The Lovers

by Rod Nordland

  After the Bamiyan courtroom melee, a furious Judge Tamkeen issued an order suspending Fatima Kazimi and Aziza Ahmadi from their jobs. He even ordered Fatima’s arrest for questioning by the attorney general’s office. “The attorney general asked us to bring her in for interrogation,” said Bamiyan provincial police chief General Khudayar Qudsi. “But there is no basis for such action, so we will not recognize such requests.” The governor simply told police to ignore the order, and Fatima continued to go to work.12

  Zakia was safe back in the shelter, but her problem was no closer to being solved. Fatima acceded to Ali’s request to be allowed to visit Zakia at the shelter, something normally not allowed, and Fatima claimed later she knew he would smuggle in a telephone but looked the other way when he did. By then Zakia and Ali were both experts in clandestine calling, and they began plotting her escape.

  There was no longer any reason to stay in the shelter; as far as the lovers could see, it offered no solutions, only a temporary safety that could end anytime without warning. The judges and Zakia’s family had the weight of Afghan social custom and practice on their side and the potential authority of the central government behind them. Even many of Ali’s fellow Hazaras disapproved of the couple’s actions.

  They were also well aware of the many examples of the fate awaiting an Afghan woman who goes astray and is returned to an angry family. “One hundred percent, they would kill me,” Zakia had said—and who could know her own family better than one of its daughters? Had Fatima not intervened to prevent Zakia from going back home with her family, she might have ended up like Amina, a teenage girl from northern Baghlan Province, who was either fifteen or eighteen years old.13 The daughter of a man named Khuda Bakhsh, Amina fled from her family’s home when her father proposed to marry her to a much older man in their village in Tala Wa Barfak District.14 Police found her wandering in the bazaar in the provincial capital of Pul-e-Kumri, asking people how to find the women’s-ministry offices. She was arrested, essentially, for being a woman alone.

  The police bypassed the jail and took her directly to the provincial women’s ministry, on March 20, 2014—the day before Zakia escaped her shelter, in fact—and handed her over to Uranus Atifi, head of the legal department; she was put in a shelter in Pul-e-Kumri and stayed there for the following month. Then a member of the provincial council, Samay Faisal, called Ms. Atifi and said that Amina’s brother and uncle had come to Pul-e-Kumri and wanted to take the girl home. Mr. Faisal offered to vouch for them, she said, so she brought the family in, and they all signed guarantee papers promising not to harm the girl if she came home and not to force her to marry the fiancé she had rejected.

  “Before handing her over to her family, we talked to Amina in private and asked her if she wanted to go back to her home,” Ms. Atifi said. “She said that she did want to go back, because she didn’t want her case to get bigger and create more problems.” Ms. Atifi took the precaution of videoing the family’s pledges not to hurt the girl and the girl’s consent to return. Still, Ms. Atifi was worried, and she got the brother’s phone number and called him to speak to Amina while they were driving back.

  “That same night I called her at eight P.M., and I talked to her and asked her if she was all right. She told me she was and that they were still driving. At ten P.M. I called them again, but this time I couldn’t get through,” Ms. Atifi said.

  The next morning Ms. Atifi called the brother, and he coolly related to her that a group of nine armed men wearing masks had stopped their car and dragged Amina out and shot her to death but harmed no one else. The family had not bothered to report the crime to the police. The brother seemed to her suspiciously calm about his sister’s murder.

  No one believed the family’s story that the masked men must have been relatives of the jilted fiancé. If that were the case, skeptics asked, why wouldn’t the outraged fiancé’s relatives have killed the brother, uncle, and cousin who were there, too, and who were supposedly returning the girl to her home and canceling her engagement?

  “You know, if a husband sees his wife in bed with a stranger and kills her, he gets one year in prison at most,” said Shahla Farid, a female professor of law who is on the board of the Afghan Women’s Network. “If she kills her husband for the same thing, she can be executed. That’s right there in the Afghan penal code.”15 More likely the husband would not be prosecuted in such a case or, if prosecuted, get anything more than a toke punishment.16

  “I believe the two families reached an agreement, but I’m not sure,” said Khadija Yaqeen, the director of women’s affairs in Baghlan Province. “We don’t care what deal or interfamily agreement is made or will be made. Someone was killed, and there has to be an investigation so that justice is done in Amina’s case.” As in so many similar ones, that apparently never happened.17

  In Bamiyan nearly two months went by after the court hearing. In the end Zakia’s father forced matters to a head by formally requesting that the court in Bamiyan transfer Zakia’s case to Kabul. There, he thought, he would get a better reception, since police and government officials in the capital would not be Hazaras but Tajiks or Pashtuns, and if a judge ordered her returned to the family, the police would obey. “We talked with the girl and got her consent to transfer her case to Kabul,” said Zaman. Zakia of course said she gave no such consent and that the impending transfer precipitated her decision to escape, which she did the night before it was scheduled.

  Coming so soon before the transfer, the elopement, Zaman felt, had to have been staged by women’s-ministry officials. “We were not even allowed to meet her in person, so we talked to her on the phone and got her consent,” Zaman said. “She agreed to come home. She is not guilty at all. It is the women’s director, who thought she might be in trouble due to her involvement in the case, who decided to help them escape. Otherwise how can a girl from a shelter which is guarded by police18 escape? It must be direct involvement of that woman and others who arranged her escape.” Fatima Kazimi and Najeeba Ahmadi denied Zaman’s claims, as did Ali and Zakia later on.

  Unknown to them all, however, Zaman’s appeals to move the case to Kabul had nothing to do with the impending transfer. Shukria Khaliqi, who was then a lawyer with the group Women for Afghan Women (WAW), had heard about the case and formally requested that it be moved to the capital, with the approval of women’s-ministry officials in Kabul and women’s advocates in the attorney general’s office. In Kabul they thought they could find a court with judges who were lawyers and who had a passing acquaintance with the law. Shukria was convinced she could win the case for the couple. Then, although they would still be at risk of attack from Zakia’s family, there would be no legal impediment to their marriage and no justification for keeping Zakia in a shelter.

  Before WAW could reach Zakia to tell her all this, however, the couple was already on the run. Zakia’s father pressed kidnapping charges against Ali, so they were fugitives not only from her family’s retribution but from the law as well. They were together, but as far as the Afghan police were concerned—and that included the police in Bamiyan—they were wanted criminals who needed to be hunted down. Fellow feeling among Hazaras goes only so far; a woman on the run would always be in the wrong in the view of Afghan authority of whatever ethnic background.

  Once Zakia and Ali had escaped, however, they also became heroes to many Afghans, especially to women and young people. Najeeba Ahmadi of the Bamiyan shelter, while insisting she had no role in Zakia’s escape, nonetheless applauded her at the time it happened. “Her action shows that everyone has the right to marry according to their own will. She has tried to achieve her own wishes. Her resistance and bravery are a good example for all those women and girls who want to protect their rights. When women resist for their rights, they have the ability to achieve their goals. I don’t believe Zakia has done anything wrong. Her actions are admirable, and wherever she is, I wish her the best of luck and success in her life.”

  Zakia and Ali themselv
es had modest goals. They knew that most couples who eloped were usually caught, with terrible consequences. They never expected to get very far but were determined to have some real time together while they could, even if it meant death for both of them.

  4

  A RABBI AMONG THE MULLAHS

  The e-mail from Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on March 25, 2014, was enigmatic and urgent. “I just heard very important info about the case. Can we speak please?” Shmuley was among hundreds of readers who had gotten in touch with me after I wrote about the plight of Zakia and Ali in the New York Times. At the time of that first article,1 Zakia was on month four or five of her stay at the Bamiyan Women’s Shelter, her disastrous court hearing was behind her, and Ali was mooning around the valley, trying to figure out an escape plan.

  Many of those readers wanted to help the couple; Rabbi Shmuley was just a bit more pushy than most, and he now had the personal e-mail address and phone number I had given him, so he was not about to let up. Somewhat wearily I called him back, because I knew he wouldn’t rest until I had. Part of me had given up on Zakia and Ali after I wrote that first story; I just didn’t see how their story could end well, unless the then-president, Hamid Karzai, decided to step in and resolve it for them by decree. He was quite capable of doing this had he been interested, but in this case any interest he had was bound to be negative. The earnest and well-meaning efforts of a rabbi from New Jersey were not going to sway the president of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, a country where most other faiths are forbidden, the only consecrated Christian church is a small chapel inside the Italian embassy, and the lone synagogue has but one surviving congregant. Plus, at that time in his administration President Karzai was scarcely on speaking terms with American officials, despite his country’s dependence on American aid.2 So, not expecting much, I called Shmuley’s number in North Jersey from our bureau in Kabul.

  Shmuley’s assistant put me straight through, and the rabbi got right to the point, addressing me, as he always had in our many previous calls, as if we were old friends. “Rod, she escaped.”

  “Who?”

  “Zina, Zophia, what was her name?”

  “Zakia?”

  “Yes, she escaped, a couple nights ago. I just heard about it.”

  “Who from?”

  “Fatima told me.”

  “Really?”

  I didn’t know that Fatima Kazimi, the women’s director from Bamiyan, was in touch with Rabbi Shmuley; he was full of surprises and, as I would see, quite determined. Fatima was the reason I knew about Zakia and Ali—and by many accounts, in particular her own, the only reason Zakia was not already dead.

  The whole affair of Zakia and Ali had come to my attention only a couple of months earlier, when, on February 9, Fatima Kazimi had emailed every journalist working in Afghanistan for major American publications. She dictated the e-mail through her English-speaking son and sent it to me by clicking on my byline on NYTimes.com:

  Dear Mr. Nordland:3

  I’m Fatima Kazimi, Bamyan Director of Department of Women’s Affairs (DoWA), the provincial branch of Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MoWA.) We are the lead protector/defender of women’s rights in Bamyan province, Afghanistan.

  I just go straightly to the point which is the case of a girl (Tajik ethnicity) and a boy (Hazara ethnicity) that fled from their houses and came to Bamyan Department of Women’s Rights (DoWA) and Bamyan Independent Human Rights Commission for the sake of safety, protection and to finally make their dream a reality, marriage. We follow up this case from its inception about three months ago, and videotaped the confession and speeches of the lovers.

  As the marriage of different ethnicity in Afghanistan and especially in Bamyan is counted as a taboo, the girl’s family insisting in their daughter’s return as well as so many other hands that get involved in this case.

  As the girl doesn’t want to return to her family, and the fact that it is involved a high risk of girl’s murder if she gets back (as we saw in previous cases), the DoWA and other women’s rights protector including the Governor Office, Independent Human Rights Commission and Civil Society Forum continues their advocacy for this lovers.

  However, instead of supporting and protecting women’s rights in Bamyan, the Provincial Court has ordered my suspension and two others from our job and prosecution just because we are following this case so closely and the FACT THAT MOST OF THE JUDGES in provincial court are from Tajik ethnicity.

  You can contact Bamyan Governor Office, and the Independent Human Rights Commission to verify this information and plenty of other information that we have. I was wondering if you broadcast this news as you will protect the life of this couple and the fact that we are being threatened to death.

  I’m looking forward to hearing from you,

  Best regards.

  Fatima Kazimi

  I called her right away and asked a few exploratory questions—chiefly, would the couple talk and could we take pictures? Fatima said yes and maybe. That was good enough for me. We were on the next flight to Bamiyan, aboard East Horizon Airlines, which flies to Bamiyan, sometimes twice weekly, sometimes not for months on end. I took with me photojournalist Mauricio Lima and our Afghan colleague Jawad Sukhanyar. A year or two earlier, we could have driven the six to eight hours over one of the two passes through the Hindu Kush into Bamiyan, but both have now been effectively cut off, at least for foreigners, by intermittent Taliban ambushes.

  I was already primed to jump on such a story and had long been looking for this sort of opportunity. Honor killings are more often than not one of Afghanistan’s dirty little secrets; instances where they come into the open are rare, and it is even more rare to have a chance to write about stopping a threatened honor killing, especially when the parties were willing to talk and perhaps even be photographed. We were en route before Fatima had a chance to change her mind; I didn’t even call her again, for fear she would reconsider, and the next time she heard from us, we were knocking on her office door in the Bamiyan government office building not far from the airstrip.

  Fatima received us from behind an expansive glass-topped desk, framed by windows and the glare from sunlit snow, in a room with walls lined with chairs for supplicants. After summarizing what had happened to Zakia and Ali, Fatima went to fetch Zakia from the women’s shelter, bringing her back to the office under a heavy guard, two green Ford Ranger pickup trucks full of policemen. Zakia had her shawl on but was dressed in loud, bright colors, as I would come to learn she usually was, a pink head scarf and an orange sweater. She caused a stir among the policemen and the government officials who lined the hallways as she was brought in; Afghans find her beautiful, with startlingly large, amber eyes.

  She was tongue-tied at first. It was not only the first time she’d ever seen a journalist, it was the first time she’d ever seen a foreigner and the first time in her life that she’d ever talked to a male stranger—moreover, the first time she’d ever talked to a man other than Ali, and Anwar, and her brothers and father. “I knew, because of my case, I had to have that courage to speak. I realized that,” she said much later, recalling how terrified she’d been that day. Expressing herself seemed painful, but with Fatima gently nudging her along, her story poured out through Jawad, who translated. “My whole family is against my marriage,” she said. “I want to go ahead anyway. I request of you, I don’t want to stay in Bamiyan. I can live anywhere but in Bamiyan. All I want is my love.

  “The judges told me, ‘We are Tajik and it’s dishonoring us if you decide to marry a Hazara.’ The judges, my mother, and father were all saying this to me, but I told them whatever he might be, he’s still a Muslim. I’m very worried about him and his safety. My father and relations threatened him, and I’m afraid they might do something. I get death threats from my family. They say if I go marry him, they will not let us live, and if I go home, my mother and father will not let me live.”

  Even her sister turned against her, she said. During a visit with her a
t the shelter, “she started screaming at me, using abusive words. You could hear her all over the building.”

  Zakia continued, “I love him, and now even if I don’t get to marry him, I couldn’t live here, I can’t go back and stay here, I have to leave forever. I have confidence in him. I know his attitudes and his good moral character. I want to live with him.”

  In the court proceeding, Zaman could not argue that his daughter had run away or chosen an improper mate, since neither of those acts is a crime. But breaking an engagement is a matter for the Afghan courts, and so her father began his suit by claiming that she had been formally engaged to her nephew, which Zakia said was the first she had heard of it.

  “They kept getting it mixed up, though,” Fatima said with a laugh. “One minute they claimed she was engaged to her father’s sister’s son, the next it was her mother’s sister’s son. They should make up their minds before lying like that.”

  Zakia’s account came out fitfully and slowly at first, with long, awkward silences and monosyllabic replies. The most extraordinary thing about her was the way her rare smile could suddenly illuminate her face, enlivening everything—eyes, lips, nose. It would flicker on like sunlight from a gap in a fast-moving cloud and be just as quickly gone. Her smile would transform her so thoroughly and so engagingly that you wanted to find some way to summon it back again.

  I explained to her the probable consequences of an article quoting her openly. People in Bamiyan would see it through local Internet connections, however rickety. All news is global, especially if it appears in the New York Times. Local news organizations might well pick it up, too. Everything she said to us would likely be heard or read by everyone she knows; if her relatives could not read, someone who could read would relate it to them.

  Zakia’s only response was that she had already been in the shelter in Bamiyan for nearly five months. She had a point. In all that time, the closest she came to resolving her status had been the abortive February 3 court hearing.