by Rod Nordland
Her smiles still lit up rooms, and she smiled a lot those last three days in Afghanistan. “We are ready. I got a veil, I didn’t need much. The men needed much more than me. In one way I’m happy, I’m excited because we will be free there, but in another way I’m worried, since we’ve never been there before. Will we manage to live there okay?”
Ali reacted as he usually did, with a love poem memorized from a song. As usual, he knew neither the name nor the author, just the words:13
Though I am far away and cannot see you
There’s no reason to think I could be unfaithful.
My loyalty to you is such that your name is always on my lips.14
There was still enough money on deposit with Women for Afghan Women to give them what they’d need for living expenses for a good three months in Tajikistan, possibly more, and they made a final visit to the NGO to withdraw it and to talk to the group’s capable country director, Najia Nasim. Beautiful and charismatic, Najia carried the day on many of the group’s regular crises by sheer force of personality, and her warmth and directness was a dose of what the couple needed on the eve of their departure. “You should be optimistic about the future. Tajikistan won’t be a problem. You’ll get through it. There will be a lot of bureaucracy, and it may take a long time, but you’re young and you will get through it.
“You know you are both very famous now, and you must take care until you are out of Afghanistan. Separate into two groups on the plane, Zakia and Anwar together and Jawad and Ali together, and don’t talk to one another on the way.
“Zakia, you are lucky. Ali cannot wear anything to cover his face—if he does, everyone will suspect him.” They all laughed. “But you can wear something to cover your face. I do it myself when I go to the provinces.”
Jawad checked on their preparations and realized they had planned to bundle up their possessions in cloth and tie the bundles with string, checking that as their luggage; it would not do. He helped them buy a suitcase each, just one, so they did not look as if they were moving to Tajikistan forever.
In our last meeting, Ali began laughing to himself—a habit he had when he was introducing an embarrassing subject. “What’s up Ali?”
“You’re not going to leave us there, are you? Just once we get to Tajikistan, leave us on our own and we’ll end up begging in the streets?”
“No, Ali, we’re not going to abandon you there, don’t worry. Once you’re refugees, we’ll come and visit you, and there are Western Union offices all over the country. People will be able to send money to help you.”
On Wednesday morning Jawad picked them all up at the usual place. They were late, though, so when Jawad saw that Anwar was still dressed like a peasant from Bamiyan, ancient silk turban and all, it was too late to do anything about it. He figured the old man would be forgiven his retro look by virtue of his age; could Tajikistan really be all that different from Afghanistan’s predominantly Tajik north, after all? Traditional dress was common there.
Everything went smoothly at Kabul International Airport; no one recognized Zakia with her veils on or Ali with his close-cropped head. The passport authorities seemed indifferent, and the group was soon aboard the hour-and-a-half-long Kam Air flight to Dushanbe.
13
IN THE LAND OF THE BOTTOM-FEEDERS
Tajikistan’s two biggest exports are aluminum from the state-controlled monopoly—the proceeds of which are believed to be funneled into offshore companies belonging to the dictatorial president, Emomali Rahmon—and prostitutes. Women from Tajikistan fill brothels throughout South Asia, including in Afghanistan, where indigenous prostitution is rare, despite the poverty. As the American ambassador to Tajikistan described it in a report to the State Department, “From the president down to the policeman on the street, government is characterized by cronyism and corruption.”1 The country is so broke with such a trade deficit that its only hope is foreign investment, but the few investors who dare to come rarely stay long. One prominent Afghan businessman told me he had closed his factory in Dushanbe, putting dozens out of work, because the annual bribes demanded by the tax office exceeded his annual gross profits.2 Mahmadsaid Ubaidulloev, the chairman of the upper house of the Tajik parliament, a rubber-stamp body like all of the country’s democratic institutions, was not just corrupt but, as described in another leaked State Department cable, deeply delusional. Discussing the Afghan War with the American ambassador, Richard E. Hoagland, Mr. Ubaidulloev, who was also the mayor of the capital city, Dushanbe, warned the ambassador about extraterrestrial wars to come. “We know there is life on other planets, but we must make peace here first,” Mr. Hoagland quoted him as saying. Worried about the rampant drug smuggling across the shared Afghan-Tajik frontier, the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) contracted with a Tajik firm to make winter uniforms for the country’s border force, only to discover they were being made of lightweight summer material by female Tajik workers who went unpaid for their labor. Another INL project provided the border patrol with bomb-and drug-sniffing dogs, highly trained animals that can sell for more than a hundred thousand dollars each. An INL inspection discovered that the dogs were being used as watchdogs in freezing conditions and had been put out to stud to breed other dogs for sale. The INL recommended that any future dogs sent there be neutered first to prevent that from happening again. In addition, many of the sniffer dogs could not be accounted for at all.3 As the border guards were poorly paid and underfed, there was speculation that some of America’s dogs had been eaten.
In retrospect, I should have known better than to help the lovers flee to Tajikistan. We just did not appreciate how brazen the corruption was there. After all, we thought, they were Muslims and Tajiks, like Afghanistan’s second-largest ethnic group and like Zakia’s family—how different could they be, even in a former Soviet republic? And anyway, what would corrupt Tajik officials care about three poor Afghans?
“Dushanbe Airport,” reads a publicity blurb on its website in English, “is indeed a delight for the passengers as it caters varied services in a truly graceful way. It is categorized as a ‘civil airport’ as both the common masses as well as the officials belonging to the armed forces like the Military.” Predictably, decades of Communist rule have left their mark; the terminal is ugly, squat, functional, and small.
The plan for them all to travel separately unraveled as soon as they reached immigration, because of one unexpected detail: the landing cards. An immigration officer pointed to the pile on a counter, and Zakia and Anwar looked at it blankly; Jawad, coming up behind, realized the problem and joined them to help them fill out the cards. It drew attention to the whole group, all the more so because Anwar was the only man in the terminal wearing traditional garb. The Tajik immigration officers knew a moneymaking opportunity when they saw it and grilled all four of them; the officials scoffed at the few small bills the group had offered in their passports and demanded a hundred dollars each to let them into the country, even though they had valid visas. They settled for fifty somonis apiece—about ten dollars. Bad as that was, it seemed more annoying than threatening. Tajik airport officials were crooked, it seemed, but cheap.
The four of them found a hotel in a neighborhood close to downtown Dushanbe that had been recommended by the Consultant as relatively inexpensive, in an area frequented by Afghans. A sprawling, Soviet-era place, the Hotel Istiqlol (“Freedom”) had two separate wings. Anwar and the lovers stayed in one side, and Jawad in the other. He paid for them and the desk clerk refused to give him a receipt. When the shift changed the next morning, the new desk clerk asked for payment again or, absent that, since they had no receipts, a little bribe to start the day.
Because their visas were valid for up to a six-month-long stay, their plan was to find an inexpensive apartment and settle in there, waiting to see if there was any progress on visas from the Canadians or the Americans, before claiming asylum as refugees. If there was progress, they could return to
Kabul within those six months. Once they were refugees, the Tajik authorities would cancel their visas, forbid them residence in cities like Dushanbe, and force them to relocate to remote parts of the country. Covered by the rugged Pamir Mountains, more than 50 percent of Tajikistan is over ninety-eight hundred feet in elevation, with many peaks above twenty thousand feet, and 93 percent of the land area mountainous. It is a place of breathtaking beauty, however ruthless and unscrupulous its apparatchiks might be; tourism is unsurprisingly rare.
On their second day in Dushanbe, Ali and Anwar went out house-hunting around midday. They were separated from Jawad by a few hundred feet when four men came and surrounded him. They wore cheap suits with no ties.
“They showed me their badges and said they were secret police. They said, ‘What are you doing here?’ and ‘We are going to deport you.’ I said, ‘What have I done?’ They said, ‘You came here yesterday, and you’re walking around like this in the city?’” The suggestion was that merely doing so was an offense.
A car pulled up, a ratty old Lada, with two more policemen inside. Two of them shoved Jawad into the backseat between them while two others got in the front. “Let me call my friend,” Jawad said, and took out his phone—thinking to warn Ali to get out of the area—but they snatched it from him and told him to shut up. Then they came right to the point, as they dangled handcuffs in front of his face. “Give us your money.” He took out a pocketful of somonis, but they scoffed at that and began methodically searching him. “They touched me everywhere, all my pockets, everything, until they found my money,” he said. Because Jawad did not trust the hotel, he and the others had taken their cash with them when they went out. Jawad was stripped of all the money he had, nearly a thousand dollars, and turned out of the car. The policemen told him to return to his hotel, and when Jawad protested that he now did not have taxi fare, they gave him 20 somonis. The first taxi that stopped demanded thirty but finally settled for twenty when Jawad said he had just been robbed.
“You’ve met our police, have you?” the driver said. “Welcome to Tajikistan. We have no crime here. We just have police.”
The Tajiks also claim to have the world’s biggest flag, a banner nearly a hundred feet high by two hundred feet wide, flying on a hill in the center of town and visible from nearly everywhere in the capital. This is the country’s only serious claim to any respectable sort of fame, but it’s not true.4
As an Afghan, Jawad was no stranger to corruption, but the blatancy of it in Dushanbe astonished him. “It’s always money, money there. It’s worse than Afghanistan,” he said. “They are like fishes—their mouths are always open, and they’re saying, ‘How much money do you have?’ They openly ask you for money. No one in Afghanistan would do that.” Jawad also was an ethnic Tajik, but these were not people he recognized or felt any kinship with at all, even though they spoke the same tongue. These were post-Soviet creatures, inhabiting a regime that was thoroughly rotten. “We expected a greedy, corrupt country, but not like this,” he said.
The plan had to change. We discussed it and decided that it would be best if Ali and his family immediately applied for refugee status instead of waiting; it was only a matter of time until the police turned their attention on them as well. Once registered, they would have some measure of international legal protection. It was dumb luck that they weren’t together with Jawad when he was picked up; as it was, finding their way blind back to the hotel was difficult. They did not know its name—the sort of thing that happens when you can’t read signs—but they managed to explain to a taxi driver where they were staying, well enough for him to understand and take them there (overcharging them by a factor of five).
They all went to the UNHCR office early the next morning and were there when it opened, but the door staff simply told them to go away, without any explanation. They stayed and insisted on speaking to someone, standing in the street and worrying that the police would come at any moment. Finally, after many phone calls between the American embassy in Kabul and UNHCR, an official came out, a thin woman in some sort of uniform, with a miniskirt so short that it shocked the Afghans. When they explained that UNHCR in Kabul had sent word about their case, the official called them liars and sent them away again. They had the impression that unless they paid someone, no one was going to help them. Advised by UNHCR in Kabul to keep waiting, they persisted, and after a few hours a female staffer came out and wordlessly handed them a slip of paper on which was written the name of an organization, Rights and Prosperity, and its address. That simple act had taken nearly six hours, with no one else in line ahead of them. Fortunately, Jawad was there to read it for them.
The staffers at Rights and Prosperity were sullen but cooperative and explained what would happen next. The trio would have to establish a residence, then go to the police station in the neighborhood and register with the police, leaving their passports there for a few days. When they got the passports back, they could then return to Rights and Prosperity and begin the formal process of applying for refugee status. Jawad helped them find an apartment, looking over his shoulder the whole time, but the secret police did not show up again.
Once Ali and family knew where to go—the location of the police registration office and the Rights and Prosperity NGO—it seemed risky for Jawad to remain with them and likely that his presence might draw unwelcome attention to them from the police. At three o’clock the next morning, Jawad went to the airport for the five-o’clock flight to Dubai. He borrowed three hundred dollars from Ali for his travel expenses, but this time he hid the cash better, deep in the lining of his laptop bag. At the airport the immigration police had the same openmouthed, bottom-feeding approach as they closed in on him. “How much money do you have?” and “Give us all your money,” and “Tell me the truth, do you have dollars?” were their conversational openers. He insisted that he had none, and although they pulled his possessions apart and body-searched him thoroughly, they never found it.
Zakia and Ali and Anwar were now on their own, at the beginning of what they thought would be a long road toward resettlement in a third country. When they appeared for registration at the police station in Dushanbe, they were extorted to pay bribes; the standard ten-dollar fee for registration became fifty dollars each, and then, before they were allowed to leave, the police demanded another hundred; so they paid a total of two hundred fifty dollars, when the official fee would have been closer to thirty for all of them. Then they had just two simple steps left: picking up their passports after registration and returning to the Rights and Prosperity office to lodge their claims for refugee status.5
It was clear by now that Tajikistan would only be a transitional place at best, even though they spoke the language; there was little or nothing for them there. Everywhere they looked, they saw evidence of the corruption and degradation that came out of decades of being part of the Soviet Union. Even the country’s mosques were subjugated, with the authorities giving mullahs a selection of sermons they were allowed to read and jail terms if they did not. A taxi driver offered to find Anwar a second wife for the night. Another pointed out that “in that building are eighty girls who give massages” and told him how little it would cost. Prostitutes plied the street corners at night; uniformed policemen were their pimps. Drug dealers were everywhere. Tajikistan is an important staging area on the drug route between Afghanistan’s poppy fields and the proliferating heroin cribs of Russia and the former Soviet republics. Anwar was horrified. “I have nothing but contempt for this country,” he said later. Hopefully it would be different in rural areas, where once registered as refugees they would be obliged to stay until their cases were processed.
By October 6, Zakia and Ali and Anwar had their passports back from the Tajik police’s registration office in Dushanbe, where again they’d been extorted for another hundred dollars. Jawad had arranged a taxi that could take them directly from the police station to the Rights and Prosperity office to lodge their applications for refugee status.
Oddly, they did not go immediately. The next day, when Jawad called, Ali told him he was going to wait yet another day to complete the process because it was raining heavily that day. Then they let another whole day—this one of dry weather—go by before going to the office. Asked later why they had delayed so long, Ali shrugged and said, “We were negligent. I don’t know why.” Finally, on Thursday morning, October 9, three days after they retrieved their passports from the police registration office, they got into a taxi and went to complete their applications as refugees. A few blocks from the Rights and Prosperity office on Hofiz Sherozi Avenue, two plainclothesmen standing on the street flagged the taxi to a stop and ordered the three passengers out of the car. The three-day delay might not have mattered, although perhaps it gave the secret police time to decide what to do with them.
It was the middle of the morning, and the street was full of passersby; none showed any sign of concern as the secret policemen systematically searched the two men and then demanded that Zakia give them her purse. Ali tried to stand in front of her, but they shoved him out of the way and threatened to handcuff him if he tried anything else. They made Zakia take off her gold bracelets and hand them over; they found the five thousand dollars the couple carried—their entire savings and the remainder of all the donor money from WAW.
When Zakia did not give up her bag, a policeman tore it from her hands—something that in Afghanistan would have been tantamount to touching another man’s wife. Ali snapped and lifted a fist ready to strike the policeman. On his fist was his antique turquoise ring, which they noticed as they grabbed his arms. The ring was his proudest possession, given to him by his mother, who had it from her mother, who had it from hers, the oldest and most valuable thing he owned. “Please don’t take this ring, please! Think of God, think of Mohammad!” Ali pleaded with them. He grabbed one of the policemen by the lapels, but that only infuriated them, and they began beating and kicking him. Still, people passing by did not bother to look—or did not dare.