The Favored Daughter (32 page)

Finally I plucked up the courage to go into the kitchen. This was the room where my mother had reigned supreme. The room where we slept on mattresses we rolled out nightly, where she told me and the other children stories of faraway lands and kings and queens, where banquets and feasts were prepared. In here we had watched the rain and snow fall and the sun rise and set from the high window set into the wall. Once upon a time I thought the whole world was in that view from the window.

I took a deep breath and walked in. My knees nearly gave way underneath me. It was almost as if I could see my mother bent over a pan of rice, ladle in her hand. I could smell the meat cooking, feel the warmth of the open fire in the center of the room. For a moment I was five again and there she was. I felt her. Then she was gone and I was left alone. Just me, the adult Fawzia, standing in a room that no longer seemed to contain all the world. Now I cried and laughed as I realized how tiny it was, just a mud room with a tiny window looking out onto a single range of mountains. Not the world at all.

I sat in the kitchen for a long time, watching through the window as the day turned to dusk and a crescent moon surrounded by twinkling stars became visible. No one disturbed me. They knew I needed that personal communion with her.

Next I needed to feel my father. I left the hooli by the back entrance and climbed the hill where he had been buried. His grave had the best view of the mountains, a 360-degree panorama of his own paradise. I knelt down beside it and prayed. Then I sat with him and spoke to the grave. I asked him for guidance and wisdom to help in this path of politics. I told him I knew he'd be shocked that it was one of his daughters and not a son who had chosen to continue the family business, but I promised him that I wouldn't let him or his memory down.

By now it was getting cold and dark and one of my mother's friends, a lady who had been one of our servants, came to call me down. She cried and shook her head sadly at my father's grave and told me not a day went by without her remembering my parents. She said my mother had been a woman who knew only kindness and saw no difference between rich and poor and that my father had been an often fearsome man but one who was determined to improve the lot of his friends and neighbors, whatever the personal sacrifice to himself.

She stroked my cheek and looked me straight in the eye: “Fawzia jan, you will win this election and take your seat in the parliament. You will win it for them. You will.”

It was not a statement of confidence in my abilities. It was an order. I had to do it. The Koofi political dynasty was about to rise once again.

 

NINETEEN

A MOVEMENT FOR CHANGE

On election day the mood was jubilant. My sisters had been mobilizing female voters, arranging free transport to take them to and from the polling stations. We didn't care who the women wanted to vote for, whether it was me or another candidate, we just wanted to make sure the women with voting cards actually got a chance to use them. My sisters were dressed in their burqas so people didn't know who they were, but they came to the office excitedly and told me virtually all of the women on the transport said they were voting for me.

I knew I was going to win by then but I was still tense. This is Afghanistan and anything can happen. I also worried I might get killed. But in some ways I was more worried about what would happen after I won, and about how I would cope with the expectations and the pressure.

The polling stations opened at 6 a.m. One of my sisters had hired a car and wanted to visit as many polling stations as possible in order to check that there was no cheating or fraud, a problem that blights almost every Afghan election. She rang me from the first polling station. She was shouting, actually screaming: “Something is wrong here, the election staff are supporting a candidate; they are not neutral. They are telling people who to vote for!”

I called some of my contacts in the electoral commission and asked them to send monitors. A Western member of staff went to check the situation and then called me back to say everything was fine. But of course no one would commit fraud openly in front of a foreigner.

Then I got a call from another district to say the same thing was happening there. One of the candidates was the brother of a local police commander and all the policemen in that area had been ordered to go vote for him. My campaign office kicked into action. They started to call all the journalists we knew—the BBC, the local Afghan radio stations, anyone we could think of. We had to get the message out that we knew they were cheating because that was the only way to stop it.

My half-brother Nadir had wanted to stand for election himself and had been very opposed to my candidacy. I think he was more opposed because he didn't think it was a job for a woman rather than being angry at not having won the family selection. If another brother had won against him he'd have been happier. Earlier in the campaign he had allegedly been furious every time he saw my face on a poster, even ripping some of them down. But on this day his family loyalty took precedence over his resentment. He spent the day driving to some of the most remote polling stations to monitor them, and when the roads were too bad to drive he got out and trekked. He had not wanted me to stand but now that I had he most certainly was not going to allow his little sister to lose because of fraud.

At the end of the day all the ballot boxes were collected and brought to Faizabad. They were locked overnight and counting started the following day. My volunteer campaign team was so scared that election staff might tamper with the boxes overnight that two of them decided to spend the night outside the election offices. They had no blankets with them but they stayed there the whole night. I was so touched by the dedication these young volunteers showed me.

The counting process took two very long weeks in total but all early indications were that despite the fraud I would win the seat.

I felt the tension lift and was able to finally get some rest. That evening I was enjoying a dinner with friends when my brother Mirshakay rang me from Denmark. He was crying and sobbing hysterically. His eldest son Najib had drowned that afternoon.

My brother had two wives. His second wife was with him in Denmark but his first wife had opted to stay in Afghanistan. Najib was the son of the first wife and the only child she and my brother had together. He was a lovely kind young man and had been part of my campaign team. He'd worked so hard for his Aunt Fawzia. The morning after the election he'd gone with friends on a picnic and decided to swim. The current took him by surprise and swept him away. I struggled to believe what I was hearing. Why did every happy event in my family have to end with a tragedy or a death?

The counting process took two weeks. Toward the middle of the first week we became aware that some of the election commission staff were cheating. They had been seen removing ballot papers with my name on them and not counting them. One of my supporters actually saw it happen with his own eyes. He was furious and began shouting: “Look she is a woman and she is risking her life to stand. Why don't you count her vote? We are the young generation and we want her to lead us.” The argument escalated so violently that the police were called.

Fortunately the police chief took the allegations seriously and ordered a recount of several boxes while they watched. On the recount I received 300 extra votes just from a few boxes. They most certainly had been cheating.

At the end of the count I had won 8,000 votes. The candidate who came next won only 7,000. As a female candidate I was part of a quota system designed to ensure at least two women from each province entered parliament on reserved seats. I had only needed 1,800 votes to fulfill the quota, but I would have won anyway, quota or no quota. I have mixed feeling about these quota systems. I can see why quotas are important in male-dominated countries like Afghanistan, where women might need extra support to enter politics. But I also feel it can stop people from taking us seriously. I want to win people's votes on an equal playing field.

By the time confirmation came that I had won, I was aware that politics had changed my life utterly. Privacy was a thing of my past. There was now a constant stream of visitors at my door, asking for my help on everything from employment issues to illness. It was overwhelming.

And without a husband it was even harder. Most other MPs have a partner to help them manage daily life and deal with guests. With Hamid gone it was just me. The girls were upset because I wasn't able to put them to bed every night like I had before. I felt guilty and torn and wondered if I had made the right decision. Like working women all over the world I wondered if I had selfishly put my own ambitions ahead of my children. But then I thought back to my father. Had it been so different for him? Didn't he also feel guilt at leaving his wives and brood for weeks on end because of his job? It was the price we had to pay. And I consoled myself by trying to remind myself that part of the reason I wanted to work for change was so that my daughters had a better country to live in.

But then the smears and rumors started against me. And I really realized just how hard it is to be a woman in a man's world. My opponents, angry at my victory, started a series of viciously untrue slanders. They ranged from the suggestion that I had a rich businessman boyfriend in Dubai who had funded my campaign to the fact that I had lied about my achievements on my resume. But the most hurtful of all was that I had divorced Hamid in order to stand for election and had lied about his death. According to this particularly nasty rumor Hamid was alive and well and living in a mountain village.

I was still grieving so badly for my husband that the allegation that I had lied about his death made me shake with rage. How dare these people speak filth, pure hurtful filth like this? It is nothing short of disgusting. Unfortunately I was not alone in suffering this. Most female politicians had suffered similarly vicious untrue rumors against them. And they were more than just hurtful, they were downright dangerous. In Afghanistan a woman's reputation and honor can mean her life. And my opponents knew that.

It was a crazy period of adjustment. On some days I had 500 people come to see me. At times people had to sit in corridors because there was no room. They all wanted to know what my policies were, what I was going to do for them. I had to sit and talk to everyone individually, explaining the same thing over and over again. It was clear I couldn't go on like this, so after a few weeks I managed to get a little more organized and hired staff to manage an appointments system.

In October 2005 the new democratic parliament opened after 33 years of conflict. On the day of the opening ceremony I was beside myself with joy. The streets were closed to traffic because of the risk of suicide bombers trying to disrupt proceedings. But people still came out onto the streets to wave flags and dance the Attan, the national dance.

A bus came to take all the female MPs together to the parliament and as I drove past the dancing citizens I felt such joy in my heart. We passed a big poster of president Karzai and Ahmed Shah Massoud and I started to cry. I really felt that I was part of a new Afghanistan, a country that was finally leaving violence behind and embracing peace. Whatever personal sacrifices I was making now, it would be worth it to achieve this.

For the first time in my life, I had a sense of pride and maturity and a feeling that I could change things. I had both the power and a voice to make a difference. I was so very happy, but I still couldn't stop crying. Since Hamid died, I rarely cry. I've been through so much in my life: my father assassinated, my brother murdered, my mother dying, my husband dying, our house being looted. I've cried so many tears over the years that these days I have no tears left. But on that momentous occasion, I think I cried the whole day long. Only this time, they were tears of happiness.

I had never been inside the parliament building until that day and I was almost overcome with excitement at the thought that this was my new place of work and my office. Under the new postwar system of governance that had been decided for Afghanistan, the National Assembly was created as the national legislature. It is a bicameral body, composed of the lower house called the Wolesi Jirga (House of the People) and the upper house known as the Meshrano Jirga (House of the Elders). I was one of sixty-eight women in the lower house and twenty-three women in the upper house. The lower house is made up of 250 members elected to five-year terms directly by the people, in proportion to the population of each province; a quota requirement of two women from each province was instituted to ensure women got elected. In the upper house, one-third of the members are elected by provincial councils for four years, one-third are elected by district councils of each province for three years and one-third are appointed by the president. Again, there is a quota to ensure female representation. Finally, there is the Stera Mahkama, the Supreme Court, which constitutes Afghanistan's highest chamber in the judicial system. The Stera Mahkama is made up of nine judges appointed by the president to a ten-year term, with the approval of the parliament. Judges must be at least forty years of age, have a degree in law or Islamic jurisprudence, and be free of any affiliation to a political party.