a Kabul television station and you’ll see evidence that Afghan women are poised at a particularly schizophrenic moment in their history. Watching televised parliamentary sessions, you’ll see women who not only sit side by side with men – a dangerous, generally forbidden proximity – but actually rise to argue with them. Yet who can forget poor murdered Shaima, the lively, youthful presenter of a popular TV chat show for young people? Her father and brother killed her, or so men and women say approvingly, because they found her job shameful. Mullahs and public officials issue edicts from time to time condemning women on television, or television itself.
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Many people believe the key to improving life for women, and all Afghans, is education, particularly because so many among Afghanistan’s educated elite left the country during its decades of wars. So the international community invests in education projects – building schools, printing textbooks, teaching teachers, organizing literacy classes for women – and the Bush administration in particular boasts that five million children now go to school.
But that’s fewer than half the kids of school age, and less than a third of the girls. The highest enrollments are in cities ¬ñ 85% of children in Kabul – while, in the Pashtun south, enrollments drop below 20% overall and near zero for girls. More than half the students enrolled in school live in Kabul and its environs, yet even there an estimated 60,000 children are not in school, but in the streets, working as vendors, trash-pickers, beggars, or thieves.
None of this is new. For a century, Afghan rulers – from kings to communists – have tried to unveil women and advance education. In the 1970s and 1980s, many women in the capital went about freely, without veils. They worked in offices, schools, hospitals. They went to university and became doctors, nurses, teachers, judges, engineers. They drove their own cars. They wore Western fashions and traveled abroad. But when Kabul’s communists called for universal education throughout the country, provincial conservatives opposed to educating women rebelled.
Afghan women of the Kabul elite haven’t yet caught up to where they were thirty-five years ago. But once again ultra-conservatives are up in arms. This time it’s the Taliban, back in force throughout the southern half of the country. Among their tactics: blowing up or burning schools (150 in 2005, 198 in 2006) and murdering teachers, especially women who teach girls. UNICEF estimates that in four southern provinces more than half the schools – 380 out of 748 – no longer provide any education at all. Last September the Taliban shot down the middle-aged woman who headed the provincial office for women’s affairs in Kandahar. A few brave colleagues went back to the office in body armor, knowing it would not save them. Now, in the southern provinces – more than half the country – women and girls stay home.
I blame George W. Bush, the “liberator” who looked the other way. In 2001, the United States military claimed responsibility for these provinces, the heart of Taliban country; but diverted to adventures in the oilfields of Iraq, it failed for five years to provide the security international humanitarians needed to do the promised work of reconstruction. Afghans grew discouraged. Last summer, when the U.S. handed the job to NATO, British and Canadian “peacekeepers” walked right into war with the resurgent Taliban. By year’s end, more than 4,000 Afghans were dead – Taliban, “suspected” insurgents, and civilians. Speaking recently of dead women and children – trapped between U.S. bombers and NATO troops on the one hand and Taliban forces backed (unofficially) by Pakistan on the other – President Karzai began to weep.
It’s winter in Afghanistan now. No time to make war. But come spring, the Taliban promise a new offensive to throw out Karzai and foreign invaders. The British commander of NATO forces has already warned: “We could actually fail here.”
He also advised a British reporter that Westerners shouldn’t even mention women’s rights when more important things are at stake. As if security is not a woman’s right. And peace.
Come spring, Afghan women could lose it all.
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Writer/photographer Ann Jones is now working as a volunteer with the Gender-Based Violence unit of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) on “A Global Crescendo: Women’s Voices from Conflict Zones,” the special women’s advocacy project she described in “Me, I’m a Camera,” a post from war-torn Africa for TomDispatch. Jones was a humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan periodically from 2002 to 2006, and is the author of “Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan.” The New York Times described her book as “a work of impassioned reportage … eloquent and persuasive.” That’s journalese for: What she saw in Afghanistan really made her mad. To view Jones’s photos of Afghan women, visit her website.
