The Lovers (9 page)

As weeks turned to months, though, she grew disenchanted. “At first I was happy at the shelter,” Zakia said. “Later on I realized they couldn’t resolve my case.” She began to ask for permission to leave the shelter so she could be with Ali. Technically, women’s shelters are not jails, but in practice they function that way by agreement between the courts and the police, women’s groups, and the women themselves. Shelter officials repeatedly convened a committee of representatives from these groups to discuss whether Zakia could be safely discharged, as she requested.

“The committee members said, ‘If we allow her to leave, where would she go?’” Najeeba said. One or another of Zakia’s family members were always waiting outside the shelter or, if they went to court, outside that building. The committee repeatedly turned down her request.

Such groups are one of the laudable outcomes of Afghanistan’s landmark Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) law—but as Zakia found, they are also examples of its limitations. When the EVAW law was enacted in 2009, it was hailed as a model of legislation on behalf of oppressed women in many underdeveloped countries. At first glance the Afghan constitution adopted after the fall of the Taliban had already admirably enshrined the rights of women.
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Written with expert help from American and European scholars, it declared that women should have equal rights with men, that a girl became a legal adult with full civil rights at age eighteen, that no girl could be married before the age of sixteen and would have to consent to any marriage, and so forth. The problem was, there were no penalties decreed for violating those declarations of equality and no enabling legislation was enacted to, for instance, penalize a father who
married his daughter off at age fourteen or beat his wife because she glanced at another man. Under the Afghan penal code, even rape was not a crime—unmentioned in civil and criminal law, it was treated as a family matter, under the purview of shariah law religious courts. Similarly, shariah law was all that applied if a husband beat his wife, even if he beat her to death; more often than not, the shariah court would approve of his crime if it was based on his belief that some transgression of his patriarchal rights had taken place.

The EVAW law changed that. Rape, wife beating, and forced and child marriage were given criminal penalties. Many customary practices were outlawed; one of those was what the EVAW law called “denial of relationship,” the practice of families controlling a person’s choice of spouse. Prior to EVAW, Zakia in effect had no legal right to choose to marry Ali; that choice belonged to her father alone, no matter her age. Prior to EVAW, the lovers would have been jailed and prosecuted for attempted adultery at the least, and adultery if there was a suspicion of sexual relations. Adultery was subject to penalties ranging from flogging to ten years in jail, or even to death by stoning.
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Without EVAW women’s shelters would not have the role they’ve come to have, in protecting women from violence that had not even been a crime prior to the passing of the law, and without shelters like the one in Bamiyan, Zakia would have long since perished. If there is one thing more than any other that made the story of Zakia and Ali possible, it was the EVAW law. In a way they had the Taliban to thank for it. The suppression of women during their six years in power had outraged most of the world, and after their fall the promotion of decent treatment for Afghan women was a cornerstone of international policy toward Afghanistan. EVAW was a direct outcome of Western intervention and a response to the excesses of the Taliban regime that preceded it.

Nonetheless, Zakia and Ali were lucky to have survived for as long as they had. EVAW is also an imperfect law, particularly when it comes to implementation in a fiercely patriarchal society and in backward, rural places where most judges have no law degree or
any other legal qualification; many still believe that the world is flat and that it is nonsense or blasphemy to suggest otherwise.

In another Hazara community a year and a half before, in Ghazni Province, a sixteen-year-old girl named Sabira was lashed a hundred and one times after being accused of adultery—although she later was proven to still be a virgin. Her only crime was to have been alone in a shop with a man she said had raped her. She was apparently too inexperienced to understand what constituted rape.
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EVAW law meant nothing in her defense, local judges refused to apply it, and the mullahs and former jihadi commanders who ordered the lashing were never punished, even after a nationwide outcry.

As long as there were no judges in Bamiyan willing to sanction Zakia’s family for staking out the Bamiyan shelter and the courts, implicitly but clearly threatening violence against her if she got out, the limitation of EVAW law there was just as clear. Only the intervention of people like Fatima Kazimi, the head of the women’s ministry in Bamiyan, and shelter officials protected her from her family’s retribution.

Despite the threat they posed to her, Zakia’s own family members had visiting privileges, and her mother and father came frequently, as did her sisters. “They would urge me to come home and would say, ‘This is not good, this is not fair that you are here,’” Zakia said. “They would not curse me, just try to make me understand. They would tell me, ‘Don’t be afraid of us. We’re not going to do anything to you.’ But I knew they couldn’t force me to come home with them, so this was the way to get me to come home, and I knew what they would do to me. One hundred percent, they would kill me even before they got me home. Before coming to the shelter, just for having an affair they were threatening and beating me. Now that I had done this big thing by running away, I knew they would do something terrible to me,” she said.

Zakia’s case went to court several times, where the judges, who were all Tajiks like Zakia’s family, would insist that she could marry Ali only with her father’s consent. Ali’s family claimed that Zaman and his sons had bribed the judges to side with them, and
Zaman claimed that Anwar and his sons had bribed the women’s ministry, the police, and the governor’s office to support Zakia. Possibly all of them were right; corruption is pervasive in Afghanistan, particularly in Bamiyan. Still, both sides would have been taking bribes to act in line with their ethnic allegiances.

Like most Afghan judges, the chief judge of the Bamiyan Province Primary Court, Judge Attaullah Tamkeen, was not a law-school graduate.
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His only legal experience was the study of shariah law at Balkh University, according to one of his legal colleagues on the panel that heard Zakia’s case, Judge Saif Rahman, who also had no law degree. Some Afghan judges are even less educated, being only graduates of madrassas, religious schools where the students spend most of their time learning to recite the entire Koran from memory. In a society that reveres its male elders, most judges are old, and whatever legal knowledge they have predates Afghanistan’s current constitution and any legislation of the last decade that gave women some rights, in particular the EVAW law. If the judges had a passing acquaintance with Afghanistan’s constitution, they would know that Zakia was legally an adult and entitled to choose her own spouse. EVAW law makes her rights more explicit and criminalizes her family’s acts, although “denial of relationship” is probably the least prosecuted of all crimes in Afghanistan.

“In any society it’s not just the law that shapes everything,” said Rubina Hamdard, a lawyer with the Afghan Women’s Network who followed this case closely. “It’s the behavior of the judges and how they implement the law. Here in Afghanistan and in this case especially, it’s true, judges are the limitation of the law. Judges resolve runaway cases by sentencing the girls to one year in jail even though they’re over eighteen and although there isn’t a law against running away—but there is a law against penalizing running away.”

Backed up by the Bamiyan court, her family’s persistence finally wore Zakia down, and on February 2, 2014, she was taken out of the shelter to meet her mother, her father, and three of the judges, along with half a dozen elders from their village. Their version is that she had petitioned to be released to them; her version
is that she had petitioned to be released on her own because she was eighteen. At the hearing, Judge Tamkeen had called in her family members and worked out an agreement. They pledged not to kill or otherwise harm her for having run away from home, and they would drop any charges against her (this court was still treating running away as if it were a crime). Her father, her uncle, and several elders all put their thumbprints on a document approved by Judge Tamkeen, confirming the agreement to take her home from the shelter and not to harm her, and her consent to that. Called before Judge Tamkeen, surrounded by her obviously angry relatives, Zakia agreed.

Pledges like the one signed by Zakia’s family have dubious value. For all the talk about Afghan honor, the concept of honor as it is applied in Afghanistan has nothing to do with keeping one’s word, especially when it comes to promising not to kill a woman.

Gul Meena was an eighteen-year-old who had been married off as a prepubescent child to an abusive husband. She ran away with a neighbor, who became her lover, a man named Qari Zakir, fleeing their village in Kunar Province, in 2012; they managed to marry on the grounds that her previous marriage was illegal. Somehow her brother and father found her a year later and visited on the pretense of reconciling with her.
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When they left, Mr. Zakir lay dead in his bed, his head nearly severed from his neck with a knife. Ms. Meena lay grievously wounded in the next bed, her head mangled by fifteen blows from an ax; police were seeking the brother for personally carrying out the attack. Such ultraviolence is often a distinguishing characteristic of honor killings
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in Afghanistan. They are rarely “clean” kills, and instead reveal the depth of hatred and passion aroused by the woman’s transgression. By some miracle and thanks to the work of the doctors at the hospital in Jalalabad, Gul Meena managed to survive; sympathetic journalists and aid workers donated money to help finance her care and pay for medication and food,
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since she had no family left that would do so.

It is common for families to resort to subterfuge to get runaway women back. In a village in Dashte Archi District in Kunduz,
in 2010, a twenty-five-year-old man named Khayyam and a nineteen-year-old woman named Siddiqa wanted to marry, but the woman’s family had already promised her to someone else. The couple fled to Kunar Province, but emissaries from both families came to them to persuade them that all was forgiven and they could return to their village to be married properly. Instead, when they got there, the entire male population of the village turned out to watch the local Taliban commander pronounce them guilty of adultery and sentence them to death by stoning. They were both put in separate large holes while their neighbors and family members began chucking stones at them. Interviewed later, Nadir Khan, one of the villagers, did not object to the stoning, though he said that he did not himself throw stones. As it began, “They said, ‘We love each other no matter what happens,’” he related.
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The stoning was enthusiastic, and some of the villagers picked up rocks so heavy they were hard to lift, pummeling the couple from close range. The evidence of the crowd’s enthusiasm for the executions was clear from video recordings made on several villagers’ cell phones, copies of which began circulating nationally on social-media sites.
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Siddiqa was seen sinking slowly to her knees and then, after being hit on the head by one especially large stone, collapsing to the bottom of the pit they had put her in, apparently unconscious; her agony was obscured from view by the blue burqa she wore. When she recovered and tried to crawl out of the pit, one of the men shot her three times in the head with his AK-47. Her lover, Khayyam, could not be seen in the video, as so many of his neighbors were crowded so closely around him; he was stoned to death in minutes.
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Although the stonings were carried out by the Taliban, after the village later fell into government hands, the Afghan police were reluctant to prosecute most of the perpetrators, despite abundant video evidence of their apparently willing involvement in the crime.
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Like any young woman in Afghan society, Zakia well knew what awaited her if she went astray, but it was also hard for her to believe that those closest to her could become her killers, and she said that she vacillated from wanting desperately to believe their
assurances to knowing she was lost if she did. “They pressured me to make me say that I wanted to go with my parents. I had to say that. I had no way to say no,” Zakia said.

Judge Tamkeen took her aside and gave her a lecture about ethnic loyalty. “Do not marry that boy, or you will dishonor me and our entire ethnic group,” Judge Tamkeen said, according to Zakia’s account. Like most of the judges in Bamiyan, he was Tajik and a Sunni Muslim. Ali as well as Fatima Kazimi, the head of the women’s ministry in Bamiyan, and most of the other officials in Bamiyan including police were all Hazaras and Shia Muslims.

None of the representatives from the women’s shelter were present during that hearing—Najeeba Ahmadi, the shelter head, had gone to Kabul on personal business and returned only toward the end of the day, and Fatima Kazimi had not been informed of it. Late in the day, after hours of pressure by the crowd of officials and family, Zakia agreed to put her thumbprint on the document consenting to her return to her family. Najeeba had arrived by then and was told of the agreement; she stalled for time, saying it was too late in the day, there was paperwork to do before she could legally release Zakia, and they should all come back in the morning. She spent the night working the phones, alerting other women’s leaders and sympathetic officials to what was about to happen.