The Lovers (39 page)

Sitting on one of the tattered sofas like the other five prosecutors in the office on this particular day, Ms. Abbasi was deeply demoralized about the prospects for the EVAW law to really work in Afghanistan, even after a new president, Ashraf Ghani, had been installed and had sent positive signals about his commitment to women’s issues.
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As the lawyers remember, President Hamid Karzai had done the same in his first years; after all, he enacted the law that brought their unit into being. “This EVAW law has had some accomplishments, but they were negative, not positive, even when we succeeded,” Ms. Abbasi said. “How can a law like this work in a society that is so strongly patriarchal?

“Out of ten cases,” she continued, “we’re lucky if two have a positive outcome, one that changes the husband or improves the situation for the woman. In the eight others, the complainants disappear, or they get killed, or they give up. It just doesn’t work. How can an Afghan man accept that his wife stands next to a lawyer and speaks about him? That is in the cities. We don’t even reach people in poor rural places.

“Half the time we go into court and the judge just says, ‘I don’t agree with the EVAW law,’ and he refuses to apply it,” Ms. Abbasi said.

Ms. Abbasi and her five colleagues had varying views on how effective EVAW law had been, but they were all in agreement about one thing: Given the chance, she and the others readily said, every one of them would leave Afghanistan and not come back. Ziba Sadat, in her forties and an EVAW prosecutor the last five of her twenty-three years as a lawyer, was the most adamant of them all. Her own husband, an Afghan TV journalist, expected her to stop working when he told her to do so. When she didn’t, he beat her until she brought charges against him under the EVAW law. As a result his entire family disowned her and their children and launched what she described as a campaign of terror against them.
The husband was convicted and served two months in jail. Ms. Sadat has four children, a daughter and three sons, all teenagers. She showed me a recent text message on her phone, one of many from a caller who did not even bother to disguise his number:
BITCH, WE WILL FIRST KILL YOU AND THEN WE WILL RAPE YOUR DAUGHTER, YOU DIRTY PROSECUTOR
.

“Look here, I am a prosecutor subject to death threats, but when I complain to anyone about it, they don’t help me,” Ms. Sadat said.

Her misery had company. The head of the EVAW prosecutor’s unit, Qudsia Niazi, is regularly beaten by her husband, as she has confided to one prominent women’s activist. “She called me, and she was crying on the phone,” said the activist, a prominent member of parliament who did not want to be further identified. “She told me, ‘I help other women, but I cannot help myself.’”

During an interview in October 2014, I asked Ms. Niazi if any members of her staff were themselves victims of spousal abuse. She laughed ruefully. “I could say even myself,” she replied. She did not want to discuss her specific case, she said, but added, “In Afghanistan the majority of those women who work have suffered violence and cannot afford to report it because of their positions. Afghanistan is a male-dominated society, and it’s very difficult to change anything to do with that.”

According to many women’s activists in Kabul, even one of the country’s first women’s-affairs ministers, Massouda Jalal, a physician who served in that position from 2004 to 2006, was beaten by her husband while she was still in office. A candidate for president of Afghanistan in the country’s first democratic election (she placed seventh out of a numerous field), she was the women’s minister who claims to have been responsible for first drafting the EVAW law, in 2005, although it was not enacted during her tenure. “It sat in a drawer for four years,” she said, “until the Americans pressured President Karzai to enact it.” She said the law was drafted in her home with a committee including her husband, a law professor named Faizullah Jalal; Ms. Jalal at first dismissed as unfounded rumors
the reports that Mr. Jalal beat her while she was the minister. “He has always been so much supportive and was one of the committee members for writing the law. It’s just not true. He really cares about women’s rights. Plus, he wasn’t even in the country most of the time I was minister,” she said.

A few days later, my colleague Jawad Sukhanyar went alone to see Ms. Jalal, and she confided to him that there
had
been something to the rumors after all. “You know that question your colleague asked?” she said. “Well, it’s true, I
have
been a victim of violence at home. And not just me. I could tell you another woman cabinet minister who was the victim of abuse from her husband.
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You cannot work in this society as a woman without suffering abuse.” He asked her if her remarks were on the record, and she defiantly said they were. There is, she said, nothing at all unusual about her case, or that of the prosecutor Ziba Sadat, or any number of female members of parliament (MPs) and women’s activists who are abused women. Yet her husband was still a good man, who supported women’s rights, she said, and they are still married.

One of the saddest cases of the abuse of prominent women
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concerned Noor Zia Atmar, one of the country’s first elected female MPs. The Afghan constitution, at the insistence of the Western powers, reserved 25 percent of the seats in parliament for women, giving that body a higher percentage of female representation than the British parliament or the U.S. Congress, although many of the Afghan MPs are stand-ins for husbands, fathers, or brothers. Routinely beaten by her husband and forced to wear a burqa, Ms. Atmar divorced him and was thrown out of their home. Disowned by both his family and hers, Ms. Atmar was forced to take refuge in a women’s shelter in 2013.

“The violence against women is getting worse and worse,” said Ms. Jalal, the former women’s minister. “Women in Afghanistan are subject to the public mentality that they should be enslaved. Even if they are working outside [the home], they have to give their income back to the male. Even after the opportunities created by these past thirteen years, they are working for the males.”

Ms. Jalal blamed this state of affairs on the continued dominance
of Afghan society by old warlords and jihadi commanders, and she was forced out of office by the Afghan parliament in 2006 for expressing that view. “We met in secret in my private home to draft the EVAW law because we were afraid of sabotage from extremists and warlords,” she said. After the draft law was submitted to the Ministry of Justice, “I was recognized as someone who wanted to release Afghan women from fear and poverty, and by my doing this the extremists saw that I was really serious about freeing women and giving them a new life, so they removed MoWA [the Ministry of Women’s Affairs] from the cabinet.” The attempted downgrading of MoWA from the cabinet level aroused indignant opposition from the international community, and the hard-liners were forced to back off and allow the ministry to be restored to the cabinet; so instead the hard-liners successfully demanded that Ms. Jalal be ousted as the women’s minister.
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Despite the EVAW law’s shortcomings, its enactment and enforcement have been the international community’s greatest achievement on behalf of the women of Afghanistan, with the possible (and qualified) exception of girls’ schools. Yet the EVAW law only barely became law in Afghanistan and remains very much at risk today.
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It was passed by decree by President Hamid Karzai in 2009,
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after it became clear that it had no hope of being enacted by Afghanistan’s parliament, and the Americans put heavy pressure on Mr. Karzai to use his powers to circumvent the parliament.

The EVAW law made rape a criminal offense; in the Afghan penal code, it had been lumped together with family and social issues to be handled by traditional shariah-law remedies. When rape was prosecuted criminally, it was as the crime of adultery. If the rapist had committed adultery, so had the victim, and many rape victims in Afghanistan have gone to jail for their rapists’ crimes. Beating one’s wife was criminalized by the EVAW law, too; previously the courts had considered such cases only when the woman suffered grievous bodily harm or was killed. Often, even in those cases, prosecutions were not pursued, or if they were, penalties were slight.
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Under the new EVAW law, harmful or abusive traditional practices such as
baad
and
baadal
were forbidden, which both the Communists
and the Taliban had previously done. Under the EVAW law, forcing a woman to marry someone against her will was deemed a crime, as was “denial of relationship,” the indignity from which Zakia and Ali had fled.

Probably more important, the EVAW law decriminalized a host of actions that had been crimes and functioned to keep women in line. Accusations of running away from home, though not mentioned in the penal code, were commonly used against any female of any age who left her family without the permission of her husband, father, or brothers. The EVAW law forbade charging women or girls aged sixteen or over as runaways.

Afghanistan’s women indirectly have the Taliban to thank for the EVAW law; their excesses led to the international community’s determination to see Afghan women protected, and it was not lost on Western policy makers that many of those who replaced the Taliban, especially those old jihadis, were not much better when it came to women’s rights. The EVAW law repeatedly acted as a brake on the worst excesses of the Taliban’s successors, especially when the international community put its weight behind the law.

The Taliban era had brought the plight of Afghan women vividly to the attention of the American and European publics. They had watched in horror as the Taliban imposed their extreme interpretation of shariah law on Afghan women, banning them from education, closing all girls’ schools, prohibiting them from employment, and ordering them to stay in their own homes unless dressed in a full-length burqa and accompanied by a close male relative, a
mahram,
usually meaning a brother, father, son, or husband. After twenty years of civil war, confinement of women to their homes was a harsh requirement, since in many families the menfolk had been killed or disabled during those years and their widows had become the only source of support for their children.
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Ordering them to stay indoors was tantamount to a death sentence.

The Taliban enforcers from the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Vice prowled the streets of Kabul, beating women with sticks if they were not fully covered and properly accompanied outside the home.
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Sometimes they beat them just
for being outside the home at all. They beat men for transgressions as well, such as failing to grow a full, untrimmed beard or wearing Western clothing or listening to music on a radio in the car. But they reserved their greatest enthusiasm for punishing women. Women convicted of serious moral crimes would be taken to the National Stadium and, in front of a capacity crowd that had been rounded up and ordered to attend, stoned to death or shot in the head, always piously covered up by a robin’s-egg blue burqa as they sat in the dirt waiting for the end.
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One of the most publicized such cases was that of a mother of seven named Zarmeena, who was convicted by a Taliban court of murdering her abusive husband and whose execution was secretly filmed by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).
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Zarmeena’s children were in the stadium, accompanied by their dead father’s relatives; moved by the children’s piteous pleas for their mother’s life, their father’s family invoked the shariah-law provision allowing them to forgive her and exempt her from the death penalty. The Taliban refused and carried out the execution anyway. On the RAWA video, her children could be heard sobbing and crying “Mama!” as the Taliban executioner fired into Zarmeena with an AK-47 assault rifle at point-blank range.

So when the American government under George Bush went into Afghanistan to avenge the attacks of September 11, 2001, there was more than just support for the goal of destroying Al-Qaeda’s bases and the Taliban regime that tolerated and encouraged the extremists’ presence. There was a sense of relief that a regime that had so brutalized its women could finally be brought to an end. Few would have advocated an invasion on those grounds, but this was a welcome outcome. Once both the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were driven into Pakistan, there was little appetite among the European allies and, as time went on in the United States, for a continuing involvement in Afghanistan. Support for Afghan women and redressing the gender terrorism of the Taliban’s six-year-long regime was the one thing everyone could agree was a worthy cause.

After the American defeat of the Taliban, the Western nations
met in Bonn, Germany in early 2002 to agree on a plan to establish an interim government that would draft a new constitution and hold elections.
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From the beginning they made it clear to their Afghan partners that there was one redline more important than all others: gender equality.
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When a new constitution was drafted—by American scholars and legal advisers for the most part—it enshrined both gender equality and shariah law, a difficult cohabitation but one that other Islamic countries have negotiated successfully.

From the beginning it was a hard slog, as Western egalitarian concepts confronted the realities of Afghan patriarchy. In 2003 a constitutional
loya jirga
was convened at the encouragement of the Western powers to approve the new constitution.
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A
loya jirga
is a grand consultative assembly in which elders are invited from throughout the country to decide on major issues. It’s a venerable tradition in Afghanistan, from the days when most people were nomadic or seminomadic tribals who would meet to hash out issues like grazing rights or alliances against invaders. It was in some ways a quintessentially democratic institution, but there was a major problem with it: Traditionally, only men could attend, and mostly only old men. At American insistence, though, the 2003
loya jirga
did have women delegates, some of them extraordinarily outspoken. They were women who saw a unique, historic opportunity and summoned the courage to seize it. Few showed more grit than a feisty young woman named Malalai Joya, who had been chosen to represent the remote western province of Farah. Malalai stood up at the
loya jirga
and denounced the gathering as an assemblage of war criminals and warlords. “They are the most anti-women people in the society, who wanted to . . . who brought our country to this state, and they intend to do the same again,” she said. After a stunned silence, several of the men tried to attack her physically, and only intervention by United Nations guards prevented them from getting to her. The chairman of the
jirga,
Sibghatullah Mujadeddi, derided her as a Communist, which she was not—except from the old jihadi viewpoint that equated feminism with Communism.
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