The Lovers (40 page)

Malalai’s criticism was not overblown rhetoric. In addition to being warlords, many of those former jihadi leaders and
jirga
delegates were also, as many reports since have documented exhaustively, mass murderers, responsible for the massacres of civilians and prisoners of war during the civil-war and Taliban-war years.
²⁹

Malalai’s courageous stance at the
jirga
instantly made her a worldwide symbol of female defiance, but within a few years she became a symbol of another Afghan phenomenon: the exodus of its best people, especially among women. The old jihadi-era warlords who dominated the
loya jirga
tent continued to call for Malalai to be killed and eventually drove her from Afghanistan permanently. Now Malalai rarely returns to her country.
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American and European policy makers were aware of the challenges of bringing gender equality to Afghanistan post-Taliban. They invested generously in female empowerment, gender balance, women’s rights, and similar initiatives. They withheld money from ministries that did not employ enough women and would allow construction companies to bid on projects only if they promised to make as much as half of their workforce female. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) alone spent more than half a billion dollars on women’s programs in Afghanistan from 2002 through 2010, according to Nadia Shaherzad, the USAID gender-equality officer, interviewed in 2010. That did not count $4 billion spent by USAID on building girls’ or mixed-sex schools.
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The European Commission, European countries individually, and the World Bank all sank hundreds of millions more into supporting civil society, particularly female civil society. This all spawned a host of Afghan women’s groups that had never existed before but now could spring to life and find generous funding overnight.

The EVAW law was the preeminent success story of those efforts, but, paradoxically, for many women the law may have made life worse. Crimes defined as violence against women nearly doubled between 2009 and 2013, in nearly every category, including honor killings, rapes, spousal abuse, and child marriages; there was another dramatic increase in 2014 over 2013.
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Partly that has
been because women are emboldened to report abuses they previously would have suffered in silence. Something else is going on as well, though, says Soraya Sobhrang, head of women’s issues for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. “It’s just a male-dominated society, and now women are finding a voice and getting an awareness that they have some rights, and men feel threatened and react against that,” she said. Ms. Sobhrang also blames the increased violence against women on a widespread “culture of impunity,” along with insecurity and continued dominance by warlords in many rural areas. Of the six thousand EVAW cases reported in the Persian year 1392 (from March 2013 to March 2014), according to data collected by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs,
³³
fewer than 10 percent of them resulted in prosecutions; fewer than half of those prosecutions resulted in convictions.
³⁴
The human-rights commission, which also tracks violence against women, logged more than four thousand such cases in the first six months of 2014, a 25-percent increase over the previous year.
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No one thinks that anything more than a tiny percentage of cases of gender abuse ever get reported. Even those cases that have come into public view and received heavy press coverage sometimes remain unhappily resolved, such as the case of Gulnaz, the girl whose documentary was suppressed by European Union bureaucrats and who ended up marrying her rapist after the klieg lights went off.
³⁶
The solution for her, and her supporters in women’s groups who caved in on her case, was to simply rewrite her tragic history, remove the rape from it, and then take some sort of solace in the knowledge that her rapist-husband has so far not beaten her or their child.

Another major advance embodied in the EVAW law was to decriminalize the social conduct of women, but the law’s provisions for that are widely ignored. By the lowest estimates, more than half the female prisoners in the country’s main prison for women, Badam Bagh, in Kabul, are held for social or moral crimes, including significant percentages for nothing more than running away or “attempted
zina”
—that is, attempted adultery.
³⁷
Women are routinely arrested for running away, for going out alone, for being in the company of an unrelated male.

“I am fifty-seven years old, and I cannot live alone in this society,” Ms. Sobhrang said. No woman can. Hardly any single women live alone; a woman is either married or living in her father’s or brother’s house; there is no other alternative, even in the relative anonymity of a city as big as Kabul, which now has 5 million or more residents. The only exception is widows who do not have brothers or brothers-in-law to take them in. “Only two percent of Afghan women are independent economically. Women need a place where they can stand together so they can do things for themselves. Now women have new hopes and dreams, and they need to be reassured that there’s no barrier between their wishes and their achievements,” Ms. Sobhrang said.

Women in Afghanistan cannot legally travel on their own but must be accompanied by a
mahram,
and in practice they neither own nor inherit property. Their husbands can divorce them with the customary Islamic declaration, “I divorce you,” repeated three times, but a wife has little more than a theoretical right of divorce from her husband—one that is implemented only with great difficulty. If her husband leaves her, she has no rights to their home and he can demand the right to take the children, leaving her with neither housing nor family. If a woman’s husband dies, she and her children can be taken in by the husband’s family—if they agree—but in many cases the price of agreement will be that she is obliged to marry a brother of her late husband. Often that means becoming a second or third wife of that brother.

In rural areas and sometimes even in towns, a woman found alone outside her home often will be assumed to be committing or trying to commit
zina
and, if she cannot prove otherwise, jailed for attempted adultery or, if not a virgin, adultery. Unmarried women found alone by the police are commonly subjected to a forensic virginity test, at the office of the provincial medical examiner, though there is no requirement in the law for a single woman to prove her virginity on demand of the authorities. “I’ve seen cases where it has been done to girls as young as seven and women as old as seventy,” said Wazhma Frogh, who is the executive director of the Research Institute for Women, Peace & Security.
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“Since these cases usually
come up in the middle of the night, there is hardly ever a female doctor on duty—there are so few female doctors anyway—so it is a man who does the test, and it is very intrusive.”

It is a sad commentary on how bad things are for women that Rubina Hamdard, a lawyer for the well-respected Afghan Women’s Network,
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says the practice of virginity testing is in the best interests of a woman who encounters male authority. “Even if the girl who is found alone is eighteen or forty, there is no question of consent or whatever. Police would just say, ‘This is not the West or America’ [and force her to undergo the virginity test]. But it’s a good idea, because if she’s arrested, then police officials could commit adultery with her and claim the sex happened before.” In other words, an invasive virginity test is justified because it might protect them from a rape at the station house, which happens so commonly that even many of Afghanistan’s policewomen have been victimized sexually by their male colleagues. A recent United Nations survey, suppressed by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), showed that 70 percent of Afghan women police have reported sexual abuse on the job.
⁴⁰

Without the EVAW law, many of the other victimized Afghan women whose travails have been so well documented in recent years would have had little or no recourse, even if their cases had come to light. Lal Bibi, for instance, would have remained forcibly married to her rapist—if he even bothered with the formality of marriage, which he had really only used as a dodge to avoid a rape charge.
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Breshna, a ten-year-old girl from Kunduz Province, raped by a mullah in her mosque, faced an honor killing by her family and even the prospect of being forced to marry the mullah who’d raped her. Women’s advocates invoking the EVAW law pushed for a successful prosecution of the mullah and protected the girl (although Breshna remains at risk; her case is discussed in detail beginning on page 287). Soheila from Nuristan
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would still be languishing in prison, as would Niaz Mohammad, her husband, for the crime of love and the temerity to run away from an arranged marriage with a pedophile—a marriage that would itself be a serious felony in most countries. It is hard to know where Bibi Aisha
would have ended up if WAW had not taken her into its shelter in Kabul, but it is doubtful she would ever have had her amputated nose reconstructed. If it were not for EVAW, there probably would not have been shelters, for starters, and the women’s shelters could not have taken on the advocacy role they have so often ful-filled.
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Most of the women and girls they shelter are being rescued from EVAW-law offenses—crimes that had not been crimes before EVAW, such as child marriage—under protections that had not previously existed.

And of course there would have been no story of Zakia and Ali without the EVAW law. Shelters saved Zakia’s life twice. The EVAW law was cited as the justification for getting Ali out of jail, whatever President Karzai did behind the scenes. The threat of EVAW-based prosecution, as well as the intense public scrutiny, no doubt protected Zakia and Ali from her family’s retribution for as long as that attention has lasted.

Because of the EVAW law’s signal importance, the international community made it one of the Tokyo Framework’s benchmarks, named for agreements made in Tokyo in 2012 establishing that future development aid for Afghanistan would be contingent on progress in areas the donors felt were important. Under the Tokyo Framework,
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the EVAW law’s implementation was a benchmark to be considered a “hard deliverable” in international parlance, something concrete and quantifiable that had to be achieved if aid were to continue. The United Nations has been charged with issuing an annual report on EVAW-law enforcement and the condition of women in the country as part of that process.
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The Ministry of Women’s Affairs does the same, with an annual report,
⁴⁶
although it has strived to underplay the problem; the minister from 2006 until 2014, Husn Banu Ghazanfar, was never known as a champion of her gender. Violence against women? It happens in every country, is Ms. Ghazanfar’s explanation; there’s nothing unusual about Afghanistan.

In fact, in few other countries is violence against women so officially, culturally, legally, and traditionally tolerated. “Afghanistan is the worst place in the world to be a woman,” says Ms. Jalal,
⁴⁷
the
abused former women’s minister. “The most dangerous place in the world to live for women.” Women in Afghanistan are worse off by most measures than in all but a handful of countries in the world, and those are places like Chad, Malawi, and Djibouti, places that have little Western involvement and nothing like the massive financial aid Afghanistan has enjoyed since 2002. Even women in Saudi Arabia, by the United Nations Development Program’s gender-inequality index,
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are far better off than those in Afghanistan. Saudi women are not allowed by law to drive cars; Afghan women are, but few dare to do so.

Unlike other backward countries where women fare poorly, Afghanistan has had a huge international commitment to advancing equality of the sexes, and Afghanistan’s occasional success stories have an outsize impact far beyond its borders.
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Mr. Sarmast, the music-institute director, remembers attending a symposium in Bulgaria after his school’s mixed-gender orchestra gave a concert. At the end of his talk about empowering women, a young woman from a Saudi Arabian delegation raised her hand. “She stood and, after giving me a lot of applause, said, ‘What you are doing in Afghanistan? We wish even half of that could happen in our country.’ Imagine how that makes the authorities in Saudi Arabia feel. How can they tolerate to see change here?”

Women’s advocates were aware of the great stakes in trying to rescue Afghanistan’s women from abuse,
⁵⁰
and they pushed very hard in the first years of the Western involvement to see legislation such as the EVAW law enacted. Unfortunately, they were never able to succeed in getting it through the country’s parliament,
⁵¹
meaning that just as President Karzai had signed EVAW into law by decree, one of his successors could erase it with the stroke of a pen.

In 2013 a female member of parliament named Fawzia Koofi forced the EVAW law onto the floor of the lower house in an unsuccessful effort to get it passed into permanent law.
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For attempting to do that, Ms. Koofi was excoriated by her fellow women’s activists, so much so that she has been shunned by much of that community. They—and their supporters at the United Nations mission and in most Western embassies as well—felt that it was a
strategic disaster to bring the law to parliament, because if it came to a vote in anything like its present form, it would probably be defeated.
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That would allow conservatives to go on and override the president’s decree and have the law repealed. Ms. Koofi was accused of grandstanding to raise her personal profile on the back of the controversy; at the time she had also declared her intention to run for president of Afghanistan. “The single biggest blow to women’s-rights achievements was the presentation of the EVAW law to parliament,” said Ms. Sobhrang, referring to Ms. Koofi’s initiative. It just was not the right time to make such a risky move, she and many other women’s activists said.