The Lovers

by Rod Nordland

  Shmuley was more frustrated with this inaction than anyone. He related to me a long conversation he’d had with an embassy official, public-affairs officer Robert Hilton, about the case. “Here we have a story that encapsulates why we’re there, a story that has fired the American imagination, and you guys are not even involved in helping. You left it to a bunch of laypeople like us who don’t know what they’re doing.”

  Mr. Hilton told him, as Shmuley explained, that the embassy had to consider the sensibilities of the host country, which only incensed him. “What about the sensibilities of American readers? What about the sensibilities of a hundred thousand troops there and the trillion dollars we spent, and you can’t get a woman who’s going to be killed out of the country? A fricking trillion dollars, I told him.”

  Hilton pointed out that there were criminal charges against the couple that would somehow have to be adjudicated, and the United States couldn’t be seen to be circumventing Afghanistan’s legal system, in which it had invested more than a billion dollars over the past decade.

  “Are you telling me you’re going to abide by a corrupt judge’s order to send her back to her family to be killed or raped?” Shmuley in righteous mid-rant was a force to be reckoned with. “This is ridiculous. This story has crystallized for all of us why we’re there. We’re there to protect people like Zakia.” He had her name down by now. “All we have to do is get this woman a passport.”

  Shmuley was livid after he recounted this conversation to me. “I don’t think the embassy is going to be helpful, but one way or another we’re going to get them out, and it’s going to be a big story when we get them out, and the U.S. government had no role whatever,” he said. “After a trillion dollars, we can’t save a woman from an honor killing because we’re worried about hurting someone’s feelings in the government? The American government can’t do it? The American government is afraid of the Afghan government? Let them be more afraid of the American public. What the hell are we doing there? What have we managed to change there? We can’t have these people die and achieve zero. So now a couple of bozos in New Jersey are going to do what the U.S. government cannot do. They seem to be under strict orders: Let’s tiptoe out of Afghanistan and make no waves.”

  This kind of accommodation is rampant in the waning days of the Western intervention in Afghanistan. The case of a girl named Gulnaz, who was forced to marry her rapist, is a good example. The European Union suppressed a film it had commissioned that featured her plight, concerned that it would embarrass the Afghan government. British-based filmmaker Clementine Malpas found Gulnaz, then only nineteen, in Kabul’s female prison, Badam Bagh, where she had been held for more than a year, and featured her in the EU-financed documentary on women in Afghanistan, which she called In-Justice. In the film, Ms. Malpas related how Gulnaz had been given a three-year prison sentence after she was raped by a cousin, Assadullah Sher Mohammad; Gulnaz gave birth to their child while in prison. When she appealed the case, her sentence was increased to twelve years,14 but an Afghan judge offered her freedom if she would marry her rapist.

  When officials at the EU mission in Kabul saw the film, they decided to withhold it from release, threatening the filmmaker with legal action if she allowed it to be aired. Ostensibly the reason was to protect the women in the film, Gulnaz as well as two other victims, from retribution. The EU rejected the position taken by the filmmaker that Gulnaz and the others in the film had given informed consent. It was a surrender by EU diplomats to Afghan cultural sensitivities. That was confirmed when the New York Times reported that e-mails from the EU’s attaché for rule of law and human rights, Zoe Leffler, had told the filmmaker that the EU “has to consider its relations with the justice institutions in connection with the other work that it is doing in the sector.”

  In the ensuing furor, President Hamid Karzai ordered the girl released from prison—but made it clear that he expected her to marry her rapist as the court had ordered, according to the Times15 account by Alissa J. Rubin.

  “Gulnaz said, ‘My rapist has destroyed my future,’” Ms. Malpas said, recounting their conversation. “ ‘No one will marry me after what he has done to me. So I must marry my rapist for my child’s sake. I don’t want people to call her a bastard and abuse my brothers. My brothers won’t have honor in our society until he marries me.’”

  Women’s groups objected and lobbied to have Gulnaz given refuge in a shelter. Then the news moved on and everyone lost interest in the case; the documentary was never officially released—another fifty thousand euros down the EU drain, part of some 18.2 million euros the EU spends annually on gender-focus programs,16 not counting bilateral donor money from its member nations.

  By 2014 history was being rewritten in Gulnaz’s case. Mary Akrami, the head of an organization called the Afghan Women Skills Development Center, who says she was the first to open a women’s shelter in Afghanistan (reportedly financed by the UN Women organization, as with the shelter in Bamiyan), claims that the international press and particularly Gulnaz’s lawyer, Kimberley Motley (who took on the case after the documentary controversy erupted), deliberately distorted what had happened to Gulnaz. “The court married her by her consent,” Ms. Akrami said. “She was not raped, but in fact she loved the guy and had a love affair with him. She then agreed to marry him. Her family reconciled with the man’s family. They live together now and are happy. They have a child and are living in Kabul.”

  That is not how Kim Motley sees it, and she had visited Gulnaz as recently as mid-2014. The young woman, now twenty-two or twenty-three years old, really is married to her former rapist and does not deny that is what he is. He treats her decently, she told Ms. Motley, does not beat her, and provides for her and their daughter. Kim said that after the controversy over the documentary erupted, she at one point had offers from a dozen Western countries to provide Gulnaz with asylum. At the time Gulnaz was staying in Mary Akrami’s shelter. “The minister of women’s affairs and the shelter were blocking me from taking her to get a passport,” she said. They saw reconciling with and marrying her rapist as the only solution that was in her interest, and history just had to be rewritten to make that possible, Ms. Motley said. “She never once denied to me that her cousin was her rapist; she was fifteen when it happened. She was even tied up when she was raped. There was never any ambiguity about that. She did finally marry him, but that’s because the only way she could leave that fucking shelter was if she married this guy.”

  The sorts of offers of asylum that Gulnaz initially got had dried up by 2014, as more Afghan women saw flight from the country as their only salvation, and Western countries began to worry that granting asylum in such cases would undermine their efforts to promote women’s rights within the country.

  It was that attitude that had made an embassy rescue for Zakia and Ali increasingly unlikely, and all the more difficult for a couple with a criminal case against them. The conundrum raised by the criminal charges incensed Rabbi Shmuley. “That’s the biggest farce of all. You fall in love with someone and it’s a criminal case? I hope you will write something about these God-only-knows-how-many dead Americans and a trillion dollars in treasure so our government can respect a barbaric government. This is called the rule of law? I don’t even know how they can say that with a straight face. Shaming them in the media is the only thing that’s going to work. These people have to live like rats. Let’s get them out.”

  Still, he couldn’t get Ali and Zakia out when they had no passports—nor any legal way to secure them. But he could save someone else—and his mystery benefactor was willing to finance it, the government of Rwanda was willing to make it happen, and, he said, they were ready. They would save Fatima Kazimi. Just one thing bothered him about that. So, he wanted me to tell him frankly, did Fatima Kazimi really have grounds to fear for her life? “I’m worried that maybe she’s just taking advantage of the situation and is now attempting to use this to get out of Afghanistan when we’re trying to focus on Zakia
and Ali, who seem to be in far greater danger.” Yes, that sounded like Fatima all right, but I said nothing aloud. Answering him would put me in an ethically difficult position. If I had given him my unadorned, honest opinion, I would have said, No, I really don’t think she is in danger. If that ruined the chance Shmuley was handing her to escape Afghanistan, what if she really was in danger? What right did I have to determine her fate and probably that of her family by expressing my opinion, particularly if I was wrong? I would get back to him, was the most I could say, and that was still kind of damning.

  Up in Bamiyan even Fatima’s allies were dismissive of any danger to her life. “There isn’t any threat against her from other people, against her or her family. We would not let that happen,” said the Bamiyan police chief, General Khudayar Qudsi. When the attorney general’s office tried to interrogate her, he said, the police intervened to block it. “There was no basis, so we will not recognize such an action. The provincial attorney general based their request on accusations of Zakia’s family, but there was no proof of Fatima Kazimi’s involvement in the shelter escape,” Chief Qudsi said. As for risks to her from Zakia’s family? “It’s not true. She has her own personal bodyguards who will take care of her safety, police bodyguards. That is our job and our responsibility. I think it’s just an excuse so she can leave the country.”

  It seemed clear that what Fatima Kazimi wanted, like many Afghans, was a better life, and she had despaired of ever finding one in Afghanistan. That, however, does not qualify as “a well-founded fear of persecution” or any of the other generally accepted grounds for granting asylum or refugee status.

  I felt like I had no choice but to share this view with Shmuley. My reporting had made her out to be one of the heroes of the piece, and he was about to reward her for it. Before I could reach Shmuley, though, Fatima called to say she was leaving that day for India, where she would be picking up her Rwandan visa. She had just the night before tried to leave through Kabul International Airport with a visa from the Rwandan government issued online, but Afghan airline officials had never seen an e-visa before and turned her away.

  Shmuley had moved quickly. I called him back later that day, and he was in a celebratory mood. “Fatima arrived in Delhi. She’s out of Afghanistan, thank God, and I hope we gave them security. They’re on their way to Rwanda. Thank you for everything.”

  I told him I had belatedly come to the conclusion she was scamming everyone. Looking back, I figured she had probably planned this from the day of that first e-mail.

  “We feel a sense of satisfaction,” Shmuley said. “We got her out of there, thank God. Some people may not believe they are in danger, but we did the right thing.” Shmuley reminded me a bit of the photographer Diego when he’d just found a beam of light coming through the ceiling and couldn’t hear anything else anyone said.

  In addition to the right to settle in Rwanda—and quite possibly becoming the first Afghans there in history—Fatima and her husband and four children would be given housing by President Kagame, and Rabbi Shmuley’s benefactor was going to provide them with a twenty-thousand-dollar stipend to live on for the year, more than adequate for Rwanda. “We want to avoid an unhealthy dependency,” he said.

  He was finally ready to tell me who the benefactor was. “She is prepared to be named, with one caveat: so long as it does not endanger the couple.” It was Miriam Adelson, the wife of casino magnate and multibillionaire Sheldon Adelson.

  Ms. Adelson did not want credit as a Jewish person for saving a Muslim couple from their backward society. She was just moved by their case and wanted to help them, and anyone affected by their story as well. There was no other agenda here; Miriam’s motives were purely humanitarian, he said. “The real hero of the story is not me, it was Miriam Adelson, who got me interested in their case. After a while, I became personally involved. I now really cared which direction this was going.”

  Fatima spent a couple of days in India, which coincided with a gala that Rabbi Shmuley’s World Values Network put on in New Jersey with a variety of A-list celebrities and politicians, including Sean Penn, Governor Rick Perry of Texas, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, and Elie Wiesel.17 Shmuley’s aides organized a video hookup to New Delhi so Fatima could thank Miriam and President Kagame for rescuing her. Miriam might have had no particular agenda, but Paul Kagame did. Once seen as a hero in the West for pulling his country through the Rwandan genocide, Mr. Kagame was lately in need of some good press, having been accused of murdering opponents, stifling dissent, and turning Rwanda, once Africa’s bright black hope, into an autocratic state run by yet another African Big Man.18 Like Shmuley, Miriam Adelson was a staunch supporter and defender of Israel, and Israel in turn was a staunch ally of Rwanda. The two countries’ backers would see the shared experience of genocide as their bond; their critics would see governments with similarly appalling human-rights records fighting against a growing status as pariah states, despite their ennobling pasts.

  The next day Fatima and her family were on the long flights from Delhi to Dubai and Dubai to Kigali.

  The next time we spoke to Ali, in this case by phone, we told him that Fatima had escaped to Africa, after telling the people who wanted to help him that she, too, needed to be saved. He was astonished.

  “Fatima went to Africa?” He laughed for a couple of minutes, then regained his composure. It was, he said, one more reason not to consider Africa as a way out. He and Zakia didn’t want to be someplace where the only other person in the country who spoke their language was Fatima Kazimi.

  His vehemence surprised me, and I asked why he felt that way. “She didn’t help us at all,” he said. “She didn’t help me, she didn’t help Zakia escape, she didn’t do anything for us. One day we will run into each other and talk.” It was an emotional outburst.

  I said it was pretty undeniable that Fatima had prevented Zakia’s family from taking her out of court that day and probably killing her. “That was all she did, and I respect that, but besides that she didn’t do anything for us.” That was underselling Fatima quite a bit, whether or not she had used the couple’s situation to her own benefit. I didn’t understand his attitude and would not for some time to come.

  8

  THE IRRECONCILABLES

  Hope is not much of a plan, but it was about the only plan they had. “This world is sprung with our hopes, the past is built on our hopes, you spend your life with hopes,” Ali said in his dreamy way on one of the few times in May when we were able to reach him, “and I’m just hoping now that God will help us.” When Ali did choose to answer his phone, either he would barely listen to us or he would suddenly appeal to us to make the couple’s decisions for them. The worst thing was that Ali was unwilling to come down to earth and get serious about their safety. Given the number of sightings of Zakia’s male relatives not far from the Chindawul area of Kabul where the couple was hiding with his aunt, it was clear that place was no longer safe. Since the aunt was Anwar’s sister, it wouldn’t be hard for Zakia’s family to find out where she lived, at least the general area, and then stake it out until Ali or Zakia came along. That might well have been what was already happening with the near misses. Ali always agreed with us when we lectured him about this, but we could have been talking to a wall.

  One day Jawad and I sat down and wrote out a list of talking points for the next time we had Ali on the telephone and he was in half a mood to listen or if we were able to meet with him when he was on leave from his army post:

  •They can’t just stay in hiding forever. Sooner or later they will be caught. That’s what everyone who works on these family disputes says.

  •If they’re caught, they’ll both be taken to jail. That could well mean that Zakia would be sexually abused in custody, which happens routinely. Jail for a woman is much worse than a shelter, which is at least run by other women.

  •They should think about at least talking to the people who run the Women for Afghan Women shelter. They don’t have
to do what they say, just hear them out.

  •The WAW lawyers are very good, and recently they won a case similar to Zakia and Ali’s, and while the case was in court, the woman had to stay in their shelter for only a month.

  •The lawyers say their case is a strong one and they’re certain they can prevail legally. They cannot do that, however, unless Zakia is no longer a fugitive and is somewhere so they can produce her in court. She could come into the shelter while Ali can stay in hiding.

  •The head of WAW, Manizha Naderi, is happy to talk to Ali, and although she is in the United States now, she will call him in the evening, and this is the number she will be calling from.

  •The WAW shelter is nothing like the one in Bamiyan. If they decide to go to the shelter to discuss their case with the lawyers there, we can go with them and guarantee that they can leave if they want to do so.

  •If they ever change their minds and decide to leave Afghanistan, they’re going to need to have passports, and they’re not going to be able to get them safely while there are criminal charges against them. They need to get the legal case settled. The only countries they could go to without passports are Iran, which is dangerous, and Pakistan, which is difficult.

  We drilled away on these talking points every time Jawad got Ali on the phone, and with his father and brothers as well, but he would not even agree to go to the shelter and hear what the lawyers said, let alone agree to Zakia’s checking into the shelter so their case could go to court. When we spoke to Zakia, she deferred to Ali.

  A week or more went by with no answer, just an out-of-service message on his number, and then finally came one of the familiar ringtones, from the blind Iranian singer Moein and his song “Past”: