The Lovers (44 page)

The two women’s activists in Kunduz were already under a lot of pressure in their community, and word that Breshna was going to be moved to Kabul only ramped that up. Her case had inflamed not only the mullahs in Kunduz but also the Taliban who dominated her village of Alti Gumbad, which is only a short drive outside
Kunduz city. Her family enlisted both Taliban insurgents and Afghan Local Police militiamen to threaten the women’s groups in Kunduz. Dr. Sarwari showed us a phone full of death-threat text messages from the ALP commander in Alti Gumbad. The family assumed that moving Breshna to Kabul meant that WAW was going to send her to America. “Her brother-in-law called and said it is [our] responsibility to prevent the Americans from taking her from here to Kabul and the U.S.,” said Dr. Sarwari. “People know this office as the Americans’ office, and they know it’s funded by Americans. They all think the shelter is an American office.” There isn’t a single American employee at any of WAW’s shelters, although much of the group’s funding does depend on grants from the American government.

“They’re constantly cursing us,” Dr. Sarwari said. “They say, ‘Once your American husbands leave Afghanistan, we will do what we want to you.’ They know where we live and how we live.”
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A month later, in June 2014, just when we thought that Breshna’s case could not possibly get any worse, the government ordered her returned to her family, to the parents and uncles who had plotted her murder. Dr. Sarwari called to give us the bad news, and she was distraught over the family’s triumph. At the time the order happened, Breshna was out of the family’s immediate reach. She had been taken to Kabul, but the CURE International Hospital there was unable to handle the complexity of surgery that her fistula injury required, so WAW arranged to quietly send her to India to have it done. By July she was back and staying in their shelter in Kabul to recuperate when the court ordered her returned to her family. “She’s a lively, spunky girl,” said Kimberley Motley,
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an American lawyer who does legal work for the group, through her practice in Kabul. “She’s very strong to even have survived this.”

In the statement she made to prosecutors when they interviewed her after her rape, Breshna gave them an earful about what she thought should be done to her assailant. “Because Mullah Mohammad Amin has raped me brutally and inside the mosque, I ask the government to give him the harshest punishment, which is stoning, and if stoning is not possible, then I ask the government
to do some kind of operation and make him a eunuch so he should not repeat this with someone else and so it becomes a lesson for him and others,” the prosecutors quoted the girl as saying.

“The girl was in constant contact with her mother and last time her uncle,” Dr. Sarwari said. “The family were complaining that she was not in Afghanistan, so I sent her uncle’s number to the office in Kabul so she could talk to them. She talked to her mother and said she was happy there in the shelter but the mother cannot tell the male members of her family that she is happy there and does not want to come back. And she misses her mother. On the ride down from Kunduz to Kabul, she kept saying she wished her mother were with her.

“She has been traumatized, and we don’t want to tell her. She doesn’t know what is waiting for her if she goes back to Kunduz,” Dr. Sarwari said. “On the way from Kunduz, she said she remembered after her father found out she had been raped, he started beating her mother a lot. He even beat her at the hospital. He was blaming her for what had happened to Breshna and to the entire family and telling her that ‘I was a farmer, I was working outside. You were in charge of everything at home. How did you let her go to the mosque? Why didn’t you follow her and monitor everything?’”

No one in the shelter had the heart to tell the girl her family had been plotting to kill her. She was probably too young to have realized the import of her mother’s words, at her bedside the day of the rape, that she would be warm and comfortable in the grave; perhaps the girl wept along in empathy with her mother’s grief; perhaps she thought she was going to die of her injuries. It might never have occurred to her that she was in mortal danger from her own family, or if it did, she had since suppressed the memory.

“That
arbakai
commander, Commander Nezam, he came with all the elders from Alti Gumbad to the governor’s office and told the governor unless the shelter brings the girl back, they will attack the shelter,” Dr. Sarwari said. Eager to keep the peace in a community where control seesawed between insurgents and pro-government militias, the governor supported their demand, and in turn prosecutors and police all signed off on Breshna’s return to her
family, and the father came to Dr. Sarwari at the Kunduz shelter and delivered a formal letter signed by the court demanding her return. “He said he would erect a tent in front of the shelter and live there and also said the villagers are after his entire family and want to kill him, his wife, and son because their family has brought shame to the village,” she said.

“After he left, I got a call from Commander Nezam. He was shouting and yelling and accused me of selling the entire village’s
nang
and
namoos,
dignity and honor, to the Americans. He demanded I give him the girl. I told Commander Nezam that he is not a relative and I would never give the girl to him. I told him that unless Breshna’s father asks us to bring her to a court, we will not give her to anyone else. I also told him that there is no way we will give Breshna back to the family, because we found out that her uncle came specifically from Iran to kill this girl. He got so angry he told me he would destroy me. I said I’m a woman and he shouldn’t display his masculinity to me. If he wanted to prove his masculinity, he should show it to a man. He texted me that if I want to live, I should not come out of my house. I left my home and am living with my parents now.”

Then Dr. Sarwari had an unexpected blow. Her women’s-ministry colleague, Nadera Geyah, had decided she’d had enough, not just because of the Breshna case but also because of threats she was getting from the Taliban in another case of abusive treatment of women and because the insurgents had recently taken control in her own home area, the district of Dashte Archi. “She had been under tremendous pressure a long time—the girls’ madrassa in Kunduz and many other cases. She couldn’t bear the pressure. She moved with her entire family to Kabul. The women’s ministry helped her to get a new job in Parwan.
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“She is gone, and now I’m the only person between all these men and the women in our shelter. I don’t know what is going to happen to these girls
¹¹
if I leave as well,” Dr. Sarwari said. “I’m so confused and so tired of all the pressure. I don’t think I’ll be able to bear it for very long. If I had the financial resources, I would have left the province a long time ago.”

Women for Afghan Women had no choice but to return Breshna to her legal family. The law was on the family’s side; they had never been convicted of doing violence against their daughter or of conspiring to do so.

When we called to speak to the head of the Criminal Investigation Division in Kunduz again, Colonel Talash, the one who had promised that Breshna would never be returned to a family who had plotted openly to kill her, he was unavailable except through a spokesman. “We handed the raped girl to her family based on her consent and will,” said police spokesman Sayed Sarwar Hussaini. “The girl’s father demanded from the police the return of his daughter, and with the approval of the attorney general’s office we did that. We also got guarantees from the girl’s family that they will not harm her.” In addition, a maternal uncle of the girl as well as a fellow villager pledged their small businesses as bonds guaranteeing that the family would not harm the girl. “It is the police’s job to make sure everyone is safe, and we have a responsibility to protect the girl,” said Mr. Hussaini. “Unless we were sure, we would never hand her back to her family. If anything happens to her, we will find the guarantors and investigate. They wouldn’t have given guarantees if they had any intention to harm her.”

Dr. Sarwari did win a promise from the family to allow social workers from WAW to regularly monitor the girl’s safety and be allowed to speak to her periodically. WAW asked Kim Motley
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to get involved on Breshna’s behalf. Kim managed to persuade the attorney general’s office in Kabul to transfer the mullah’s rape case from Kunduz to Kabul, where it would be much harder for local power brokers in Kunduz to interfere on the mullah’s behalf. She was able to do that, ironically enough, because of the lack of rape as an offense in the Afghan penal code. In rural areas, Kunduz among them, local judges were ill versed in the EVAW law, or downright antagonistic toward it as un-Islamic, and unlikely to invoke it. Kim was able then to persuade the prosecutor in charge of the EVAW unit, Qudsia Niazi, to order the mullah’s case transferred to Kabul so the rape could be prosecuted under EVAW law. She was not, however, able to stop the girl’s return to her family.

“She cried every single day she was in the shelter, and she’s ten, and she wanted her mother,” Kim said. “They’re trying, trying to protect, protect, protect, and you can’t blame them for that—they do a great job of it. But at some point you can’t keep the girl forever from her natural parents, or at some point you’d be kidnapping her yourself.”

Later that summer Dr. Sarwari called to report that Breshna’s father had decided not to allow the girl to travel to Kabul to testify against Mullah Amin. She looked into the matter further and talked to a lawyer from a local human-rights group who had visited the mullah in prison before he was moved out of Kunduz. The lawyer said he had worked out a deal with the family. The charges against him would be dropped, he would marry Breshna, and as compensatory payment to her family the mullah would give his thirteen-year-old niece in
baad
to one of their menfolk. In other words, an innocent thirteen-year-old as well as the victim herself would end up paying for the mullah’s crime. “I asked the head of the prison if there was such a deal, and he said the mullah had told them that, too,” Dr. Sarwari said. “The father said he will not allow the girl to testify. We will not let it go, though. We will push the police and the prosecutors to continue the case.” Since the mullah had already confessed to his crime, the girl’s testimony was not necessary for the prosecution to proceed, though it would help—particularly in convincing the court of the seriousness of the crime and the youthfulness of the victim. With her head office’s permission, Dr. Sarwari offered to pay the travel expenses for the girl and her family to attend the court. The father was dubious, but as the case became nationally notorious, he eventually gave in to public pressure to agree to let her testify.

“It doesn’t surprise me,” said Wazhma Frogh, the women’s-rights activist, reacting to that situation. “In so many cases, the women are forced to marry the rapists.” Even more often the rape victim is charged with adultery, as is the rapist, as if each party had committed an offense of equal severity. “Due to the lack of a definition of rape in the penal code, rape victims are charged with
zina
and further revictimized as some of them are forced
to get married to their rapists,” said a report on implementation of the EVAW law by UNAMA in December 2013.
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“This ugly crime is an everyday occurrence in all parts of the country. It is a human rights problem of profound proportions. Women and girls are at risk of rape in their homes and in their communities, in detention facilities and as a result of traditional harmful practices to resolve feuds.”

“Her life is over if she’s forced to marry the mullah,” said Dr. Sarwari.

With WAW and Kim Motley, among others, pushing the case, it finally came to trial on October 25, 2014. Mullah Mohammad Amin was led into the judge’s chambers with chains around his waist but his hands unshackled;
¹⁴
he kept his eyes skyward and under his breath recited verses from the Koran. He was a short, stocky, black-bearded man, about thirty years of age. For reasons that were never made clear, Judge Mohammad Suliman Rasuli had decided to hold the trial in his chambers rather than in one of the empty courtrooms nearby. All the seats were taken by the time they brought the mullah in, so he was forced to kneel on the floor in his shackles.

Breshna covered her face with her veil and looked away from him, and underneath the head covering her breathing was troubled and labored, and she soon broke into sobs. Purely by chance she was seated next to me. In person her extreme youth was obvious. No more than four feet tall, and perhaps fifty pounds in weight, the girl was still plainly a child in every way, including her tiny voice. She seemed so alone, although one of the women’s advocates was next to her. Her father and uncle stood farther back in the room and never looked at her during the proceeding.

The mullah had two defense attorneys, whose case consisted of his testimony that he was sorry for what he had done but that the sex with the girl was consensual and he should therefore receive the shariah-law penalty for adultery of a lashing with a whip. The lawyers did not mention the number of one hundred lashes normally stipulated, since that is a devastating and often crippling punishment.

“Is it true you raped the girl?” Judge Rasuli asked the mullah.

“I need to go to the doctor. I’m not feeling well,” the mullah replied.

The judge pointed out his confession, parts of which the prosecutor, from the EVAW unit of the attorney general’s office, had already read into the record. “Did you make this up? Did you commit adultery with the girl? Did you rape the girl?”

“I was beaten, I was tortured, they even made me eat shit, and they forced me to give my confession. I was teaching the children, before breakfast, and it wasn’t like that in the confession.”