The Lovers (10 page)

The next morning, February 3, Najeeba brought Zakia from the shelter to the court, where her family had assembled again; this time the group was larger, including her brother Gula Khan, two male cousins, her parents, Sabza and Zaman, the six village elders, plus the panel of three judges, headed by Judge Tamkeen. Fatima Kazimi was also there, backed up by the deputy governor, Asif Mubaligh, and the deputy police chief, Ali Lagzi.

Fatima Kazimi is a presence; big and slightly rotund, usually dressed in a purple silk head scarf and a dark modesty trench coat, she exudes self-assurance and authority. Fatima and the deputy governor took Zakia aside, over the strenuous objections of her family. “Do you understand,” Fatima asked her, “that you have signed an agreement to return home with your family?”

“Yes,” Zakia said in a small voice.

“You don’t have to do it,” Fatima said. “You can always change your mind, and we will protect you if you do. You just have to say in court, in front of the judges, that you don’t want to go.”

When they returned to the courtroom, Zakia stood up and said she wanted to stay in the shelter. Judge Tamkeen leaped to his feet and ordered policemen to take her out by force and return her to the family. Zakia screamed, “I don’t want to go home!”

The judge threatened to send them all to jail.

“This is a violence against her and a violence against women,” Fatima retorted. “You can’t do this.” She asked the deputy police chief to intervene, and he ordered the policemen to bring Zakia back to the shelter; in the end the policemen obeyed their superiors, who were fellow Hazaras, and not the judges, who were Tajiks.

Zakia’s family then dropped all pretenses of not wishing her harm. Her father and brother tried to drag her physically away from Fatima and the police, but her mother was the worst of them.

“You whore!” Sabza screamed at her, about the worst thing any Afghan mother—or any mother—could say to her daughter.

One of the men yelled, “You will not live in peace! We will kill you!”

“My mother was shouting and cursing me, my brothers and my aunt’s son tried to beat me, my father and mother were tearing at my clothes and even pulling my clothes off,” Zakia said. “I felt that if they got me out of there, I wouldn’t have gotten home. They would have killed me on the way.”

“They were ferocious,” Fatima said. “There was no question in our mind—of course she would be killed if they ever got their hands on her.”

The girl’s scarf was ripped from her head, and Sabza pulled her jacket off as the family struggled with police to get her back.

“This girl must be hanged!” shouted Zaman.

“That was their plan. That was their decision,” Zakia said. “At least then the police also found out that they would kill me, so they assured me they would not hand me over.”

Zaman and his son were handcuffed and arrested and held until
they calmed down, while the police pushed Sabza out of the courtroom, still screaming and cursing.

The deputy governor and the deputy police chief, as well as Najeeba Ahmadi, Fatima Kazimi, and the head of the human-rights office, Aziza Ahmadi, all witnessed the outburst and her family’s passionate vows to kill Zakia. These could have been dismissed as being said in the heat of the moment, the sort of harsh words uttered in a family conflict that go far beyond any settled intention, except that their anger did not dissipate. Weeks and months later, Najeeba was still receiving telephoned death threats from Zakia’s family, and they would eventually give up their farm, their livelihood, and their home in the single-minded pursuit of vengeance against Zakia and Ali.

After the Bamiyan courtroom melee, a furious Judge Tamkeen issued an order suspending Fatima Kazimi and Aziza Ahmadi from their jobs. He even ordered Fatima’s arrest for questioning by the attorney general’s office. “The attorney general asked us to bring her in for interrogation,” said Bamiyan provincial police chief General Khudayar Qudsi. “But there is no basis for such action, so we will not recognize such requests.” The governor simply told police to ignore the order, and Fatima continued to go to work.
¹²

Zakia was safe back in the shelter, but her problem was no closer to being solved. Fatima acceded to Ali’s request to be allowed to visit Zakia at the shelter, something normally
not
allowed, and Fatima claimed later she knew he would smuggle in a telephone but looked the other way when he did. By then Zakia and Ali were both experts in clandestine calling, and they began plotting her escape.

There was no longer any reason to stay in the shelter; as far as the lovers could see, it offered no solutions, only a temporary safety that could end anytime without warning. The judges and Zakia’s family had the weight of Afghan social custom and practice on their side and the potential authority of the central government behind them. Even many of Ali’s fellow Hazaras disapproved of the couple’s actions.

They were also well aware of the many examples of the fate
awaiting an Afghan woman who goes astray and is returned to an angry family. “One hundred percent, they would kill me,” Zakia had said—and who could know her own family better than one of its daughters? Had Fatima not intervened to prevent Zakia from going back home with her family, she might have ended up like Amina, a teenage girl from northern Baghlan Province, who was either fifteen or eighteen years old.
¹³
The daughter of a man named Khuda Bakhsh, Amina fled from her family’s home when her father proposed to marry her to a much older man in their village in Tala Wa Barfak District.
¹⁴
Police found her wandering in the bazaar in the provincial capital of Pul-e-Kumri, asking people how to find the women’s-ministry offices. She was arrested, essentially, for being a woman alone.

The police bypassed the jail and took her directly to the provincial women’s ministry, on March 20, 2014—the day before Zakia escaped her shelter, in fact—and handed her over to Uranus Atifi, head of the legal department; she was put in a shelter in Pul-e-Kumri and stayed there for the following month. Then a member of the provincial council, Samay Faisal, called Ms. Atifi and said that Amina’s brother and uncle had come to Pul-e-Kumri and wanted to take the girl home. Mr. Faisal offered to vouch for them, she said, so she brought the family in, and they all signed guarantee papers promising not to harm the girl if she came home and not to force her to marry the fiancé she had rejected.

“Before handing her over to her family, we talked to Amina in private and asked her if she wanted to go back to her home,” Ms. Atifi said. “She said that she did want to go back, because she didn’t want her case to get bigger and create more problems.” Ms. Atifi took the precaution of videoing the family’s pledges not to hurt the girl and the girl’s consent to return. Still, Ms. Atifi was worried, and she got the brother’s phone number and called him to speak to Amina while they were driving back.

“That same night I called her at eight
P
.
M
., and I talked to her and asked her if she was all right. She told me she was and that they were still driving. At ten
P
.
M
. I called them again, but this time I couldn’t get through,” Ms. Atifi said.

The next morning Ms. Atifi called the brother, and he coolly related to her that a group of nine armed men wearing masks had stopped their car and dragged Amina out and shot her to death but harmed no one else. The family had not bothered to report the crime to the police. The brother seemed to her suspiciously calm about his sister’s murder.

No one believed the family’s story that the masked men must have been relatives of the jilted fiancé. If that were the case, skeptics asked, why wouldn’t the outraged fiancé’s relatives have killed the brother, uncle, and cousin who were there, too, and who were supposedly returning the girl to her home and canceling her engagement?

“You know, if a husband sees his wife in bed with a stranger and kills her, he gets one year in prison at most,” said Shahla Farid, a female professor of law who is on the board of the Afghan Women’s Network. “If she kills her husband for the same thing, she can be executed. That’s right there in the Afghan penal code.”
¹⁵
More likely the husband would not be prosecuted in such a case or, if prosecuted, get anything more than a toke punishment.
¹⁶

“I believe the two families reached an agreement, but I’m not sure,” said Khadija Yaqeen, the director of women’s affairs in Baghlan Province. “We don’t care what deal or interfamily agreement is made or will be made. Someone was killed, and there has to be an investigation so that justice is done in Amina’s case.” As in so many similar ones, that apparently never happened.
¹⁷

In Bamiyan nearly two months went by after the court hearing. In the end Zakia’s father forced matters to a head by formally requesting that the court in Bamiyan transfer Zakia’s case to Kabul. There, he thought, he would get a better reception, since police and government officials in the capital would not be Hazaras but Tajiks or Pashtuns, and if a judge ordered her returned to the family, the police would obey. “We talked with the girl and got her consent to transfer her case to Kabul,” said Zaman. Zakia of course said she gave no such consent and that the impending transfer precipitated
her decision to escape, which she did the night before it was scheduled.

Coming so soon before the transfer, the elopement, Zaman felt, had to have been staged by women’s-ministry officials. “We were not even allowed to meet her in person, so we talked to her on the phone and got her consent,” Zaman said. “She agreed to come home. She is not guilty at all. It is the women’s director, who thought she might be in trouble due to her involvement in the case, who decided to help them escape. Otherwise how can a girl from a shelter which is guarded by police
¹⁸
escape? It must be direct involvement of that woman and others who arranged her escape.” Fatima Kazimi and Najeeba Ahmadi denied Zaman’s claims, as did Ali and Zakia later on.

Unknown to them all, however, Zaman’s appeals to move the case to Kabul had nothing to do with the impending transfer. Shukria Khaliqi, who was then a lawyer with the group Women for Afghan Women (WAW), had heard about the case and formally requested that it be moved to the capital, with the approval of women’s-ministry officials in Kabul and women’s advocates in the attorney general’s office. In Kabul they thought they could find a court with judges who were lawyers and who had a passing acquaintance with the law. Shukria was convinced she could win the case for the couple. Then, although they would still be at risk of attack from Zakia’s family, there would be no legal impediment to their marriage and no justification for keeping Zakia in a shelter.

Before WAW could reach Zakia to tell her all this, however, the couple was already on the run. Zakia’s father pressed kidnapping charges against Ali, so they were fugitives not only from her family’s retribution but from the law as well. They were together, but as far as the Afghan police were concerned—and that included the police in Bamiyan—they were wanted criminals who needed to be hunted down. Fellow feeling among Hazaras goes only so far; a woman on the run would always be in the wrong in the view of Afghan authority of whatever ethnic background.

Once Zakia and Ali had escaped, however, they also became heroes to many Afghans, especially to women and young people.
Najeeba Ahmadi of the Bamiyan shelter, while insisting she had no role in Zakia’s escape, nonetheless applauded her at the time it happened. “Her action shows that everyone has the right to marry according to their own will. She has tried to achieve her own wishes. Her resistance and bravery are a good example for all those women and girls who want to protect their rights. When women resist for their rights, they have the ability to achieve their goals. I don’t believe Zakia has done anything wrong. Her actions are admirable, and wherever she is, I wish her the best of luck and success in her life.”

Zakia and Ali themselves had modest goals. They knew that most couples who eloped were usually caught, with terrible consequences. They never expected to get very far but were determined to have some real time together while they could, even if it meant death for both of them.

4

A RABBI AMONG THE MULLAHS

The e-mail from Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on March 25, 2014, was enigmatic and urgent. “I just heard very important info about the case. Can we speak please?” Shmuley was among hundreds of readers who had gotten in touch with me after I wrote about the plight of Zakia and Ali in the
New York Times.
At the time of that first article,
¹
Zakia was on month four or five of her stay at the Bamiyan Women’s Shelter, her disastrous court hearing was behind her, and Ali was mooning around the valley, trying to figure out an escape plan.

Many of those readers wanted to help the couple; Rabbi Shmuley was just a bit more pushy than most, and he now had the personal e-mail address and phone number I had given him, so he was not about to let up. Somewhat wearily I called him back, because I knew he wouldn’t rest until I had. Part of me had given up on Zakia and Ali after I wrote that first story; I just didn’t see how their story could end well, unless the then-president, Hamid Karzai, decided to step in and resolve it for them by decree. He was quite capable of doing this had he been interested, but in this case any interest he had was bound to be negative. The earnest and well-meaning efforts of a rabbi from New Jersey were not going to sway the president of
the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, a country where most other faiths are forbidden, the only consecrated Christian church is a small chapel inside the Italian embassy, and the lone synagogue has but one surviving congregant. Plus, at that time in his administration President Karzai was scarcely on speaking terms with American officials, despite his country’s dependence on American aid.
²
So, not expecting much, I called Shmuley’s number in North Jersey from our bureau in Kabul.