Kabul, July 24: A few days after the Taliban were toppled in 2001 I was in Kabul. The city was jubilant and full of hope for the future, and I remember talking to some laughing teenage girls in the street. One was excited because she could now go back to school. Another sang terrible disco songs and showed me dance steps she had been practising for five years in secret. A third debated whether to take off her burka. “Is it safe enough yet?” she asked me. “For five years, I lived inside this prison.”
Eight years later I returned, but the Afghanistan I found was far from jubilant. Despite the money poured into reconstruction and development, it is one of the five poorest countries in the world. There is 40% unemployment – nearly 80% in some parts of the country. A third of children under five are malnourished. Life expectancy is 43 – and it is one of only three countries in the world where women die earlier than men.
I arrived to meet women before the presidential elections next month and to talk about a new law, which if brought in, could have drastic repercussions for women. The Shia Family Planning law was signed last March by President Hamid Karzai in an attempt, many believe, to appease powerful mullahs. The Afghan constitution allows Shias to have a separate family law from the Sunni majority based on traditional Shia jurisprudence, and some think the law is linked to the August elections and the Shia electorate who would have to abide by it (they could form up to 20% of the electorate).
The proposed law led to furious protests from women’s groups. It sanctioned marital rape and brought back Taliban-era restrictions on women by outlining when a woman could leave her house and the circumstances in which she has to have sex with her husband; Shia woman would be allowed to leave home alone “for a legitimate purpose” only which the law does not define, and could refuse sex with their husbands only when ill or menstruating.
Following international outrage, Karzai backtracked and said the law would be reviewed. This month it was amended and re-signed by the president, but has not yet been ratified by parliament. Human rights groups say it is unclear how much the amendments have done to improve the law. And the law has already achieved its aim – instilling fear and insecurity among an already traumatised female population.
Soraya Sobhrang, a human rights activist I meet in her Kabul office, says, “The law will affect all women if it goes through. It opens the door for other repressive laws to be passed, for Sunni Muslims as well as Shia.” A young doctor friend, Najeeb Shawal, says he is seeing more female patients who were depressed since news of the law emerged. “They have the kind of hopelessness that comes with knowing your life is incredibly repressed. And might become more so.”
On Mothers’ Day, I had sat with Seema Ghani in her home as she blew out candles on a small walnut cake. Her seven adopted children surrounded her – six girls and a boy – dancing, practising judo and lighting sparklers. “Dear Mother,” Seema read above the din from a card her children made. “We hope you are happy! Love from your children.”
Seema is 41, and a single mother. Born in Kabul, the daughter of a high-ranking army officer, she moved to London with her family during the Russian occupation. When the Taliban fell, she decided to return home. “I wanted to do something for my country,” she says. She worked for the Ministry of Finance setting up budgets; and ran a boutique hotel. Now she is a poet, management consultant, and runs her own childrens’ charity. A straightforward woman who gets what she wants, Seema is a rarity in Afghanistan. When she did not find the man of her dreams she adopted. “Because of the children, I am happy,” she says. “But the situation here for women is so tough. There are times when I have been severely depressed. And I have resources. What is it like for women who don’t have that?”
I first met Seema on the day President Karzai was in America, backtracking on TV about the Shia law. Her burst of colourful clothing – a purple kaftan, skinny jeans and high heels – was almost defiant in a city where women still scurry around in burkas. “I’m not a feminist or an activist either,” she says, ordering green tea. “But this law, and what is happening now in Afghanistan, leave me little choice.” She has been trying, on a grassroots level, to instill awareness, to raise a list of women who could enter the political arena. But in a population of illiterate and repressed women, it is not easy. “We don’t want this law,” she says quietly. “It gets into our bedrooms.”
Karzai’s initial (ridiculous) defence was that he had not read the law before signing it the first time. Most women here are cynical of his about-turn. “It’s an election year,” Seema says. Business developer Meena Sherzoy, 49, whom I meet a few days later, says, “What is he supposed to say to the west? It makes him look like a radical fundamentalist. ”
To see the women who will be worst affected by this law, I drove for 10 hours through rural Afghanistan to Bamiyan. The road to this, the least developed province, is unpaved, checkpointed and blighted by bandits and the Taliban. We pass miles of country where there is nothing but the vast earth and sky, mud houses, and everywhere, women – out working in fields, pregnant, holding the hands of children or walking in the rain. Most of the houses have no electricity and no running water. I don’t see many schools or clinics. But it does have the only female governor Afghanistan has seen since 2005.
Bamiyan is the home of the Shia Hazara, the third largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. I am surprised by the “city’s” remoteness because there has been a huge outcry here from the women over the law: demonstrations, protests on the radio, grass roots organisations very quickly coming together. I meet one of the protest leaders in a small restaurant overlooking the holes in the mountain left when the Taliban blew up the ancient Buddha statues there in 2001. Batool Mohammadi is 27, black-robed, and heavily pregnant. “The law does not fit with humanitarian law,” she says. Batool, a Hazara, comes from the generation of Afghan women born after the Soviet invasion and raised during the Taliban era. She has only known war, conflict and repression. The small window of triumph after the fall of the Taliban – who brutally repressed the Hazaras – has given her a taste of freedom and she is not ready to give it up. “In an area as traditional as Bamiyan, one of the major problems with this law is that it will stop the trend towards modernisation.” As Batool leaves, she says that when her baby is born in June, she wants him or her to enter a world moving towards equality, not repression.
The governor, Habiba Sarabi, is the former Minister of Women and as a Shia will have to obey the law if it is passed. She meets us in her sparse office, a grim, Soviet-style building set on a windswept plain. There are plates of nuts and fruits and the governor, looking exhausted, nibbles dried apricot. At 53, Sarabi is no-nonsense. She is a chemist by trade and speaks good English. The daughter of an illiterate mother who encouraged her daughter to read and write, she tells me when she was young she was mocked as she walked to school alone. Having struggled so hard it was particularly hard to see her own daughter, now 24, denied education under the Taliban. The family escaped to Pakistan and Sarabi worked on human rights and women’s projects.
On the new law, she tries to be diplomatic, but I can tell she is concerned: “Fortunately, women raised their voice.” She is confident (perhaps overly so) that the law will not go through. But later, at her residence, when she curls her stockinged feet under her, she admits the wider crisis. Bamiyan is one of the few success stories in Afghanistan: it is poppy-free, the government functions well, and as she points out, “It is the safest place in Afghanistan. The rule of law is important here.” She has improved the education and health services (instigating midwife programmes, for example, in a province that has one major hospital). But can this last? If, following elections, Karzai succumbs to the mullahs (who exercise huge political power in Bamiyan and the rest of the country), for how long will it be safe for women? Even Sarabi finally admitted that if the law is ratified, it would affect her too.
Women who have managed to cross gender boundaries seem in a state of shock over the law. Jamila Barekzai is a police officer whose female colleague was killed by the Taliban last year in Kandahar for daring to do a mans’ job. When I go to meet her at the Central Afghan Police Headquarters on the edge of Kabul, next to one of the biggest Shia mosques in the city, she is wearing her olive uniform and heavy black eyeliner. She was transferred from Kandahar last year to Kabul when she thought she would be killed too. She takes out her mobile phone and plays a recording of an unnamed Taliban telling her to stop working, “or you will be taught the lesson we taught your friend”. She says she was mainly frightened for her children and touches the gun at her hip.
Her face darkens when she mentions the new law. “The biggest problem facing women today in Afghanistan, aside from illiteracy, is the lack of support,” she says. “It is always the intention of men to keep women in their cages. To keep women down.” As I leave she adds, “women are strong here”, but she does not sound convinced.
Jamila’s role, advising other policewomen on gender issues, is not heavy field work – and I wonder if the government uses her as a fig leaf. I wonder the same when I meet a female general in the Ministry of Defence in Kabul, Khatol Mohammedzai. She is heavily made up for our meeting. A parachutist, she says she is used by the Afghan government during parades. I ask if she has ever been in combat. She seems surprised. “No. Of course not.” Technically, women received the right to vote in the early 1960s, and everyone talks about Kabul in the 1970s, when women wore miniskirts and were the smartest ones in the medical schools. But Afghanistan is scarred by decades of war and occupation. The fact that a law like the family planning law could even be conceived in 2009 – even if it did come through Iranian-influenced radical mullahs as many believe – is surprising to most Afghans.
“The speed of which this law has gone through [to the president] has shocked me” says Soraya Sobrhang, . “It’s not a law – it is theft.” In April, Sobrhang and some of her colleagues staged a protest. “Suddenly, about 200 students from the madrassa surrounded us.” The women were stoned – Sobrhang , a grandmother, was hit on the shoulder and nearly knocked to the ground. Their banners were torn as the angry men blocked them from moving towards the parliament. I keep thinking of this image – of the tiny grandmother and her brave colleagues surrounded by hissing madrassa students. Soraya says she is not afraid.
But other people are – for the future of their daughters. Back in Kabul, Seema Ghani organises a lunch for her friends – all powerful, emancipated women. It is true that they are a small class within Afghanistan, but they have very different backgrounds. Some were educated in the west; some lived in America. Some like Aziza Momman, who ran girls schools during the time of the Taliban, or Fahima Barati, who runs a school for dressmaking, hold traditional views. But they are united on one point: the law stuns all of them.
As they talk it sounds like the kind of banter I could hear at home in Paris. A middle- aged woman recounting how her husband left her for a younger woman; an overworked mum talking of her daughter resenting her job; a single woman complaining about finding a man in your 40s. Except these stories have a deeper resonance: the husband leaves his wife for a younger second wife; the daughter is embarrassed by her feminist mother who does not wear a burka and is threatened by the Taliban; the woman in her 40s complains that an Afghan man is happy to have a spirited intelligent lover, but when it comes down to it, “they want the virgin!” “The glass ceiling is very thick here,” admits Katrin Fakiri, “those who break it have to be exceptional.” And Meena Sherzoy, who runs her own business, says, “If we had female leadership, this law would not be going through . . . would not even be raised.”
Before I leave, I meet Hasina Syed Jouvenal, who at 27 is managing a fistful of different enterprises (including her latest, trying to import tomato hot-houses to be run by a women-only farm) and the mother of two small girls.
“Women can do anything,” she says brightly when we talk about the law – meaning that women can turn it around. “They make better managers. They are more trustworthy. And they have kind hearts. I am going to continue using them as managers because it is my way of moving women forward.” I am not surprised when I hear that Hasina is being touted as a young politician. But the law won’t affect her – she has a British husband.
When I leave, someone tells me the Taliban spring offensive has begun, American troops are pouring in, and President Karzai is beginning his political campaign. I keep thinking of Batool, the pregnant activist in Bamiyan, and her baby, and her life in 20 years’ time. If the law does not pass and women continue rolling on, she has a chance. If not, she might still be wearing a burka and never learn how to drive.
–Agencies–