by Fawzia Koofi
{ LETTERS TO MY DAUGHTERS }
{ a memoir }
FAWZIA
KOOFI
LETTERS TO
MY DAUGHTERS
Copyright © 2011 by Fawzia Koofi
First published in France by Michel Lafon Publishing
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Douglas & McIntyre
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Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-55365-876-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-55365-877-1 (ebook)
“A Historical Timeline of Afghanistan” on pages 271–274
adapted with permission of BBC online
Copyediting by Lara Kordic
Jacket design by Naomi MacDougall
Jacket photograph © Reza
To my mom, who was the kindest, most talented teacher in the world; to both my daughters, who are the stars of my life; and to all women of Afghanistan
{ contents }
prologue September 2010
· · · PART ONE
one Just a Girl
two Stories of Old
three A Terrible Loss
four A New Start
five A Village Girl Again
six When Justice Dies
seven The War Within
eight Losing Her
· · · PART TWO
nine One Ordinary Thursday
ten Retreat to the North
eleven Everything Turns White
twelve A Taliban Wedding
thirteen An End before a Beginning
fourteen The Darkness Pervades
fifteen Back to My Roots
sixteen A Daughter for a Daughter
seventeen The Darkness Lifts
eighteen A New Purpose
nineteen A Movement for Change
epilogue A Dream for a War-Torn Nation
A Historical Timeline of Afghanistan
Acknowledgements
Photographs
· · PROLOGUE · ·
{ September 2010 }
THE MORNING I wrote the first letter to my daughters, I was due to attend a political meeting in Badakhshan, the province I represent as a member of the Afghan parliament. Badakhshan is the northernmost province of Afghanistan, bordering China, Pakistan and Tajikistan. It is also one of the poorest, wildest, most remote and culturally conservative areas in the country.
Badakhshan has the highest rate of maternal mortality and child mortality in the world—partly because of its inaccessibility and the crippling poverty of its people, and partly due to a culture that sometimes puts tradition ahead of women’s health. A man will rarely seek hospital treatment for his wife unless her life is clearly in danger. By the time she reaches hospital—often after days of agonizing labour while travelling on the back of a donkey over rocky mountain tracks—it is usually too late to save both mother and child.
That day I was warned not to travel to Badakhshan because of a credible threat that the Taliban planned to kill me by planting an improvised bomb under my car. The Taliban dislike women holding such powerful positions in government, and they dislike my public criticisms of them even more.
They often try to kill me.
Recently, they have tried even harder than usual, threatening my home, tracking my journeys to work so that they can lay a bomb as my car passes and even organizing gunmen to attack a convoy of police vehicles assigned to protect me. One gun attack on my car lasted thirty minutes and killed two policemen. I stayed inside the vehicle, not knowing if I would emerge alive or dead.
The Taliban and all who seek to silence me for speaking out against corruption and bad leadership in my country will not be happy until I am dead. That day, however, I ignored the threat, just as I have ignored countless others. If I didn’t, I could not do my job. But I felt threatened and afraid. I always do. That’s the very nature of threat, as those who use the tactic know very well.
At 6 A.M., I gently woke my elder girl, Shaharzad, who is twelve, and told her that if I didn’t come home after this trip of a few days, she was to read the letter to her ten-year-old sister, Shuhra. Shahar-zad’s eyes met mine, full of questions. I placed my finger to her lips, kissed her and her sleeping sister on the forehead and quietly left the room, closing the door behind me.
As I tore myself away from my children I knew I might well be murdered. But my job is to represent the poorest people of my nation. That mission, along with raising my two beautiful daughters, is what I live for. I could not let my people down that day. I will never let them down.
PART ONE
Dear Shuhra and Shaharzad,
Today I am going on political business to Faizabad and Darwaz. I hope I will come back soon and see you again, but I have to tell you that I may not.
There have been threats to kill me on this trip. Maybe this time these people will be successful.
As your mother, it causes me such bitter pain to tell you this. But please understand I would willingly sacrifice my life if it means a peaceful Afghanistan and a better future for the children of this country.
I live this life so that you—my precious girls—will be free to live your lives and to dream all of your dreams.
If I am killed and I don’t see you again, I want you to remember these things.
First, don’t forget me.
Because you are young and have to finish your studies and cannot live independently, I want you to stay with your aunt Khadija. She loves you so much and she will take care of you for me.
You have my authority to spend all the money I have in the bank. But use it wisely and use it for your studies. Focus on your education. A girl needs an education if she is to excel in this man’s world.
After you graduate from school, I want you to continue your studies abroad. I want you to be familiar with universal values. The world is a big, beautiful, wonderful place and it is yours to explore.
Be brave. Don’t be afraid of anything in life.
All of us human beings will die one day. Maybe today is the day I will die. But if I do, please know it was for a purpose.
Don’t die without achieving something. Take pride in trying to help people and in trying to make our country and our world a better place.
I kiss you both. I love you.
Your mother
· · ONE · ·
Just a Girl
{ 1975 }
EVEN THE DAY I was born I was supposed to die.
I have stared death in the face countless times in my thirty-five years, but still I’m alive. I don’t know why this is, but I do know that God has a purpose for me. Perhaps it is for me to govern and lead my country out of the abyss of corruption and violence. Perhaps it is simply for me to be a good mother to my daughters.
I was the nineteenth of my father’s twenty-three children and my mother’s last child. My mother was my father’s second wife. When she became pregnant with me, she was physically exhausted from the seven children she had already borne and depressed at having lost my father’s affections to his newest and youngest wife. So she wanted me to die.
I was born out in the fields. Every summer, my mother and a host of servants would journey to the highest mountain peaks, where the grass was sweet and luscious, to g
raze our cattle and sheep. This was her chance to escape the house for a few weeks. She would take charge of the entire operation, gathering enough dried fruit, nuts, rice and oil to sustain the small party of travellers for the three months or so that they would be away. The preparations and packing for the trip caused great excitement. Everything was planned to the last detail before a convoy on horses and donkeys set off across the mountain passes in search of the higher grounds.
My mother loved these trips, and as she rode through the villages her joy at being temporarily free from the shackles of home and housework, able to breathe in the fresh mountain air, was obvious.
There is a local saying that the more powerful and passionate a woman is, the nicer she looks sitting on a horse in her burka. It was also said that no one looked more beautiful on horseback than my mother. There was something about the way she held herself, the straightness of her back and her dignity.
But in the year I was born, 1975, she was not in a celebratory mood. Thirteen months earlier, she had stood at the large yellow gates of our hooli, a large, sprawling single-storey house with mud walls, watching a wedding party snake its way down the mountain path that wound through the centre of our village. The groom was my mother’s husband. My father had chosen to take a seventh wife, a girl just fourteen years old.
Each time he remarried, my mother was devastated—although my father liked to joke that with each new wife my mother became even more beautiful. Of all his wives, my father loved my mother, Bibi jan (literally translated as “beautiful dear”), the most. But in my parents’ mountain village culture, love and marriage seldom meant the same thing. Marriage was for family, tradition and culture, and obedience to all those things was deemed more important than individual happiness. Love was something no one was expected to feel or need. It only caused trouble. People believed that happiness lay in doing one’s duty without question. And my father genuinely believed that a man of his standing and position had a duty to marry more than one woman.
My mother had stood on the large stone terrace, safely behind the gates of the hooli, as the party of a dozen or so men on horseback ambled its way down the hillside, my father dressed in his finest white shalwar kameez (a long tunic and trousers), brown waistcoat and lambskin hat. Beside his white horse, which had bright pink, green and red wool tassels dangling from its decorated bridle, were a series of smaller horses carrying the bride and her female relatives, all wearing white burkas, accompanying her to her new home, the home she would share with my mother and the other women who also called my father husband. My father, a short man with closeset eyes and a neatly trimmed beard, smiled graciously and shook hands with the villagers who came out to greet him and witness the spectacle. They called to each other, “Wakil Abdul Rahman is here,” and “Wakil Abdul Rahman is home with his very beautiful new wife.” His public loved him and they expected no less.
My father, Wakil (Representative) Abdul Rahman, was a member of the Afghan parliament, representing the people of Badakhshan, just as I do today. Before my father and I became members of parliament, my father’s father, Azamshah, was a community leader and tribal elder. For as long as my family can remember, local politics and public service have been our tradition and our honour. It can be said that politics runs through my veins as strongly as the rivers that flow across the mountains and valleys of Badakhshan.
The Badakhshani districts of Koof and Darwaz, from where my family and my surname originate, are so remote and mountainous that even today it can take up to three days in a four-wheel drive to reach them from the provincial capital of Faizabad. And that is in good weather. In the winter, the small mountain passes are completely closed.
My grandfather’s job was to help people with their social and practical problems, connecting them with the central government offices based in Faizabad and working with the provincial district manager’s office to provide services. The only way he could go to speak to the government authorities in Faizabad from his home in the mountainous Darwaz district was by horse or donkey, a journey that often took him a week to ten days. In his lifetime, he never once flew in a plane or drove in a car.
Of course, my grandfather was not the only one who travelled in this rudimentary way. The only way any of the villagers could connect with the bigger towns was on horseback or on foot; that was how farmers bought seed or took cattle to market, how the sick got to a hospital and how family members separated by marriage visited each other. Travel was possible only in the warm spring and summer months, and even then it was dangerous.
The greatest risk of all was the Atanga crossing. Atanga is a large mountain bordering the Amu Darya River. This clear green waterway is all that separates Afghanistan from Tajikistan, and it was as dangerous as it was beautiful; in spring, as the snow melted and the rains came, its banks swelled, creating a series of deadly, fast-flowing currents. The Atanga crossing was a series of rough wooden stairs fastened to either side of the mountain for people to climb up and then down the other side.
The steps were tiny, rickety and slippery. One small stumble and a person would fall down straight into the river and be swept away to certain death. Imagine returning from Faizabad with the goods you had just purchased, perhaps a seven-kilo bag of rice, salt or oil—precious cargo that had to last your family all winter—already exhausted after a week of walking, and then having to risk your life negotiating a treacherous pass that had probably caused the deaths of many of your friends and relatives.
My grandfather could not bear to see his people being killed in this way year after year, and he did all he could to force the government to build a proper road and a safer crossing. However, although he might have been richer than most people in Badakhshan, he was still just a local official living in a remote village. Travelling to Faizabad was as much as he could do. He did not have the means or the power to travel to Kabul, where the king and the central government were based.
Knowing change would not come in his lifetime, my grandfather decided his youngest son would take over his campaigning role. My father was just a little boy when my grandfather began grooming him for a future in politics. One day years later, after months of solid lobbying, one of my father’s biggest successes in parliament would be the realization of my grandfather’s dream to get a road built over the Atanga Pass.
There is a famous story about the road and my father’s audience with Zahir Shah to discuss the project. He stood in front of the king and said, “Shah sahib, construction of this road has been planned for years, but there is no action—you and your government plan and talk but do not keep your promises.” Although the parliament at that time was made up of elected representatives, the king and his courtiers still ran the country. Direct criticism of the king was rare, and only a brave or foolhardy man would attempt it. The king took off his glasses and looked long and hard at my father before stating severely, “Wakil sahib, you would do well to remember you are in my palace.”
My father panicked, thinking he had gone too far. He hurriedly left the palace, fearing that he would be arrested on the way out. But a month later, the king sent his minister of public works to Badakhshan to meet my father and make plans for the construction of the road. The minister arrived, took one look at the mountain and declared the job impossible. There was no more to be said; he would return home at once. My father nodded sagely and asked him to go for a short horse ride with him first. The man agreed, and they rode together to the top of the pass. As they dismounted, my father grabbed the man’s horse and raced back down, leading it behind him, leaving the minister alone on the mountain all night long to give him a taste of what it was like for villagers who got trapped on the passes.
The next morning my father returned to pick up the minister. He was furious, half bitten to death by mosquitoes, and he had lain awake all night terrified that he would be eaten by wild dogs or wolves. But now he had some direct understanding of how harsh life was for the local people. He agreed to bring engineers and dynamite so
the pass could be created. My father’s pass at Atanga is still there, and this feat of engineering has saved thousands of Badakhshani lives over the years.
But long before the pass was built and my father became an MP, my grandfather had appointed the little Abdul Rahman an arbab, a community leader. This effectively gave the boy the powers of a tribal elder at the age of twelve. He was asked to settle the villagers’ land, family and marriage disputes. Families who wanted to arrange good matches for their daughters’ weddings would come to him for advice in choosing a suitable husband. Before long, he was negotiating health and education projects, raising funds and meeting with the provincial officials in Faizabad. Although he was barely more than a child, these officials knew that under our arbab system he had the support of local people and they were prepared to deal with him.
These early years gave my father such a solid grounding in the issues facing our community that by the time he grew into adulthood he was ready to lead. The timing was perfect, for at that time real democracy was beginning in Afghanistan. In 1965, the king decided to establish a democratic parliament, giving people a role in decision-making by allowing them to vote for their local members.
The people of Badakhshan felt they had suffered years of neglect by the central government and were excited that their voices would finally be heard. In the election, my father was voted into the new assembly as the first-ever member of parliament for Darwaz, representing people who were not only among the poorest in Afghanistan, but also among the poorest in the world.
Despite their poverty, Badakhshanis are also people with pride, people who stick to their values. They can be as wild and angry as the ever-changing mountain climate but also as tender and tenacious as the delicate wild flowers that grow on the granite river banks.
Abdul Rahman was one of them and knew their qualities better than anyone. He took on his new role with nothing short of total dedication.