by Rod Nordland
Later we asked her how she had found the WAW shelter compared to the Bamiyan one. She was glad that her stay in the Kabul shelter was so short, but she didn’t like it as much as the one in Bamiyan. “They were so strict here.”
Ali laughed. “Women are only happy when they are free to wear makeup,” he said. Having weathered a couple of crises in Kabul in which archconservatives accused WAW’s shelter in Kabul of being a bordello and the people who ran it of being pimps, Women for Afghan Women was sensitive to anything that might give conservatives ammunition against them. Makeup was one of those things, so it was banned inside their shelters.
At the time the details of how their case had been settled, and so quickly, were a complete mystery. In addition, Zaman and his sons and nephews disappeared from the picture overnight, as if someone had come along and swept them away with a broom. When Ali stepped out of PD1, there was no longer an in-law stakeout in evidence, and when he was reunited with Zakia at the shelter and she stepped outside the walls that surrounded it and onto the street, they looked around themselves apprehensively, but Zakia’s family was not there either. Some speculated that President Karzai must have intervened behind the scenes, but that seemed hard to believe after the antipathy of his women’s minister only a few days earlier—which her aides blamed on anger from the presidential palace over the high profile of the case and the embarrassment it was causing the country.
All the public attention made Zakia and Ali nervous, too. They were confused and didn’t know what to make of it. Neither of them knew what Facebook was, or an online news agency, or even the Internet, except that they were something mysterious, like the New York Times, for that matter, that could have a big impact on their lives. They did not much enjoy their celebrity. People would stop them on the street and ask to take selfies with them, and Zakia would pull a veil across her face and she and Ali would reluctantly oblige.
The lovers soon decided they would return to Bamiyan. Ali explained it this way: “In Kabul I know it is a big city, but I don’t know it and I don’t know who all the people are. If I look at them, I don’t know which one knows me now.” Their faces were easily recognizable due to the heavy local press coverage, and I felt somewhat guilty about their predicament. “If they know me, I still don’t know them and don’t know if I need to be worried about them. In Bamiyan you know your enemy, in Kabul you don’t.” That wasn’t the only reason, though. Ali kept it to himself, but he was steaming that we had encouraged Zakia to go into a shelter.
For the time being, they had decided against going abroad, he said. Africa they had already ruled out. In America there would be pockets of other Afghans, but they would still be lost souls. “In America we wouldn’t know where is the food store. Where can you borrow food on credit and pay them back later? We wouldn’t know where to go for that,” Ali said. I didn’t bother to tell him stores in America don’t usually give food on credit.
Zmaryalai Farahi from the American embassy called him around that time; the publicity, plus pressure from the home front thanks to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and his friends in high places, had aroused their interest again. Now that the couple no longer had criminal charges hanging over them, there was no political-diplomatic reason they could not get visas. This time Zmaryalai offered to come and meet them at a place of their choice, rather than asking them to run the police gauntlet and come into the embassy.
Ali said he would rather talk on the phone and asked Zmaryalai whether, if they got visas to America, they could bring along his father, mother, brothers, sisters, and their children, eighteen persons in all. When Zmaryalai said he greatly doubted it, Ali flatly told him they had changed their minds, that they were staying in Afghanistan and no longer wanted to flee abroad, and with that, for the near future at least, he pretty much dashed what little chance they had of going to America themselves. If they were not pushing, no amount of pushing from others on their behalf was going to carry the day. I asked Ali why he hadn’t just left his options open and kept his doubts to himself while talking to the American embassy. He offered an odd aphorism for someone from rural, pasta-less Afghanistan: “This is the dish, and this is the spaghetti. Whatever is there, is there. Maybe later we will think about it.” With a death threat still looming, “later” seemed like a faraway place.
For American officials this was a relief. The American embassy reported back to Samantha Power’s staff that Ali, criminal case now dismissed, had decided to stay in Afghanistan and was no longer looking for asylum abroad. Problem solved.
“I’ve never worked harder on a case since the Wikileaks thing,” Shmuley quoted one of Power’s aides as telling him. “I am so frustrated by our embassy’s unwillingness to help.” Now there was nothing more they needed to do.
Even if Ali and Zakia had decided to try to leave the country, the American embassy had little to offer them. While there had been criminal charges against them, the embassy’s reluctance was understandable; now that the legal charges against them were resolved, however, all the embassy was willing to offer them was advice: flee to another country, apply for refugee status there. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees would then consider their request for resettlement, and the United States would inform the UNHCR that it was following their case. All of this might help push things along faster, might lead to resettlement in the United States, but there would be no guarantees. I spoke to UNHCR officials in Kabul, and they agreed that the process would be a protracted one, even with the United States following the couple’s case, even with well-heeled sponsors willing to help them and guarantee them jobs, language training, education.9
The two were looking at six or seven months as refugees before they could get resettled to the United States, maybe twice as long—and that was only if U.S. officials did follow up on their case, which they had only sort of promised to do—always adding “No guarantees.” There is another method that American officials could have used, but they ruled it out, I suspect, for fear that it would open the floodgates for other potential honor-killing victims. This was humanitarian parole,10 and it can be used to take people straight from their own country, without the need of their first becoming refugees. It is used in cases of extreme emergency, such as for people who need specialized medical care in the United States that is unavailable in their own country. Or in cases where someone’s life is in imminent danger. The lovers seemingly qualified there. In the American embassy’s interpretation of humanitarian parole, however, Ali and Zakia did not satisfy the condition that their lives were in imminent danger.
Even if the United States had chosen to offer humanitarian parole—and the embassy nixed suggestions from Washington that they do so—it is no longer the magic bullet it once was for extreme cases. It was used, for instance, in the case of Bibi Aisha, disfigured by her Taliban husband. The Grossman Burn Center11 in Los Angeles offered to reconstruct her face, cutting-edge medicine no one in Afghanistan was qualified to do, and Women for Afghan Women, with the embassy’s enthusiastic support in such a high-profile case, applied for humanitarian parole for her. Using immigration lawyers in the United States, WAW did manage to get humanitarian parole for Bibi Aisha—after eight months of waiting, most of that time due to delays by the Department of Homeland Security, undertaking its exhaustive security checks to confirm to its satisfaction that this seventeen-year-old victim of the Taliban was not a terrorist trying to sneak into the United States under medical cover.
It was little wonder that the couple stopped speaking to everyone and gave up on leaving. They could have been more patient, though; as long as the embassy was interested enough to continue talking to them, there was always the possibility of an option being worked out. With Shmuley’s Africa option also off the table, their lives were a crapshoot, dependent on the chance that Zaman and sons did not find a way to take their revenge.
“When your story came to light, I was fortunate that I do have friends in positions in the American government who could help,” Shmuley sa
id when I talked to him about the lovers’ present dead end. “Senator Cory Booker, I discussed the case with him, for instance, and especially Samantha Power, who was uniquely positioned to assist because of her international portfolio—she has always cared, instantly and immensely—gave me a lot of time, to her immense credit and at a time when it’s been pretty darn busy in the world. She could easily have said, ‘It’s a terrible story, just one among millions that require our attention,’ but she didn’t do that. And with all of that, there still has been the snail-like pace of the American government. The strictures are not just ones of immigration. Those are understandable after 9/11, I understand that. The disappointing part to me is how the American government couldn’t go officially on the record to condemn the violence against this woman, or the intended violence. There wasn’t a single American reading these stories about this couple who were going, ‘Oh, I sympathize with her family.’ They can’t even publicly condemn it, because we don’t want to be seen dictating to the Muslims about their culture. Neither do I believe that we can lose thousands of soldiers to liberate Afghanistan from the monstrous barbarity of the Taliban and then not have the right to speak out against that barbarity. We can’t be dictating to the Afghan people how they should be living? Give me a break. This isn’t a domestic issue, brutality against women. We’re not talking here about a woman who wants to put on a miniskirt and dance at a disco—she wants to marry the man she loves and live an Islamic, religious life. If we can’t condemn her treatment, our mission has no meaning. Notwithstanding how much the U.S. government did not want to offend the Afghan government’s sensibilities, what about offending the American public’s sensibilities? The officials I spoke with were all very well-meaning, but they spoke about how they were handcuffed, about not playing into this narrative of the U.S. controlling Afghanistan. It’s our taxpayers’ money that is being spent there—we have the right to demand the most minimal impact on the country. If we can’t even say something like that, help people in that kind of situation, what was the purpose of the entire American mission? You have to redeem the lives of our soldiers with some moral progress.”
11
BACK TO THE HINDU KUSH
The problem with helping people too much is that they don’t learn how to help themselves. Governments know that, but it doesn’t stop them from giving money to increasingly dependent societies. We knew this, but it didn’t stop us from helping Zakia and Ali. They weren’t going to do it on their own, it seemed. They were just making one bad move after another.
The day after Zakia’s release from the shelter, they disappeared, and even Ali’s brothers couldn’t find them. It was rumored that they had fled to Iran. Finally Ismatullah, Ali’s older brother, got a call from them asking him to approach us and get money from WAW on their behalf so they could fly to Herat, a city in western Afghanistan. We told Ismatullah that all they needed to do was get in touch with the shelter and ask for some of the donors’ money, but they had to do that themselves—they couldn’t expect someone else to do it for them. The shelter needed to verify that they personally received the money.
It turned out that Ali was keeping his distance from us because he was angry that Zakia had been kept in the shelter. He felt she never should have gone there and instead should have fled with his father and his cousin. It was an unreasonable attitude, but then he had waited for her for more than six months outside another shelter, and his attitude was as understandable as it was foolish. He didn’t seem to appreciate that in the less than a week they both spent in custody they’d had all their legal problems resolved.
Herat in some ways seemed like a good place to hide; the western city was much more relaxed than many places in Afghanistan, big enough to get lost in easily, ethnically diverse. But Herat was close to Iran, and the jumping-off point for many Afghans fleeing there, and we all worried that the couple now intended to go that route. When we refused to act for him, Ali called WAW’s Manizha Naderi himself and persuaded her to give him another thousand-dollar installment from the donors’ money. He wanted more, but out of concern that he might use it to go to Iran, Manizha decided to limit the amount the organization would give him at any one time. The result was the couple did not have enough to afford air tickets to Herat.
Three days later, June 22, we got another call from Ismatullah. “Ali and his wife are now in Bamiyan, hiding. They came back because they couldn’t go to Herat by ground,” he said. The roads were too unsafe; it is a telling fact that fourteen years after the American intervention in Afghanistan began, many of the country’s major cities and provincial capitals are connected by roads that are not safe to travel, even for Afghans. The brother said he would try to persuade Ali to call and talk to us. “I want you to help them leave the country,” he said. “We really need your help. They can’t stay here long. Already Zakia’s relatives held a meeting because it seems they knew they came to Bamiyan. They’ll do something for sure.”
The next day Ali called and missed us, but Jawad called him back. His ringtone was a song by Jamshid Parwani, an Afghan crooner, called “Gonjeshkak Telayee”:
Little goldfinch, who lives at my girl’s,
I am waiting for you.
Tell me, when will you come?
Come to me, come from my ravishing girl,
Come sing to me how she is,
And go tell her how am I,
My naive little messenger.1
Ali asked us, as he’d asked the American embassy, whether, if they were able to get to a third country, the whole family could go along. We told him that was doubtful. There are Afghans who have gotten entire families out like that, on grounds of family reunification, but it takes many years, sometimes decades. They might be allowed to take close relatives, like father, mother, and of course their own children, but that was all. That was the last we heard from him for nearly a month.
When they resurfaced, we learned that the couple had gone back with Anwar to the family home in Surkh Dar late that June, when Zakia’s father and brothers were still away. Having given up their fields and moved to Kabul to hunt for the couple, it was too late for Zakia’s family to resume farming that season, and they continued to stay in Kabul as day laborers, street vendors, and the like. More distant relatives—cousins and in-laws—and some of Zakia’s younger siblings were living in Zaman’s house, but they had less of a personal stake in hunting the couple down. The fields were rich and green, on their way to a bumper potato crop, and the young lovers were happy to be in the midst of Ali’s family again, living an almost-normal life. At night Ali and his brothers took turns standing guard outside their house, but they were not very worried.
Ali and Zakia were, relatively speaking, flush with cash; the thousand dollars from Women for Afghan Women was more than they needed for necessities, so Ali and Anwar decided to spend much of it on gold jewelry, bracelets, and chains for Zakia. That is, in some ways, a method of storing money, by putting it into gold—although the gold dealers sell dear and buy cheap—and stashing it in the relative safety of adorning a woman’s untouchable person. It is also a way of showing how much they valued her. “We bought gold for her even though we were in debt and couldn’t afford it,” Anwar later said. “Because we are happy with her and wanted to show it to her, that we love her and we know she abandoned her family for our family, so we bought her gold and would be willing to buy her more if we could.”
Zakia had given up a lot to be married to Ali, and that point was driven home when he encountered her little brother, Razak, while walking toward the bazaar in the town. Razak blocked Ali’s way, brandishing a penknife. “I’m going to stab you, and then you’ll see whether it’s so easy to elope with girls,” he said. Ali laughed him off and brushed him aside, but it was a reminder of the way the anger had hung on and spread throughout her entire family.
Zakia was heartbroken about her little brother’s stubborn hatred. “I love him so much, more than anyone in my family,” she said. “He was so upset by this.
He had more anger than my older brothers, even. It’s very sad. I really love him.” Mightn’t there one day be a chance of reconciliation with him, a chance to explain what had happened once he was old enough to understand? “He wouldn’t listen, he wouldn’t accept it, even if I explained it to him. Maybe when he grows up, he’ll change, he’ll understand. Maybe if he falls in love with someone, then he might understand. I hope so.”
Despite the bad tidings of the encounter with Razak, those first few days home were happy ones. The couple threw a party for close family and a few of the Surkh Dar village elders, who after all the publicity had become far more supportive of the couple—at least on the Hazara side of the road. While Ali’s family and friends do not boast of this, support among the Hazaras, who are more numerous in Bamiyan than Tajiks, was a factor, in addition to their shame and embarrassment, in driving Zakia’s male family members away. The Hazara elders wanted Anwar’s family to throw a wedding party for the entire village—insisted on it, in fact—so they would have to do that soon, before the beginning of Ramadan, the month of fasting, which would begin in July 2014.
Ali’s mother was thrilled to see her son back; he had been close to her, he said, and he knew that she was unhappy that he and Zakia had gone away and were thinking of trying to leave the country. Now he was under the same roof with the two women in his life.
Chaman had once said to Ali, “You are the son of a poor person, so try to do good things and try to make your life better.”
“I never forgot that,” Ali said. Chaman hated when she saw him smoking, for example, and told him to stop. “And I did stop,” he said, and laughed. “For a day.” But he took care not to let her see him smoking after that.
During his long courtship of Zakia, Ali had made friends with a young Tajik man about his age who lived in her village. He had become Ali’s confidant—a fellow conspirator who also believed in love. They’d been in the army together, and after the love affair became infamous, he called Ali to rekindle their friendship—secretly, for fear of being seen as a traitor by other Tajiks. It proved to be a fortunate alliance. One day in early July, Ali was working in the fields, watering vegetables by hand after a dry spell, when his Tajik friend called him. “Gula Khan is back,” the man told him. “They’re planning to catch you in the fields, and they’re on their way now. He has a pistol and a knife.” Running atop the berms between irrigation ditches, Ali made his way across the fields and, by a roundabout route, back to Surkh Dar and the family’s home. He could see Gula Khan running after him, but he’d had enough of a head start to reach safety. After a hurried family council, Zakia and Ali decided to return to hiding in the mountains. Their wedding party would have to wait until after Ramadan.