Walking the Precipice

by Barbara Bick

  On the third day, we include a visit to the regional UNICEF office, where we meet a young woman, Fauzia, who helps run the office. She is lovely, with a stylish haircut and an elegant loose silk dress that is both modest and fashionable. The habitual Muslim scarf is tied loosely around her neck. Fauzia tells us that she began medical studies at Kabul University but left when the Taliban closed all the schools. She is nearly fluent in English and lets us know that no women are included in the regular meetings of the nongovernmental aid organizations that coordinate local programs. Fauzia begins to describe a pet idea of hers, to set up a silkworm industry, when the UNICEF chief comes in and takes over. We are annoyed with the chief’s discourtesy in treating Fauzia so dismissively, so we deliberately turn and direct a number of our questions to her. He answers in her stead however and, since it is clear that Fauzia wants to avoid conflict, we listen quietly to what he has to say.

  UNICEF had programs all over Afghanistan, the chief tells us, but these are all closed in the areas conquered by the Taliban. Under UN rules they are not allowed to support schools that deny education by gender, so it is only in the north that UNICEF currently funds schools, some 250 of them. In addition, the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan provides aid to nearly 600 more schools. As is traditional in provincial areas, the schools are separated by gender, but both girls’ and boys’ schools are academic.

  After all our excursions, we return to Star House to have our meals and relax. One day, three local women come to meet with Nasrine, who asks me to join them. Their political group has gotten the news that an Afghan woman activist from the West is in town, and these three have been delegated to meet her. The women appear to be poor, working class, meagerly dressed. They look worn and tired, but they are totally rapt as Nasrine speaks. They know Assim from Taloqan, their hometown, where Massoud was based before the city was taken by the Taliban. They tell Nasrine they love Assim and praise him for helping them get their group organized. I am thrilled to know that such groups exist, as they could be the backbone of a strong political movement for change. Nasrine is terrific, encouraging their political work, telling them about Western feminists, and explaining NEGAR’s work. The women promise to get thousands of signatures for the petition from men and women alike.

  Nasrine is eloquent and persuasive everywhere she goes, and she is tireless. When there are no guests available for her to proselytize at Star House, she sits outside and engages the mujahidin guards. One night she bursts into my room waving a petition with the signature of a prominent mullah who is an overnight guest.

  In between our trips and meetings around Faizabad, I spend a good deal of time talking to Mary MacMakin. Sometimes, Sara turns the camera on while I “interview” Mary for the documentary. Her stories of life in Kabul before the Russian war and during the mujahidin civil war fascinate me.

  Mary came to Afghanistan with her husband and their four young children in 1961 when her husband, like hundreds of others from the developed world, was sent to help build Afghanistan’s infrastructure. Bob MacMakin was commissioned by the Asia Foundation to develop an educational press. Mary describes the times as “just so much fun.” Zahir Shah was an enlightened monarch. The city and countryside were unmarred by pollution or war. Afghan Islam was tolerant, diverse religions practiced their faiths, and foreigners took little notice of the problems underlying the calm exterior. Mary admits that in those days she wasn’t necessarily aware of the tribal, conservative culture that was so oppressive to the overwhelming majority of Afghan women. She and her family spent six years living an idyllic, expatriate life in Kabul. They returned to the States in 1967. Four years later, Mary decided to come back to Afghanistan, leaving behind Bob and their now-grown children.

  For ten years she lived the life of a Kabuli. A physical therapist, Mary practiced her profession and trained students in hospitals in Kabul and Taloqan. She left again in 1981, two years after the Soviets invaded, and returned in 1992, with the fall of the Afghan Communist regime. By then Kabul was a far different city from the one she had left eleven years before. The population was swollen with people fleeing the devastated countryside. Streets were filled with the wounded and disabled, with orphans and destitute widows.

  “Still, the coming of the mujahidin government did not interrupt the normal flow of life in Kabul,” Mary says. “Women continued to hold 80 percent of the teaching positions in Kabul’s schools, young women as well as men attended the university, women worked in the post office, in government ministries, as flight attendants on Arianna airlines, with foreign nongovernmental and UN agencies.” She is describing life in Kabul as I saw it in 1990 before the mujahidin came to power.

  But as the rivalries and tensions grew within the mujahidin coalition, “It all fell apart” says Mary. She started an organization named PARSA (Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation Support for Afghanistan) to provide war widows with viable skills so they could support themselves and their families. Bob, who had retired to Bisbee, Arizona, became treasurer of PARSA, which was chartered in the United States, and editor of a newsletter to keep supporters informed on Mary’s projects. One of the projects, a handicraft business begun in 1992 that sold items made by women to outlets in Kabul, the United States, and Canada, was still in operation in 2001. “We were even making and selling sanitary napkins,” Mary says, “for the new spenders in town, the young women working for foreign agencies with a good salary, able to afford our product.” Mary also set up job training for boys who were supporting their families.

  But as the mujahidin infighting intensified, life in Kabul became a nightmare. “Hekmatyar wasn’t able to seize control of Kabul for himself, so he started destroying the city block by block,” Mary tells Sara and me. “He was safe in his nest ten miles away in Char Asyab, and he rained down rockets on the city, killing civilians by the thousands for a year and a half. The fighting got dirty as different ethnic groups battled each other. Then the rape stories started. A Hazara woman confirmed that she had been raped, after which gossip swept the city faster than e-mails, doubling, tripling the number of rapes. There may have been ten, there may have been five hundred rapes, no one knows; the assumption is that mujahidin from all the forces were raping, looting, and fighting. Women and girls stayed at home to be protected by their families.

  “And then, in the winter of 1995-96, the Taliban militia pulled up close to Kabul and did the same blanket rocketing as Hekmatyar had earlier. For eight months they pounded the city, killing thousands more civilians, until the end of September, when Massoud moved his troops and armaments up to Jabal Seraj, forty-five miles away, at the foot of the Hindu Kush.”

  Mary witnessed what few Westerners had seen. “The Taliban rolled into town on a Thursday as Massoud’s people pulled out. Friday was very quiet, the day for rest and prayers. On Saturday not a woman in all of Kabul went to her job, not a teacher, not a clerk. Out of the fifty or so desks in the huge Mille Bank, all but a handful were empty—just a few male clerks were there. Aid organizations and UN agencies were scrambling to run their offices without their female staff. The post office was in disarray as most of the clerks were women . . .” Mary stops talking, too upset to go on. She has lived through the past eight years of the Taliban’s rule, seeing the women of Kabul turn into wraiths, unable to feed their children or themselves if they have no male relative to support them, locked away in their homes, barred from the most basic of human interactions. PARSA has helped some of them, but Mary has spent these years all too aware of the many women she cannot reach.

  Although Afghan women were severely restricted, Mary was able to continue her public life as before, riding her bicycle, gray hair uncovered, seemingly just an eccentric elderly Western woman. But part of her life went underground; she set up covert schools for girls and managed to keep women working in her projects, despite the Taliban’s decree that all Western agencies lay off all Afghan women on their staffs. In July of 2000, the Ministry for Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue raided the P
ARSA office. Mary and her entire staff of men and women were carted away to jail, based on the claim that incriminating material had been found in Mary’s possession. There was a major uproar among nongovernmental agencies in Kabul and in the Western media, which forced the Taliban to offer to release Mary and some of the men on PARSA’s staff. Mary refused to leave the jail unless the seven women staff members were also released. Once they were all out, her visa was revoked and she was told she had to leave the country. She moved to Pakistan and set up her PARSA office there.

  Mary dislikes working from Pakistan and she is planning to move her organization to the Northern Alliance’s stronghold in Faizabad, so we get to see more of the town as we accompany her on her search for housing. One day Sara and I go with her to look at two houses for rent near the UN guesthouse where she is staying. This is a newer, planned district where streets are more or less straight, with two lanes of traffic. Pedestrian walkways are also straighter and broader than in our part of town, but they are still made of packed dirt, with flowing canal ditches alongside. The compounds are larger, built for prosperous families. After the Taliban banned Afghan women from working, many international and nongovernmental agencies moved their offices north to Faizabad so they could hire women, and most of the agencies are located in this newer district. Foreign agencies often have staff living quarters and guest rooms as well as offices in their compounds.

  The first house is shown to us by the owner, a well-dressed, youthful woman bedecked in gold jewelry. She and her husband, a doctor, live elsewhere and rent this inherited, mud-brick house. It is on one side of the lot, while on the other side the compound boasts a vegetable garden and fruit trees. There is a separate building for a semi-open kitchen with an adobe oven, and another for the outhouse. A covered trough from the outhouse carries the waste to drainage beyond the walls. Water is delivered once a week to a cistern.

  The house has several rooms, all without doors. Window openings are cut in the wall, but there is neither glass nor screens. The interior walls are mud, the floors hard-packed earth. Mary walks around as she considers how to use each room—one for her bedroom, one or two for staff and work space. A family is living there and they watch us despondently; they know a foreigner will bring higher rent and they will have to leave.

  All this occurs while our meetings proceed relentlessly. The most interesting are with women community organizers and with President Rabbani and his wife.

  The community organizers are four professional women who represent the Badakhshan Women’s Association, formed in 1998 for the purpose of finding and creating jobs for poor women in the province. The group began with forty women, whose first project was a needs survey. They went into each of the sixty quarters, or neighborhoods, of Faizabad and in each met with a local woman who knew her community, its labor skills, and needs. These sixty community women agreed to be the core group that would meet regularly with the women of their neighborhoods on issues such as health care, hygiene, and family planning. I can hardly believe the level of work and sophistication of these women who have never been trained in this kind of organizing.

  We visit one of the group’s projects, begun with a grant from the World Food Programme, which provides the eighteen women involved with a kilo of wheat daily. The women are making a delicious candy, which is always available at Star House. We watch the hard, tedious, completely unmechanized work. Apricot pits are cracked open and the fingernail-sized nut inside pulled out. Meanwhile, sugar is being liquified in pans set over open fire pits. Then, as the apricot nuts are rolled and tossed in a large, heavy metal pot by one woman, another pours the hot sugar from a ladle until all the nuts are encased in a glistening white coating.

  The four women who lead the association exemplify the type of educated middle- and upper-class Afghan women who have a long history of participation in voluntary groups. I wonder about the women we are meeting, the doctors, the teachers, and others in senior positions. Almost all did their undergraduate and graduate work at Kabul University under the Communist regime. I want to question them about how much they were influenced by the expanded role of women during that period, but I feel unable to ask Nasrine to translate such questions. I am surely being oversensitive, but I know her hostility to the Communists and I fear embarrassing her.

  An elated Nasrine also manages to arrange our visit with President Rabbani. For the political leader of the Northern Alliance, I dress in my peacock blue silk outfit once again, the one I had brought along for such formal occasions, and Nasrine puts on her good black suit, with long sleeves and a skirt almost to her ankles. But she refuses to cover her long hair.

  The headquarters of the Islamic State of Afghanistan is an old mansion. The green, white, and black national flag flies in front. Mujahidin stand, sit, and mill around outside.

  In a long, marble-floored “throne room,” we are introduced to President Rabbani, who wears a long white robe, an oversized gray silk jacket, and an elegant white turban. He is seated on a gold brocade divan with an elaborate carved back. Nasrine bows her head slightly to him and then presents him with copies of her two books, which he accepts with a warm smile. He knew Nasrine’s family many years ago.

  Mary, Sara, and I sit down on a row of straight-backed gold chairs opposite Rabbani; Nasrine joins us and then the president begins to speak in Dari. He talks. And he talks. He smiles. And he talks. My head keeps snapping up as I try to stay awake, but I can’t help but doze off. Finally he stops, and Nasrine goes up to talk to him privately. Later, she tells us she asked him why women in Faizabad are wearing the burqa. He replied that he had never said they must. So Nasrine suggested that he encourage some of the older women to appear in public without the burqa. She feels optimistic that he will take up her plan for women to go uncovered. When the audience is over, we are told that we will lunch with Mme Rabbani at the family’s home.

  Enclosed by the usual high walls, the Rabbani’s house resembles millions of middle-class dwellings in the United States, but looms large and luxurious in this old town. The front garden is overwhelmed by a huge circular satellite dish and towering florescent stanchion. A group of women, whom I think of as “a bevy of handmaidens,” ushers us into a large room suitable for formal receptions. Then Mme Rabbani comes in and the room is transformed into a family room by her friendly presence. She is a large woman, forty-five years old, and she speaks to us in English.

  We exchange gifts, which we always carry with us for unexpected moments such as this. We chat about our families. Both her family and her husband’s have lived in Faizabad for generations. Her father, a judge, served in Parliament, and she graduated from the girls’ high school we visited. “I used to be beautiful,” she tells us laughing, “but after twenty years of war, I am no longer. First the Russians”—she casts her eyes up—“and now these silly ones. How did they descend upon us? They came and took away all the rights of women. This area is very freedom loving and my husband has a free mentality.”

  We know that, as a youth, her husband went to an Islamic university in Cairo, where he joined the conservative Muslim Brotherhood. Returning to Faizabad, he built a boys’ religious school next to his house. Nasrine and Mary have both told us that, unlike Massoud, Rabbani is a traditionalist and has never, in his long career as a theology professor and Islamist party builder, shown any sign of concern for women’s rights.

  Nasrine leads the conversation around to the status of women and the wrecking of Afghan society by the Taliban. She explains the formation of NEGAR, the Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women, and our petition project to obtain a million signatures for the UN. As usual, Nasrine is eloquent, and Mme Rabbani responds with enthusiasm.

  “I will get hundreds of signatures,” she promises, “and will send them with my husband, who, as president of Afghanistan, will be going to address the UN in New York in November.”

  “Why don’t you go to the United States with him?” I burst out. “We’ll organize a large New York recepti
on for you. We’ll bring together the Afghan community, all the Afghan expatriates, with American feminists.” Compared to some of the plans Nasrine has put forth on this trip, I know organizing an event for Mme Rabbani would be a cakewalk. Rabbani is, after all, the UN-accredited President of Afghanistan, and few among the expat Afghan community are supportive of the Taliban. “We’ll make it an evening to support your orphanage,” I promise. Mme Rabbani seems to be considering the possibility.

  Eventually we are called in to lunch, and gasp at the size of the freshly baked nan, as huge as the platter they are stacked on. There is rice cooked with pistachio nuts and raisins, a mound of roasted meat decorated with caramelized carrot sticks, bowls of eggplant and yogurt, a succulent roasted chicken, and more vegetable dishes. Dessert is milk pudding and a spread of fruits. Mme Rabbani clearly relishes a good meal, as indicated by her figure.

  She wants us to see her favorite project, the orphanage and school we have promised to raise money for when—or if—she comes to New York. As we walk out of the house, she starts to slip on a burqa. Nasrine stops her and suggests that, as the wife of the president, she will set an important example if she walks with us with only a scarf covering her head. With a wide smile, Mme Rabbani looks over at her female entourage already covered in burqas for the outside and then, with her burqa thrown back on her head, she walks through the gate with us, her face uncovered.

  As we walk along the street, Mme Rabbani tells Nasrine that Afghan women feel safer concealed under the burqa, given that the Taliban is so close and many of the people who have fled to the town are conservative. In Sheghnan, a more secure spot further north, near Tajikistan, where there are fewer displaced people, many women do not wear the burqa, she says.