The Face Behind the Veil

by Donna Gehrke-White

  Then she was sent to Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia for a three-month training program on peace-building.

  “What a big difference when I came to the United States,” she says. “I had thought no one is helping us. But I realized we are not alone in our suffering.”

  Re-energized, she returned first to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan, where she was promptly visited by the Taliban, who demanded to know why she had come back. She told them, “This is my country and I belong here.”

  She felt driven to help. “I saw how the women needed us. Even a very small amount of support means a big difference to women there.”

  One event that sustained Farida’s convictions was seeing a woman give birth by herself, because there were no doctors or clinics. The woman had high blood pressure and couldn’t push the baby out. “She died in front of my eyes. She could have been saved. I could not stay calm. I have to be able to help her and other women like her.”

  But the Taliban wouldn’t let her alone, even venturing into Pakistan to threaten her. One official told her: “You know it is very easy to kill you and your children.”

  Fortunately, she returned with her two young sons to Eastern Mennonite University for more training, and this time she applied for political asylum. The Tahirih Justice Center, which advocates for women and children fleeing human rights abuses and violence, filed legal briefs in her behalf. In 2001, she won her asylum. It was a heady victory but soon Farida had to concern herself with finding work to support herself and her sons. “I just applied everywhere”—stores, restaurants, and offices—“I was not hearing from anybody.” She managed to work a few days at a nursing home and was content to mop the facility and clean bathrooms. But, as a Muslim woman who is required to be modest, she felt she could not undress and bathe the home’s elderly men, so ultimately she had to quit.

  But fate intervened—in her favor. The Vital Voices Global Partnership hired her to help Afghan and Middle Eastern women.

  Thanks to Farida’s steady paycheck, she sent money home to her family and her husband, who were still in the refugee camps. She had applied for her husband to come to the United States, but after 9/11, the government froze the number of refugees allowed into the United States, especially Middle Eastern men.

  Meanwhile, her career was taking off. Farida helped advise First Lady Laura Bush about the conditions of Afghan women and Mrs. Bush used information she provided for a radio address. Farida appeared with the President and Mrs. Bush when he signed a bill to give aid to help Afghan women. Farida would also work with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and other congressional leaders.

  Meanwhile, her husband was becoming depressed and Farida promised to visit him. With their sons, they spent a month in Pakistan after the children were out of school. But when Farida said she felt she had to return to America for a better life for her sons, her husband balked. He wanted them to stay with him. Claiming that his life was useless, he couldn’t see living without them. Farida urged patience—his U.S. asylum papers had to come through one day—but he only grew more upset, telling his wife that people were saying bad things about her.

  Although accused of forgetting her culture, and not living her life in the Islamic way, she tried to reason with him. “I have a stable job. It is dignified and respectful. I’m helping people. This is a future for our children.”

  He would have none of it. He decided to flee with their sons. “He felt he had to take control,” she says. And so Farida came back to America alone.

  She was beside herself with worry for her children. But at least her husband allowed her to talk to them on the telephone, and after three months, her husband was complaining that their sons were faring poorly. They were crying for cereal and milk—nourishment they had taken for granted in America. Only then did her husband agree she could take them back to America.

  To do so, Farida had to wait until she had accrued enough vacation time at work. However, by summer, when she was finally able to return to Pakistan, her husband had changed his mind. They would start over, he declared, in the newly liberated Afghanistan. Farida protested, but he took away her and their sons’ American passports. Trapped, she went with them to Kabul.

  Her brother tried to intervene but the husband was implacable. This was the end: She felt she had no choice but to escape.

  When she could, she and the children crept from the house and hurried over to her brother’s. She had assumed her husband would eventually come after her, which he did. But she had a plan. When he and friends began pounding on her brother’s front door, she and her sons raced out the back and jumped over the side wall next to her brother’s home. They landed in the yard of the family next door, who took them in overnight. The next day, Farida and her sons made it to the home of a former co-worker from her Norwegian Church Aid days and they at last had a safe place to stay.

  While there, she became sick and, with a high fever, began to hallucinate. She thought she was going to die. She dreamed she saw a container filled with small bits of paper, each of which read, “All our prayers are with you.”

  “When I woke up there was no pain,” she says. “I prayed and thanked Allah.”

  It was also Thanksgiving week and, of all people, Senator Clinton was in Kabul to help American troops celebrate the holiday. She tried to help Farida, but Farida was forced to sneak out of Afghanistan because her husband had obtained a court order to keep her and the children there.

  The United Nations’ Rina Amiri and friends in the United States pleaded with the U.S. State Department to speed up Farida’s paperwork. She had so much support that Farida says a State Department official later told her that everyone was encouraging them to act, and it became their top priority to bring back Farida and her children.

  She and her sons are now back in Virginia. The boys lost a year’s schooling. Farida lost all their belongings because the landlord threw away her stuff when he evicted her for not paying rent while she was held in Afghanistan. But she was able to get her job back with the Vital Voices Global Partnership. She now has a new, neatly kept apartment in suburban Virginia, and feels blessed that her sons will have a better life. She, too, has fulfilling work, which includes taking in other struggling Muslim women to her apartment.

  And, of course, she continues to work to help bring peace to Afghanistan.

  “There have been twenty-five years of war,” she observes. “How can you have any stability with all that war?”

  Many in Afghanistan, she adds, no longer know how to resolve disputes peacefully. “They are used to speaking with a weapon.”

  31

  TANIA, THE RUNAWAY

  FOR YEARS, Tania’s family had eked out an existence in a refugee camp in a strange country, trying to wait out the violence in their homeland. It has been a familiar plight for millions of Africans and Asians fleeing wars and violence. Finally, there was word that Tania’s family could go home: The oligarchy had been overthrown. There was the promise of peace.

  To get home, Tania’s family trudged hundreds of miles across mountains and arid lands. They were reunited with members of their extended family whom they hadn’t seen in years. The welcome home was sweet, indeed.

  But the reunions were soon to become a nightmare for Tania, now twenty-three. One of her father’s brothers, who had remained in their country, rapidly made up for lost time with his long-absent brother. Both now had grown sons and daughters and within a month after the homecoming, the brother suggested to Tania’s father that their two families cement their ties with marriage: Tania would marry his son and one of her brothers would marry his daughter.

  Although in most of the United States marriage to a first cousin is illegal, in Tania’s third-world country—one of the poorest on the planet—the tribal ways are very much in force. Families have intermarried for centuries, and the tradition still goes on today. As such, the proposal was considered not strange, but entirely proper. To this day, fathers like Tania’s are arranging the marriages of
their children, especially their daughters, for it is considered wise for the fathers to choose their daughters’ husbands and it is a dishonor to the family if the daughter does not comply. Tania’s father thought about the offer and agreed to it, thinking that his brother’s children would be good for his. He had met his nephew and niece and was impressed with them.

  Tania had also met her husband-to-be and thought he seemed acceptable, even pleasant. Well, he was family, wasn’t he? “He seemed nice,” she remarked, “but you know how some people change?”

  That’s what happened to her: The man she thought she was marrying turned out to be entirely different after the agreement was reached. The polite older man—he was about a half dozen years her senior—suddenly became arrogant, abusive, and controlling as soon as their engagement became public. As far as he was concerned, even before their marriage, she became his property to manage as he saw fit, an attitude that included meting out corporeal punishment.

  “He hit me so many times,” she admits.

  The first time stunned her—he just smacked her for some minor thing she can’t even remember. It escalated to beatings and threats that he would kill her family if she did not do as he said. Traditionally, opinion in her country was on his side: There have been honor killings before if family members thought they had been dishonored.

  Tania was taken aback at this man whom she had trusted. “We never thought the family was like this, that they were so violent,” she says. They were, after all, blood kin—and Tania’s family was not violent.

  He also ordered Tania about. “He would tell me, ‘You are my property. You have to do what I tell you to do.”

  At about the time Tania was decided that she couldn’t possibly go through with this marriage, her brother, who was betrothed to her fiancé’s sister, began having second thoughts, too. She was not what he had thought he was getting, either. His and Tania’s unease about their future spouses only worsened as weeks went by, but they suddenly found their situation impossible to get out of. It is a sign of disgrace if an engagement is broken and the other family was making threats if the marriages did not go through.

  Tania did not see how she could marry this man. She had finished her high school education—a rarity for women in her country where many today remain illiterate—and was looking forward to college. She had a rare opportunity to study agriculture in the United States, and would be able to learn about farming techniques in a three-week seminar. The program was designed so that she could, in turn, then pass on to other people in her country what she learned. It was a great opportunity for her—the beginning of a fine education and a virtual assurance of work for her once she returned home. But there was one major problem—her fiancé refused to let her out of his sight, and refused to let her go to America.

  By this time, Tania says, “I hated him.”

  She decided she could no longer endure being beaten and ordered about. She decided to tell him that she could not marry him. It was over. And, indeed, she went through with her plan.

  Then she had second thoughts—and fears. What if he did come after her family? There had to be a better way to get rid of him without her family suffering retribution.

  That’s when she came up with the idea of apologizing to him and saying she had been confused. She told him it might be better for her to go to America, to have time by herself, to think things over. “That way I would pretend to miss him.” Both of them, she added, would have time and distance to think over their future marriage. And it was, after all, only three weeks and then she would be back.

  She was relieved when he agreed to the plan.

  When she went to her family to tell them what she was going to do, her brother agreed with her. He, too, had decided likewise, and, indeed, would abruptly “disappear” so he would not have to marry.

  At last, Tania boarded a plane to the United States for her course. It was at one of her classes that she met human rights activist Farida Azizi (see preceding chapter), who had endured some harrowing times herself in Afghanistan. Farida gave Tania hope.

  After Tania had told Farida her story, Farida made a suggestion that changed Tania’s life: Why not stay in the United States and file for political asylum? Tania would be free from any abuse. Farida was now on the board of Tahirih Center, a Virginia-based legal rights group that represented poor refugee women. She would ask if the center would take Tania’s case. The center agreed.

  Tania is eager to start making her way in the United States and is looking for a job. “I will do anything,” she says. Her English is good and so are her prospects. Tania is confident she will eventually find work.

  It is her family that she worries about. For that reason, she did not want to use her real name for this chapter, in case the publication of her story would further enrage her angry fiancé and his family. The fear was not misplaced.

  After both she and her brother had escaped, her uncle’s infuriated family arrived, with friends in tow, to her father’s home. They demanded to know where Tania and her brother were. Tania’s fiancé and the other men ransacked the house and threatened more violence if the two did not return.

  “When I called my family, my mom was crying,” Tania says. “It was a very bad situation.”

  Her ex-fiancé continues to demand her return. Tania is sometimes tempted, just to help out her family, but, she says, “I can’t. I think I would be killed.” Besides, she adds, “I have suffered enough. I don’t want any more suffering.”

  32

  DEMAN: SAFE FROM BOMBINGS AND SADDAM

  DEMAN ZUBAR, A KURD from northern Iraq, was only eleven years old when the bombs came. The planes flew near her Kurdish village and dropped the bombs on a nearby town, where members of her mother’s side of the family lived. She never saw them again. “They died,” she says, as did many others—men, women, and children—in the streets, in shops, in their homes. They were killed because they were Kurds, a minority making up about 20 percent of the Iraqi population, whom Saddam Hussein persecuted ruthlessly.

  The village might have been one of those targeted for chemical warfare. Documents from the Iraqi secret police and military, captured in the 1990s, disclosed how Iraq gassed Kurdish villages as retaliation for the Kurds’ support of the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War and for starting their own rebellion. Human rights groups documented how the Iraqi military used low-flying planes to drop bombs containing nerve or mustard gas on Kurdish villages. “Saddam treated us different,” Deman says. That is an understatement. In 1988 alone, the Iraq military killed 200,000 Kurds in an ethnic cleansing campaign.

  Deman grew up in fear of Saddam Hussein and his military as the violence continued. In 1991, Saddam again sent troops to brutally suppress another Kurdish rebellion. Kurdish leaders thought the United States would support them after American troops chased Iraqi forces out of Kuwait during the first Gulf War in 1991. But President Bush did not send any troops or launch any bombing missions to help the unlucky Kurds. Once again, Saddam destroyed entire villages in the course of putting down the rebellion. Tens of thousands of Kurds died, while others fled to nearby Turkey.

  Amid the years of bombings and military invasions, Deman’s family tried to live a normal life. Deman went to school, eventually earning a nursing degree in her community near the Turkish border. She married, became pregnant, and had a daughter in 1996. But days after she had given birth, Saddam Hussein started another military campaign against the Kurds. This time, Deman and her husband decided they had had enough. With a newborn in tow, they fled to Turkey, where they asked for political asylum in the United States. Their baby was forty days old when they were flown to, of all places, a refugee camp in Guam, a U.S. territory in the western Pacific. They lived in the refugee camp for two and a half months before they could relocate to their new home in the Phoenix area.

  Her husband found employment and they had a son. But the stresses of adjusting to America were too much. Deman and her husband divorced in 1999. Deman has been
on her own since then.

  Though others are too afraid, Deman, adamant in her dislike for Saddam, is willing to talk openly about Iraq and her new life here. A friend of hers, a Shiite from Basra near the Persian Gulf, says she fears to talk openly. “He was a dictator. Not good—horrible,” she says. “He hurt my family. He forced my brother and cousins to go to wars.” Three to be exact: the war against Iran, the first Gulf War, and the American invasion in 2003.

  Deman’s family was just as hurt by Saddam. But Deman is one of the most confident of Muslim refugee women, says Rosalind Rivera, director of the Arizona Refugee Community Center. Indeed, Deman is becoming acclimated to the United States, including its politics. “I like George Bush. Most of us like George Bush for one reason. No more Saddam Hussein.”

  True, she says, a violent insurgency is at work against the American troops and Iraqi people as Iraq tries to establish a new government. But she credits President Bush with transforming the country, giving it a chance to become a democracy.

  She is grateful to be in America. She and her family are much safer. Her two children, now seven and nine years old, go to school. She volunteers in their classes and helps out at the refugee center every week where she has lots of friends. She is hoping to start advanced English classes soon so that she can be a nurse here.

  It has not been easy. She has struggled to take care of her children by herself. Her husband remarried and has a little boy with his new wife. Deman herself almost married again before her friends urged her to slow down the relationship and heal emotionally.