The Lovers

by Rod Nordland

  In the meantime Zakia had plenty to say and was widely quoted; WAW was only too happy to arrange interviews, because Manizha sees public outreach and education as a vital part of her organization’s mission.1 Under the circumstances, speaking out seemed to Zakia the natural thing to do, and she was no longer afraid of the sound of her own voice, although she would have been surprised if anyone had tried to explain to her how famous she and Ali had become. “I am by his side, and at court I will say no one kidnapped me, that I came by my consent and will, and I want to be with him for the rest of my life,” Zakia said. “If I see my father and brothers, I will tell them, ‘Whatever has happened, has happened, and it is nothing you can change. Why is it any of your business that this has happened? This has just happened. You cannot change what’s in my heart, so stop trying to do anything about it.’”

  She was still worried about her family’s retribution. “If I fell into my parents’ hands, they will do something to me, kill me or something else even worse. There is nothing they want to do except to kill me. I haven’t even seen my aunt’s son—how is it possible that I would have been married to him? There was no neka. How is it possible? I said this to my father and asked them, ‘Why do you lie?’ But if it is left to my father and mother, they will not agree with me even in ten years.” Mostly, though, she was worried about Ali and about her father-in-law. “He is ill and has high blood pressure, and he must be very worried. They have to let the boy go, that is all.”

  Zakia’s father, Zaman, was stunned by the onslaught of interest about his daughter’s case. Nothing could be more galling to a potential honor killer than the glare of publicity. Zaman had soon adjusted his narrative to the prevailing mood.

  “My young son”—this would have been Razak—“saw him and went to the police and told the police this person has done this crime, he kidnapped my daughter. What can we do? If we could do something, we would do something. I am a poor person and don’t have the power to harm anyone. What can I do? If I was a rich and powerful person, I would do something. No one is listening to me. If I would kill him, everyone would blame me for it. But you see, we handed him to the police.” That was true, but it was Zakia they most wanted. They had hoped Ali would lead the authorities and hence her family to Zakia. There is not all that much honor in killing the offending man, since a man is just seen as doing what men do, whether it’s seduction or even rape. It is the death of the woman that is required by this concept of honor.

  “The police asked me to come and give a statement, and I went and did that,” Zaman said. “I told them what that boy has done. He kidnapped my daughter. Isn’t that true? We want the girl back, and we want to hand her to her husband and see what he does with her.” He meant his nephew, the supposed husband by Zakia’s first marriage, which she never attended. “The boy we married Zakia to has made claims against me. He spent a lot of money, and he wants it back or he wants his wife back. All I want is that the girl should be handed to her first husband. Then it is up to him whether he accepts her as his wife or not. If that doesn’t work, I will leave it to God. I can’t do anything myself. I lost everything and came here to Kabul with fifteen family members, and we’re all working on the streets.”

  The police were in no hurry to interview Zakia at the shelter, so Shukria went to the Ministry of Interior on Sunday and won permission for Ali’s criminal case to be dismissed if she could produce Zakia to swear that Ali had not kidnapped her and that they were married. She and three WAW staffers took Zakia to PD1, the police station, and Zakia made her declaration; they managed to get her in and out by a side entrance to avoid her family. When Shukria later went back to PD1 to tell Ali how things were going, Zakia’s father and uncle saw her. They blocked her way and demanded the right to visit Zakia at the WAW shelter. Shukria agreed they could visit in a couple of days, after they had calmed down. They were so angry that it was clear to her that they would kill either the girl or Ali on sight.

  “Stop shouting at me!” she told the men, shouting back at them. “You will never see her without my permission, and you will never get that permission unless you calm down and behave with respect.” Never having been really yelled at by a woman, particularly one who exuded authority, Zakia’s relatives were easily cowed—for the moment.

  After Zakia and Shukria’s visit, the police accepted that they no longer had a criminal case but instead a family dispute. Ali soon saw a difference in the way he was treated. The beatings stopped; he was given food and allowed to use the toilet facilities. “They even offered me cigarettes,” he said. He had quit smoking at Zakia’s request after they arrived in Kabul; this was the first time he’d broken his vow to her.

  The day after their encounter with Shukria, Zakia’s family began fighting back. Her father and her brother Gula Khan showed up in the WAW offices as part of the entourage of a high official from the Ministry of Interior, who introduced himself as a director general, a department head of some sort. He never produced a name, but he demanded to know why the New York Times had delivered Zakia to the shelter and what the paper’s role in the whole matter was. “We know that the New York Times brought the girl here, and why did they do that? We know that the U.S. embassy and the New York Times helped the girl and the boy and support them.” Behind him, Zaman and his sons, emboldened by having a powerful man in their midst, were screaming at Shukria and the other women present, demanding to get in to see Zakia. Shukria stood her ground, told the official she had no idea what he was talking about, and made sure that WAW’s guards kept the visitors from the living quarters of the shelter itself.

  Then Zaman had a lawyer petition to move the case from a civil proceeding in family court to the attorney general’s office, as a criminal investigation. Zaman surprised everyone when he produced a neka document signed by a mullah and a host of witnesses, fifteen in all, saying that Zakia had been married to her father’s nephew. The neka was dated a year and a half earlier, but that is not an unusual practice.

  “A lot of people do the neka like this during the engagement, because it gives the couple more freedom to sit and talk and go places alone without people talking about them,” Manizha said. “My own family does it, too. They do a preliminary neka during the engagement and then another one during the marriage ceremony. So it’s legal.” If that were true, then it would mean that under Afghan law Zakia had been legally married to her cousin—or at least her family had enough witnesses willing to establish that was the case.

  Manizha and Shukria were worried. “After talking to Mohammad Ali, his father, and Zakia, we don’t think that Mohammad Ali and Zakia did the neka,” Manizha wrote in an e-mail. “They just ran off, and that’s it. There is no neka nama [marriage certificate] like her father has. Or any witnesses! As you know, a neka isn’t legal without two male witnesses! His father asked Shukria if she can just make one up. This isn’t good! This will spell trouble for the couple. Zakia’s father is very stubborn. He would rather see her rot in jail than just let the case go.”

  There was little doubt that Zakia’s father had concocted her first wedding ex post facto, but proving it would be hard. Zaman wasn’t arguing that it had been consummated or even that she had ever met her cousin and putative husband. In court in front of witnesses, he had only claimed an engagement; the judges in Bamiyan, otherwise so friendly to the family, had acknowledged that openly. But now he had the paperwork, and he had witnesses, including a mullah, to establish that a marriage took place.

  Zakia and Ali had none of that, no document to prove that they had really tied a neka up in Foladi on the day after Zakia’s escape. First they said they had the document at home, but none of Ali’s brothers could find it. Then they said that the mullah who had signed it, Mullah Baba Khalili, had disappeared. Then they had supposedly reached the mullah by phone but he refused to testify that he had signed the neka. We began to think that Manizha and Shukria were right, and they just had not bothered. As people who didn’t read, they might not have taken the neka do
cument to be as important as was the fact that a neka ceremony had occurred, presided over by a mullah, witnessed by the requisite two males; the paperwork was a formality that meant little to them, since they could not read it.

  My journalistic position also seemed to be unraveling fast. We went to a public seminar sponsored by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MoWA) for its provincial directors; there were a couple dozen Afghan journalists there, plus Jawad and me. Husn Banu Ghazanfar, the imperious minister of women’s affairs, was presiding. When she and her entourage came in, she was angered as she noticed us in the press section. We knew she had been upset over an interview I’d done with her a few weeks earlier. Little of it was published, since she had said almost nothing usable.2 The only quote I used from the interview was her criticism of Fatima Kazimi’s claim that Fatima’s life was in danger.3

  There was more to Minister Ghazanfar’s anger than that, however. Interrupting the proceedings when she saw us, she summoned MoWA’s public-relations adviser, Abdul Aziz Ibrahimi, to confer with her. Ibrahimi, like a large proportion of women’s-ministry employees, is a man. He came and told us the minister wanted us expelled from the public session. “She’s unhappy because the parliament and the president are complaining about MoWA helping us to make a Romeo-and-Juliet love story, and that is wrong. President Karzai is especially unhappy that you made a Romeo-and-Juliet story out of this.” I thought about standing my ground against being kicked out, since there were other journalists there, but it seemed unwise. The profile of the New York Times in this whole case was already getting uncomfortably high. President Karzai’s hatred of the paper was well known; he had at that point not given an interview to anyone from the paper since 2008.4 The war was getting ever worse. The election fiasco was deepening, and in the course of that year Mr. Karzai’s government, with what we believed to be his encouragement, had already threatened to expel me, would soon try unsuccessfully to expel Times correspondent Azam Ahmed,5 and would later that year successfully expel Times correspondent Matthew Rosenberg.6 The cases against us were spurious and had nothing to do with the lovers’ story, but I was keenly aware that my role in Zakia and Ali’s case might embarrass the paper at a sensitive time.

  On June 9 Shukria told Jawad that Ali’s family was going to have to come up with a neka document by the scheduled court hearing the next day. “Otherwise the relations which they had in the last three months will be considered inappropriate and they’ll be charged with adultery,” she said. Under criminal law that could mean a penalty of ten years in jail. Under shariah law the couple could get death; technically, the courts had the option of applying either code. Jawad met with Anwar and the brothers, and they finally admitted to him that they had no neka. Their story then was that the mullah and witnesses all signed a blank sheet of paper, intending to fill it in later with the legal niceties and the necessary stamps. That paper was with Mullah Baba Khalili, and it was too dangerous to go to his home in the Behsood District of Wardak Province. Now that the mullah had heard that the couple had been arrested, Anwar said, “He is afraid and does not want to give the neka letter to us. He is denying that he tied this neka. I sent my son to talk to him and convince him to give us the neka letter. I gave him all that money to tie the neka, and he promised. He is such a liar. But now I am worried. If their case goes to the attorney general’s office, there is need for bribe money, and I don’t have any money to give them.”

  As far as Anwar was concerned, all such problems were addressed only one way in Afghanistan: through sufficient bribes to the right people. That was not going to work in this case, although it was hard to make him understand that the case was too high-profile for the old rule—who bribes the most wins—to apply.

  Ali’s arrest and Zakia’s detention were huge news in Kabul, and young people were quick to lionize them; the Facebook groups and Twitter feeds devoted to them had continued to proliferate.7 Videos of them were ripped from the Times website and embedded in Afghan Web pages, posted on YouTube, dubbed into Dari and Pashto.

  One of Zakia’s biggest fans was Zahra Mousawi, a former an-chorwoman for Tolo TV, who refuses to play by the patriarchy’s rules. Breezing into the Blue Flame restaurant in the midst of the controversy over the couple’s detentions, Zahra headed to a secluded corner booth at the hideaway garden restaurant with two unrelated men. She had no head scarf on—she did not even have one handy—and she was wearing a normal blouse and skirt, not the usual shapeless trench coat over a long dress that most Afghan women in public life adopt. Zahra had driven herself to the Blue Flame in her own car, alone, with no mahram. She not only shakes hands with men—most Afghan women, even women officials, do not—but men she knows well she will greet with a hug or a kiss on the cheek, even in public.

  She is one of the few women in Afghanistan who dares to do what she does. “I drive, and I don’t wear a head scarf, and I really don’t have much trouble,” she said. “The other women activists all say, ‘But it’s Afghanistan. You have to be like them.’ I’m ready to pay the costs not to be, but no one else is. They’re really not ready for big changes.” To some extent Zahra overstates how easy it might be. She has the benefit of Swedish as well as Afghan citizenship, so she can leave anytime, and she has a highly educated, tolerant family. Zahra, too, had started a Facebook campaign to free Zakia and Ali. “The only hope is the young. The future is the young, and that’s why I want to applaud Zakia. It’s her life, and she has decided how to live it.”

  At the attorney general’s office, young couples began showing up at the Elimination of Violence Against Women Unit (EVAW), which is staffed mostly by female lawyers, to file complaints of denial of relationship, something that would have been unheard of even a year earlier. “Ali and Zakia’s story will have a great impact on the future generation,” said Qudsia Niazi, the head of the EVAW unit. “Young people now are starting to realize that there is no restriction in religion or in the law about who you can marry. Any Muslim can marry any other Muslim.” There were even street demonstrations to protest the pair’s lockup.

  But while support grew, the prospects for resolution of their legal case diminished. If the mullah did have the paper, he wasn’t going to provide it.

  Then, just when it looked hopeless all around, on June 11 the attorney general’s office issued an order out of the blue that Ali should be released without bail, all charges dropped.

  21/3/13938

  Attorney General of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan

  Release Order

  The dossier of these two people should be studied, verified and retained after a complete investigation is done. Mohammad Ali who had a neka with Zakia should be released from detention and she should be handed to him. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs should assist them in forming a family life and finding a place to stay.

  Duly noted, Office of Governmental Relations

  Dossier should be referred to Legal Office for further legal formalities.

  Ali was free, but Zakia was still stuck in the shelter until he could produce the neka; the attorney general’s office had to see it before they would approve her release. Possibly his brother would find the mullah and get it—if it existed, though none of us any longer believed that was the case. Then suddenly word came that Ali and Anwar and three witnesses could go to the attorney general’s office with Zakia and formally tie a new neka.

  Just how this came about was mysterious, but somehow it was no longer necessary for them to produce the original neka that the mullah did or did not do for them in Foladi on the second day of their elopement. The resolution didn’t come about from a bribe; it is clear that Anwar had no money—he was asking us for even a small amount to survive on, and we were trying to arrange for him to get some from the donations on account at WAW. The couple’s attorney, Shukria, just shrugged it off without explanation, and her tone suggested we not ask her too many questions about it. So Anwar’s other sons came down from Bamiyan with a fresh neka signed by a friendly mullah and witnes
sed by a couple of men from their village. They delivered it to WAW to produce for the attorney general.

  Ali was ecstatic. “Before being arrested I was a hundred percent happy. Now that I am freed from the government’s claws and when my wife is released, I will be a thousand percent happy. We are so happy that we cannot fit into our clothes anymore.”

  Zakia was still in the shelter, but now that a neka had been produced, she would be out soon. We spoke to her the night before they were due to go to the attorney general’s office and get the new neka registered and approved.

  “I feel I am born once again to this world,” she told us. “I missed him so much I cannot count how much. I’m so happy that I won’t be able to go to sleep tonight. I wish after I get released that we could have a happy life again and go and live in a place that is safe for us. We cannot stay in Bamiyan or Kabul anymore. I love him so much I cannot possibly explain it to you.”

  Qudsia Niazi, from the attorney general’s EVAW law unit, told Zakia that if she wanted to press charges against her parents, for unlawfully trying to force her to marry against her will and trying to prevent her from marrying Ali, those were crimes under EVAW law and she could do so. Zakia demurred. “About my father my feeling is that it would be better if he would agree to this, but now that he doesn’t agree, I cannot say anything about the matter to him. But I don’t want to bring charges against them, because they are my father and mother and I couldn’t bear to do anything to them. I can’t see anything happen to them or happen to my brothers from such a thing. Once I get out of here, my father and mother will not even want to see me, I know that, but I don’t want trouble for them.”