The Lovers

by Rod Nordland

  Examples of this phenomenon abound. Consider a $35 million “go fly a rule-of-law kite” program, dreamed up and funded by a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) contractor, a commercial firm that is now known as Tetra Tech DPK.20 Their idea was to stage a public event at which they would hand out kites, comic books, and posters with slogans printed on them touting equal rights for women and respect for the rule of law. Hundreds of kids and some adults showed up. Because the contractor was an American company, a large contingent of police was on hand to protect the American employees. First, no one could read the slogans on the kites and posters, let alone the text-heavy comic books; most of the kids were too young, and most of the adults who came were either jobless or policemen—neither a group with a high literacy rate.21 Then handing out the kites went badly awry when policemen systematically stole them from the kids who had come, in order to take them home to their own cildren, beating some of the kids at the event with sticks when they didn’t cooperate. Finally, gender equality was hard to come by. The few times any girls got their hands on the free kites, their fathers took them away and gave them to their sons instead. Despite critical coverage22 that made the fly-a-kite program a laughingstock in the aid community, the contractor deemed it such a success that it was repeated later in Herat, and the contractor continued to dream up other methods of public outreach funded by U.S. taxpayers’ money.

  Similarly, indiscriminate American largesse dispensed by the embassy financed a rock concert in a country where rock music is little followed, infuriating the mullahs; a yoga charity with the stated goal of getting the Taliban to the peace table via the yoga mat; an Afghan adaptation of Sesame Street23 for Tolo TV, featuring the American ambassador posing in Kabul with Grover, in all likelihood a war-zone first.24 The American embassy also pumped more than $100 million into underwriting indigenous television stations, so that any minor press conference in Kabul has more television cameras25 in attendance than most major news events in New York City or Washington, D.C. None of this was any more sustainable long-term than flying a kite; all will come crashing down once the American-financed windfall ends.

  That May when we dialed Ali’s number, we got love-song ringtones, a different one every few days, but he never answered. One frequent song was “Your Unkempt Hair,” by the famous Afghan singer Ahmad Zahir.

  Afghan women are rarely seen in public without at least a head scarf.

  If the early morning breeze

  Should ruffle your unruly hair

  All hearts would be ensnared

  In that trap of love and suffering.26

  7

  HONOR HUNTERS

  The lovers had no idea how many friends they had, but late that May and early June it was hard to persuade them that they had any. Everything seemed to be going wrong for them. Zakia’s family was actively looking for them. They were miserable in hiding. Escape abroad seemed impossible. Money was running out. Faced as the couple was with a hopeless situation, their suspicious refusals to accept aid made it all worse.

  While their hideout at Ali’s aunt’s house on the hill in Chindawul seemed secure, it was crowded and small and a hard place for anyone to spend much time. Remaining in hiding was getting increasingly difficult, particularly for Ali, but if either of them still wanted to flee abroad, they had a funny way of showing it. They were no longer answering the phone at all—not to Rabbi Shmuley’s fixer, Aimal, not to the American embassy’s human-rights officer, not even to us at the New York Times. They were low on prospects and almost out of hope.

  Their pursuers had come to town in force, and Zakia’s brothers and cousins were being spotted often. Zakia’s father, Zaman, had left Bamiyan and resettled his immediate family in Kabul. This was partly because they had suffered so much contempt from their Hazara neighbors after they became the nationally notorious villains persecuting Zakia and Ali and partly because Zaman could not bear the humiliation of facing his Tajik neighbors after the loss of his honor. Mostly, though, as they told everyone who would listen, they wanted to exact revenge on the lovers, no matter what it took. Zaman and his sons had given up their tenancy on the farm in Bamiyan and looked for what work they could find as day laborers in Kabul, expecting to find the couple there.

  “Honor and dishonor is like this: According to Islamic and shariah law, the girl cannot run away from home,” explained Zakia’s cousin Najibullah, an uneducated farm laborer. “It will be seen by the people as, ‘Ha, your daughter has run away. You should no longer live in this village. If she had not run away, her father never would have quit the village. He quit it because he is so dishonored that he cannot live here anymore,’” he said. “All the people will mock him and jeer at him, like, ‘If you were a man, why did your daughter run away? Why didn’t you stop her?’ They say these things, so we cannot let it be. He is her father, and I am her uncle’s son, but it hurts our honor, too. I cannot live in Bamiyan any longer myself when they say my uncle’s daughter ran away. We could not bring her back, so people will say to us, ‘If you were men, had daring and courage, why couldn’t you get your daughter back from the government?’”

  One of Zakia’s other cousins, Mirajuddin, was sitting with Najibullah; the two young men were among the relatives left in Kham-e-Kalak, although they no longer farmed the land and would soon join Zaman and his sons in Kabul to hunt the couple down. They had been in the courtroom when the melee broke out, although Zakia says they were not among those family members who attacked her physically. They were not close enough blood relatives to feel entitled to rip her clothes off and touch her, even if violently. “Your life is your honor, like your wife is your honor, and if your honor leaves you and goes to someone else, then this life is worthless,” Mirajuddin said. “If someone takes your wife, your life is not worth living.” Their position reflected a broader societal concern, as the cousins saw it. “If today the government doesn’t do something about this, then tomorrow the wife of a farmer will elope with a schoolboy or a businessman and will say she can’t live with her husband. So in this way, after the first one left, the others will follow.” Zakia, in short, had challenged the entire structure of Afghan patriarchal society, and if she was not stopped, all women would abandon the husbands chosen for them. (“First one wants freedom, / Then the whole damn world wants freedom,” as the late Gil Scott-Heron put it in his song “B Movie.”)

  In fact, there is a lot at stake for the women’s-rights movement in Afghanistan, even far beyond its borders. Afghanistan, because of the involvement of the West since 2001, is the only such country where serious efforts are under way to improve the lot of its women. “Afghanistan is still the great battleground of women’s rights in the twenty-first century,” says Nasrine Gross, an Afghan sociologist and women’s advocate. If women could win some measure of gender equality and equal treatment before the law in a country as backward and abusive as Afghanistan, that would be a provocative example to disenfranchised women in those other countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen, the Gulf satrapies and Iran. “There are some countries that are very powerful in certain ways, and women’s rights is not something they want to discuss,” Ms. Gross says. By “certain ways,” she means power that comes from possessing vast oil and gas wealth. “They use the lack of women’s rights as a means of controlling their own countries, and they want to keep Afghanistan at bay in terms of women’s rights so Afghanistan will not become a role model for their societies. A place so poor, so illiterate, so backward, they cannot stand it if this poor Afghanistan would be a model of women’s rights.”1

  Internally Afghanistan has long been a battleground for women’s rights, but the battle is one that women and their advocates have always lost. Probably in no other country2 have so many rulers been toppled over this particular issue, going back to King Habibullah, who opened the earliest girls’ schools and ushered in some rights for women before he was assassinated in 1919. His son, King Amanullah Khan, went much further, banning the vei
l for women, instituting girls’ education in rural areas, and outlawing polygamy. King Amanullah began his reign as a popular leader, credited with defeating the British in the Third Anglo-Afghan War. When he returned from a visit to Europe with his liberal-minded queen, Soraya Tarzi, he declared at a public event that Islam did not require women to be covered, whereupon Queen Tarzi tore off her veil and the other government wives present did so as well. Under his rule women were allowed to divorce and to choose their husbands, bride prices were outlawed, women were encouraged to work and study. But in a country with no roads and little infrastructure of any kind and a weak central government and bureaucracy, Amanullah was unable to persuade his countrymen to embrace his reforms and instead provoked an uprising of mullahs and conservatives that drove him from power in 1929.3

  This uprising was fueled in part by British agents, whose country was eager to get back at King Amanullah for its recent humiliation. They circulated pictures showing Queen Tarzi wearing a sleeveless gown at a state function and allowing her hand to be kissed during the European tour. Even today most educated women will not shake hands with men, while bare shoulders and arms in public would provoke a riot in Kabul.

  Amanullah’s successor, Nadir Shah, tried to institute reforms but was himself assassinated. Subsequent Afghan rulers were much more cautious about women’s-rights issues. Not until the Communist era in the 1970s was any successful effort made to extend rights to women, and the sweeping progress decreed by the Communists on gender equality was the major reason for the uprising against them by mujahideen and their followers.4 Their problem was with feminism, not with Communism. Their jihad was first of all against women’s rights, and later against schools for girls, the right to divorce, and women in the workplace and public life. They did not object to Communism as an economic or political system; it was equal rights for women that bothered them.5 When many of these mujahideen leaders later joined with the Americans to oust the Taliban, the alliance was not motivated by the Taliban’s social policies; in most cases Afghan warlords were as hard-line on women’s issues as the Taliban, and often even more regressive. The Taliban at least outlawed baad, and they officially disapproved of honor killings not based on their own judicial processes.6

  The concept of honor and killing women to uphold that honor is not unique to Afghanistan. In ancient Rome the paterfamilias or dominant male within a household had a legal right to kill a sister or a daughter who had extramarital sex or a wife who committed adultery.7 Othello’s murder of Desdemona was an honor killing and typical of honor killings in that the woman is given no real recourse to plead her case; the victim’s guilt or innocence becomes subordinate to the man’s sense of the violation of his honor. This goes some way to explaining the murder of rape victims by their own families in Afghanistan.

  The eminent anthropologist Thomas Barfield8 of Boston University, who is president of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, says there is a sort of blood-feud belt, where honor killings of women were historically endemic, that stretches from Spain throughout the Mediterranean basin, across the Middle East, Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan and then ends in Pakistan. East of that, north of that, south of it—in China or Mongolia, Southeast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa, Northern Europe or Russia—the concept of honor killing is pathological and rare, rather than socially acceptable and widespread.

  With the notable exception of Saudi Arabia,9 however, most modern societies, including Islamic societies, in the honor-killing belt have successfully criminalized the practice, just as nearly all societies have moved away from the concept of men’s ownership of women. Even Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in fundamentalist Iran has condemned the practice of honor killing, and as with most Islamic scholars, Sunni and Shia, he insists that honor killing has no theological basis in Islam.10

  A weak central government throughout Afghanistan’s modern history, three and a half decades of war, and low levels of education and literacy11 have helped to sustain abusive customary practices like honor killings.12 “Dealing with the status of women has brought down more regimes in Afghanistan than anything else,” Professor Barfield says. Both King Amanullah’s premature reforms and the Communists’ excessively ambitious efforts provoked a strong backlash, contributed to prolonging abusive customs, and made most modern leaders unwilling to confront conservatives on such controversial issues. Even today women’s groups that protest honor killings typically refrain from challenging the concept underlying them, that women are the property of men, who are in absolute control of regulating their behavior.

  In that ancient honor belt, Afghanistan has been a major holdout.13 “The state in Afghanistan has not been able to move its writ into family affairs. The Afghans feel that is not a state responsibility,” Professor Barfield says. Other states throughout that belt developed strong ruling systems where the state could and did inject itself into family and social affairs. “The state in the rest of the world has moved its power all the way down to the family level, but in Afghanistan, even today, the state is very hesitant to regulate family affairs. If there’s a revenge killing, because it’s murder, when it’s brought to their attention, they will act, but on the other hand if it doesn’t come to the state’s attention, they don’t look for it.”

  Given the attitudes of Zakia’s family, she and Ali were doing their best to stay hidden, but in the crowded little house on the side of the Chindawul Hill, Ali was increasingly irritable. With the aunt and her children, as many as eight people were sharing perhaps four hundred square feet and a tiny yard. Every food purchase, every bucket of water, involved an exhausting climb up the steep hill. Complicating matters for them, Zakia was not feeling well and was constantly complaining of stomach cramps and pains and nausea—dysentery is rampant in a city that long ago outgrew what primitive sewage system it had. She did not suffer as much from the inability to go out, but she sensed that Ali’s aunt resented her presence there and did not approve of her marriage to Ali. The aunt tolerated them because her brother Anwar had asked her to do so. Zakia was also lonely. She still missed her mother and father and brothers and sisters, the populous household in which she had spent her entire life, however much they wanted to kill her. She especially missed Razak, her lively nine-year-old brother, the much-doted-upon youngest male of the family. “I love him so much,” she told Ali. “It’s hard to think I will never see him again.”

  Zakia and Ali began arguing with each other over little things, and Ali was confused and defensive. This was not what he had expected their life together would be like. The long days of hiding at home were uncomfortable, but when Ali went out, Zakia worried constantly that her family or the police would find him. Suddenly one day, impulsively, he decided to rejoin the army. He had one year left on his enlistment, and he could go back without any real penalty as a deserter. Zakia was against it, and they argued, but she eventually agreed.

  “I couldn’t stay jobless forever,” he said. “I have to do something to make back that money that we borrowed from people. They will not let us keep their money forever, one day they will ask for it.” He’d had two months of freedom with his wife, and now it was time to work, as he put it. But the two-hundred- to two-hundred-fifty-dollar monthly army salary was not going to make much of a dent in their debts. There was a more practical reason to reenlist: Once in the military, stationed on a base, he would be virtually immune from arrest by the police. “I was going out a lot, and it wasn’t good for me—it was dangerous—and I thought, why not join the army and be safe, plus make money?” He had managed, through the uncle of one of his sisters’ husbands, to be allowed to rejoin as a bodyguard to a Hazara commander in the Afghan National Army. The commander was stationed at the Kabul International Airport, so Ali would not be far away from Zakia and could visit her on weekends. Even the uniform would help him to hide, although it meant that all his long black hair would be shorn to a military close-crop. The haircut proved to be not a bad disguise. One day when he was heading home on weekend leave to
see Zakia, he passed right by his father-in-law, completely unnoticed by Zaman.

  During this time we had begun talking with Ali and Zakia again, and we decided that it was time to engage with them about the Rwanda option that Shmuley had put on the table. It seemed like they were never going to deal with Aimal Yaqubi directly, and Shmuley was insistent that we offer them this opportunity. It put me in an awkward position, but I didn’t feel right letting them pass it up for lack of the right messenger. We got Ali and Zakia to sit down with Anwar, Jawad, and me, to talk it through. Again we explained what they could expect in Africa, a minimum of six months of isolation in Rwanda while they waited for onward visas—and no guarantee of those, though chances would be good. It was clear they had soured on the idea, but in any case their lack of passports was a deal breaker. Zakia had a new tazkera, or ID card, by then, but they were unwilling to risk going to the passport office with criminal charges still lodged against them, and without passports Rwanda was a nonstarter. Rabbi Shmuley was disappointed, but not daunted. Within a few days, he called to say that he was fed up and ready to make a move, and he wanted my advice on what to do about Fatima Kazimi.

  “We’re friends, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “So tell me the truth.”

  “Okay.”

  “Should we save Fatima?”

  I stalled for a moment to collect my thoughts, realizing what he probably had in mind. “Save her how?”

  “Get her out, save her. Rwanda.”

  “Okay, I see. Can I get back to you on that?”

  That June we were all getting frustrated and anxious for some sort of action. Stasis served no one’s interest, least of all that of Zakia and Ali, who remained elusive and unpredictable even toward Jawad and me. The fixer Aimal Yaqubi and the American embassy were having a still-harder time pinning down Ali. The embassy began calling me to try to get him to pick up calls from them, and Aimal called us to complain that he was getting nowhere. At one point Aimal accused us of using our influence with the couple to obstruct his efforts. Aimal had five hundred dollars to give them as a donation from Rabbi Shmuley’s mystery benefactor, he said, and they still wouldn’t cooperate (the amount had shrunk since we’d first heard about it).