The Lovers (26 page)

Just how this came about was mysterious, but somehow it was no longer necessary for them to produce the original
neka
that the mullah did or did not do for them in Foladi on the second day of their elopement. The resolution didn’t come about from a bribe; it is clear that Anwar had no money—he was asking us for even
a small amount to survive on, and we were trying to arrange for him to get some from the donations on account at WAW. The couple’s attorney, Shukria, just shrugged it off without explanation, and her tone suggested we not ask her too many questions about it. So Anwar’s other sons came down from Bamiyan with a fresh
neka
signed by a friendly mullah and witnessed by a couple of men from their village. They delivered it to WAW to produce for the attorney general.

Ali was ecstatic. “Before being arrested I was a hundred percent happy. Now that I am freed from the government’s claws and when my wife is released, I will be a thousand percent happy. We are so happy that we cannot fit into our clothes anymore.”

Zakia was still in the shelter, but now that a
neka
had been produced, she would be out soon. We spoke to her the night before they were due to go to the attorney general’s office and get the new
neka
registered and approved.

“I feel I am born once again to this world,” she told us. “I missed him so much I cannot count how much. I’m so happy that I won’t be able to go to sleep tonight. I wish after I get released that we could have a happy life again and go and live in a place that is safe for us. We cannot stay in Bamiyan or Kabul anymore. I love him so much I cannot possibly explain it to you.”

Qudsia Niazi, from the attorney general’s EVAW law unit, told Zakia that if she wanted to press charges against her parents, for unlawfully trying to force her to marry against her will and trying to prevent her from marrying Ali, those were crimes under EVAW law and she could do so. Zakia demurred. “About my father my feeling is that it would be better if he would agree to this, but now that he doesn’t agree, I cannot say anything about the matter to him. But I don’t want to bring charges against them, because they are my father and mother and I couldn’t bear to do anything to them. I can’t see anything happen to them or happen to my brothers from such a thing. Once I get out of here, my father and mother will not even want to see me, I know that, but I don’t want trouble for them.”

Later we asked her how she had found the WAW shelter compared
to the Bamiyan one. She was glad that her stay in the Kabul shelter was so short, but she didn’t like it as much as the one in Bamiyan. “They were so strict here.”

Ali laughed. “Women are only happy when they are free to wear makeup,” he said. Having weathered a couple of crises in Kabul in which archconservatives accused WAW’s shelter in Kabul of being a bordello and the people who ran it of being pimps, Women for Afghan Women was sensitive to anything that might give conservatives ammunition against them. Makeup was one of those things, so it was banned inside their shelters.

At the time the details of how their case had been settled, and so quickly, were a complete mystery. In addition, Zaman and his sons and nephews disappeared from the picture overnight, as if someone had come along and swept them away with a broom. When Ali stepped out of PD1, there was no longer an in-law stakeout in evidence, and when he was reunited with Zakia at the shelter and she stepped outside the walls that surrounded it and onto the street, they looked around themselves apprehensively, but Zakia’s family was not there either. Some speculated that President Karzai must have intervened behind the scenes, but that seemed hard to believe after the antipathy of his women’s minister only a few days earlier—which her aides blamed on anger from the presidential palace over the high profile of the case and the embarrassment it was causing the country.

All the public attention made Zakia and Ali nervous, too. They were confused and didn’t know what to make of it. Neither of them knew what Facebook was, or an online news agency, or even the Internet, except that they were something mysterious, like the
New York Times,
for that matter, that could have a big impact on their lives. They did not much enjoy their celebrity. People would stop them on the street and ask to take selfies with them, and Zakia would pull a veil across her face and she and Ali would reluctantly oblige.

The lovers soon decided they would return to Bamiyan. Ali explained it this way: “In Kabul I know it is a big city, but I don’t know it and I don’t know who all the people are. If I look at them,
I don’t know which one knows me now.” Their faces were easily recognizable due to the heavy local press coverage, and I felt somewhat guilty about their predicament. “If they know me, I still don’t know them and don’t know if I need to be worried about them. In Bamiyan you know your enemy, in Kabul you don’t.” That wasn’t the only reason, though. Ali kept it to himself, but he was steaming that we had encouraged Zakia to go into a shelter.

For the time being, they had decided against going abroad, he said. Africa they had already ruled out. In America there would be pockets of other Afghans, but they would still be lost souls. “In America we wouldn’t know where is the food store. Where can you borrow food on credit and pay them back later? We wouldn’t know where to go for that,” Ali said. I didn’t bother to tell him stores in America don’t usually give food on credit.

Zmaryalai Farahi from the American embassy called him around that time; the publicity, plus pressure from the home front thanks to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and his friends in high places, had aroused their interest again. Now that the couple no longer had criminal charges hanging over them, there was no political-diplomatic reason they could not get visas. This time Zmaryalai offered to come and meet them at a place of their choice, rather than asking them to run the police gauntlet and come into the embassy.

Ali said he would rather talk on the phone and asked Zmaryalai whether, if they got visas to America, they could bring along his father, mother, brothers, sisters, and their children, eighteen persons in all. When Zmaryalai said he greatly doubted it, Ali flatly told him they had changed their minds, that they were staying in Afghanistan and no longer wanted to flee abroad, and with that, for the near future at least, he pretty much dashed what little chance they had of going to America themselves. If they were not pushing, no amount of pushing from others on their behalf was going to carry the day. I asked Ali why he hadn’t just left his options open and kept his doubts to himself while talking to the American embassy. He offered an odd aphorism for someone from rural, pasta-less Afghanistan: “This is the dish, and this is the spaghetti.
Whatever is there, is there. Maybe later we will think about it.” With a death threat still looming, “later” seemed like a faraway place.

For American officials this was a relief. The American embassy reported back to Samantha Power’s staff that Ali, criminal case now dismissed, had decided to stay in Afghanistan and was no longer looking for asylum abroad. Problem solved.

“I’ve never worked harder on a case since the Wikileaks thing,” Shmuley quoted one of Power’s aides as telling him. “I am so frustrated by our embassy’s unwillingness to help.” Now there was nothing more they needed to do.

Even if Ali and Zakia had decided to try to leave the country, the American embassy had little to offer them. While there had been criminal charges against them, the embassy’s reluctance was understandable; now that the legal charges against them were resolved, however, all the embassy was willing to offer them was advice: flee to another country, apply for refugee status there. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees would then consider their request for resettlement, and the United States would inform the UNHCR that it was following their case. All of this
might
help push things along faster,
might
lead to resettlement in the United States, but there would be no guarantees. I spoke to UNHCR officials in Kabul, and they agreed that the process would be a protracted one, even with the United States following the couple’s case, even with well-heeled sponsors willing to help them and guarantee them jobs, language training, education.
⁹

The two were looking at six or seven months as refugees before they could get resettled to the United States, maybe twice as long—and that was only if U.S. officials did follow up on their case, which they had only sort of promised to do—always adding “No guarantees.” There is another method that American officials could have used, but they ruled it out, I suspect, for fear that it would open the floodgates for other potential honor-killing victims. This was humanitarian parole,
¹⁰
and it can be used to take people straight from their own country, without the need of their
first becoming refugees. It is used in cases of extreme emergency, such as for people who need specialized medical care in the United States that is unavailable in their own country. Or in cases where someone’s life is in imminent danger. The lovers seemingly qualified there. In the American embassy’s interpretation of humanitarian parole, however, Ali and Zakia did not satisfy the condition that their lives were in imminent danger.

Even if the United States had chosen to offer humanitarian parole—and the embassy nixed suggestions from Washington that they do so—it is no longer the magic bullet it once was for extreme cases. It was used, for instance, in the case of Bibi Aisha, disfigured by her Taliban husband. The Grossman Burn Center
¹¹
in Los Angeles offered to reconstruct her face, cutting-edge medicine no one in Afghanistan was qualified to do, and Women for Afghan Women, with the embassy’s enthusiastic support in such a high-profile case, applied for humanitarian parole for her. Using immigration lawyers in the United States, WAW did manage to get humanitarian parole for Bibi Aisha—after eight months of waiting, most of that time due to delays by the Department of Homeland Security, undertaking its exhaustive security checks to confirm to its satisfaction that this seventeen-year-old victim of the Taliban was not a terrorist trying to sneak into the United States under medical cover.

It was little wonder that the couple stopped speaking to everyone and gave up on leaving. They could have been more patient, though; as long as the embassy was interested enough to continue talking to them, there was always the possibility of an option being worked out. With Shmuley’s Africa option also off the table, their lives were a crapshoot, dependent on the chance that Zaman and sons did not find a way to take their revenge.

“When your story came to light, I was fortunate that I do have friends in positions in the American government who could help,” Shmuley said when I talked to him about the lovers’ present dead end. “Senator Cory Booker, I discussed the case with him, for instance, and especially Samantha Power, who was uniquely positioned to assist because of her international portfolio—she has
always cared, instantly and immensely—gave me a lot of time, to her immense credit and at a time when it’s been pretty darn busy in the world. She could easily have said, ‘It’s a terrible story, just one among millions that require our attention,’ but she didn’t do that. And with all of that, there still has been the snail-like pace of the American government. The strictures are not just ones of immigration. Those are understandable after 9/11, I understand that. The disappointing part to me is how the American government couldn’t go officially on the record to condemn the violence against this woman, or the intended violence. There wasn’t a single American reading these stories about this couple who were going, ‘Oh, I sympathize with her family.’ They can’t even publicly condemn it, because we don’t want to be seen dictating to the Muslims about their culture. Neither do I believe that we can lose thousands of soldiers to liberate Afghanistan from the monstrous barbarity of the Taliban and then not have the right to speak out against that barbarity. We can’t be dictating to the Afghan people how they should be living? Give me a break. This isn’t a domestic issue, brutality against women. We’re not talking here about a woman who wants to put on a miniskirt and dance at a disco—she wants to marry the man she loves and live an Islamic, religious life. If we can’t condemn her treatment, our mission has no meaning. Notwithstanding how much the U.S. government did not want to offend the Afghan government’s sensibilities, what about offending the American public’s sensibilities? The officials I spoke with were all very well-meaning, but they spoke about how they were handcuffed, about not playing into this narrative of the U.S. controlling Afghanistan. It’s our taxpayers’ money that is being spent there—we have the right to demand the most minimal impact on the country. If we can’t even say something like that, help people in that kind of situation, what was the purpose of the entire American mission? You have to redeem the lives of our soldiers with some moral progress.”

11

BACK TO THE HINDU KUSH

The problem with helping people too much is that they don’t learn how to help themselves. Governments know that, but it doesn’t stop them from giving money to increasingly dependent societies.
We
knew this, but it didn’t stop us from helping Zakia and Ali. They weren’t going to do it on their own, it seemed. They were just making one bad move after another.

The day after Zakia’s release from the shelter, they disappeared, and even Ali’s brothers couldn’t find them. It was rumored that they had fled to Iran. Finally Ismatullah, Ali’s older brother, got a call from them asking him to approach us and get money from WAW on their behalf so they could fly to Herat, a city in western Afghanistan. We told Ismatullah that all they needed to do was get in touch with the shelter and ask for some of the donors’ money, but they had to do that themselves—they couldn’t expect someone else to do it for them. The shelter needed to verify that they personally received the money.