by Fawzia Koofi
It was important for you that my father should be the best man in the world; that is why you always tried to make the best food for his guests and why you always kept the yard tidy. That is why you would always be nice to the other women of the family so they didn’t become jealous and create problems for him. I think of how you used all your natural intelligence to try to solve people’s problems when my father was not around, and how after my father was martyred you realized how important it was that his children—both girls and boys—go to school and live with you in the same house so that you would know their problems and be there for them. It was important for you that my brothers should grow to be men of good character and become people who could do something for their country. You suffered and starved yourself so my brothers could study and go to university.
When I remember all this, I still feel amazed that through all these problems and heavy responsibilities you laughed. You laughed all the time.
I wish I was able to face my problems laughing like you.
Mother, my entire world was in these stories.
The interesting thing was the older I became, the more I wanted to hear these nighttime tales; they would make me feel calm and safe in bed. Maybe I was trying to escape from the war all around us.
You were the refuge from my surroundings. The best moments in my life were after you had finished the stories and would turn your attention to me. Promising me I’d become someone important. Telling me my father’s words after I was born, that I would grow to be like you. Beautiful, clever, wise and warm. They were small words, but they became my inspiration to struggle and strive for a better life.
When I asked you what I would become, you’d smile and reply, “Maybe, Fawzia jan, you will be a teacher or a doctor. You will have your own clinic and will treat the poor patients who come from the provinces for free. You will be a kind, good doctor.” Then I would laugh and say: “No, Mother, maybe I will be a president.” I said this because once I heard you telling a neighbour, “My daughter tries so hard at school. I am sure she will become president.”
I learned so many life lessons from those stories.
And I have never felt so calm and safe with anybody else as I did with you. Mother, I learned from you what self-sacrifice really means. I learned from you that literacy alone is not enough to bring up good children but that intelligence, patience, planning and self-sacrifice are what really count. This is the example of Afghan women, women like you who would walk miles with an empty stomach to make sure your children got to school.
I learned from you that any human, even a “poor girl,” can change everything if she has a positive and strong attitude.
Mother, you were among the bravest of the bravest Afghan women. I am glad you were not here to witness the horrors that came next in our lives—the Taliban years.
Your daughter,
Fawzia
· · NINE · ·
One Ordinary Thursday
{ 1996 }
I WILL NEVER forget the day the Taliban came to Kabul. It was a Thursday in September. I had stayed home from university that day to study. My sister Shahjan needed to buy bread, and I needed a new pair of shoes, so in the afternoon we walked to the bazaar together.
I was wearing one of my favourite brightly coloured head scarves and a tunic. My sister told me a joke, and I giggled. A shopkeeper smiled at us and said, “You ladies will not be able to come here dressed like that tomorrow. The Taliban will be here and this will be your last day of pleasure in the market, so be sure to enjoy yourselves.” He was laughing as he said it, his green eyes smiling and the lines around them crinkled. I thought he was joking, but his remark still made me angry. I stared at him furiously and told him this was a wish he’d be taking to the grave because it would never come true.
I only vaguely knew who the Taliban were—religious students who had formed a political movement—and we still didn’t know what they stood for. During the years we were fighting the Russians, the Afghan Mujahideen had been joined by thousands of Arab, Pakistani and Chechen fighters. They had been funded by other countries, such as the USA, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to help fight the Soviets. Each of those countries had its own vested interests and political reasons for helping us. While their help in our battle was initially welcomed, these foreign Mujahideen fighters brought with them a fundamentalist version of Islam, Wahhabism, which was new to Afghanistan. The Wahhabis originated in Saudi Arabia and form a particularly conservative branch of Sunni Islam madrassas in the border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan promoted this type of Islam to young Afghan men, many of them barely children and many of them vulnerable, traumatized refugees.
But there was a lot of misinformation in those days. Some people in Kabul thought the Taliban were angels, whereas others thought they were Communists coming back in a new guise. But whoever they really were, I could not and would not believe that they, or anyone, had beaten the Mujahideen. The Mujahideen had defeated the mighty Red Army; how could a few students possibly defeat such men? The idea that by the next day they would have taken over the shop in which I was now standing was just ridiculous.
At that stage, I did not see much difference between the Taliban and the Mujahideen. As a child, I had been very much afraid of the Mujahideen. Now, as a university student, I was afraid of the Taliban. In my view, they were all just men with guns. Men who wanted to fight instead of talk. I was sick and tired of all of them.
But that night, we got the shocking news on BBC radio. We listened to it all night long, incredulous at what we were being told. The BBC reported that Ahmad Shah Massoud’s men had withdrawn from Kabul and gone back to their stronghold in the Panjshir Valley. I still couldn’t accept that it meant defeat. Tactical withdrawal was not an unusual military tactic for Massoud. I truly thought he’d be back to fight before breakfast to restore peace and support the government. Most people in Kabul thought the same.
Suddenly, the front door opened and my brother Mirshakay, the senior police chief, came in looking terrified. He spoke rapidly, saying he didn’t have much time. He had asked his wife to pack his bag. He, like many senior government officials, was leaving to join Massoud in Panjshir.
I had so many unanswered questions about the future. I started to argue with him. His wife began crying. He hissed at us and told us to be quiet in case anyone heard.
Mirshakay had two wives, and it was decided that one would stay in Kabul in the apartment with me, while the other would be taken by her family that same night to Pakistan, where my brother owned a house in the city of Lahore.
It all happened so quickly we could barely believe it was real. As my brother went back out the door, my sister threw a pot of water after him. This is part of our culture: if the water follows the target, it is said he will come back soon.
With Mirshakay gone, we women huddled around the radio. The latest reports stated that President Rabbani and his ministers had also fled. They had gone by plane to Panjshir and from there to Rabbani’s home province of Badakhshan. Then it was reported that former president Najibullah, the man who had been regarded as Moscow’s puppet and a Communist sympathizer, had been killed. Najibullah had been under United Nations protection. But as the Mujahideen government collapsed, Ahmad Shah Massoud had gone to meet him and offered to take him back to the Panjshir Valley. But Najibullah didn’t trust the Mujahideen any more than he did the Taliban and he feared the former were setting a trap to kill him. That was perhaps understandable in his position, but not trusting Massoud at that critical moment was to be his fatal mistake. Within hours of Massoud retreating, Najibullah would be dead.
At 8 o’clock that night, jets flew overhead. My family teased me that “even in war Fawzia keeps her nose in a book.” I wasn’t particularly fond of the Rabbani government, but at least it was a government. At least there was some kind of system. But now, officials like my brother were leaving their posts and running. I was furious that our leaders were giving up so easily.
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sp; We barely slept that night. We just listened to the radio as the country unravelled around us once more. At 6 o’clock in the morning, I looked out the window and saw people wearing little white prayer hats. Suddenly, everyone was wearing them. I quickly closed the curtain and returned to my studies; I wanted to shut out this new world, this latest incarnation of Kabul that I didn’t understand.
Then the rumours started. It was a Friday, prayer day. Reports started surfacing that they were beating people to make them go to the mosque. By now we had realized they weren’t Communists or angels of rescue. So who were they? Never in the history of Afghanistan had we experienced anything like this. It was clear they were a strange force, not controlled by Afghans. They couldn’t be, behaving like that.
We learned that they had forced Najibullah from the United Nations building where he had been staying in sanctuary. The Taliban had stormed the UN compound, dragged him out and executed him. They hung both his body and that of his younger brother at a busy roundabout for everyone to see. For three days, as the bodies slowly turned yellow and bloated, they hung there as a warning. People drove past in scared silence. No one dared take the bodies down.
Then they looted the museum, destroying thousands of artefacts reflecting the history of our land—ancient Buddhist statuettes, Kundan ornaments, eating vessels from the time of Alexander the Great, relics dating from the times of the earliest Islamic kings. In the name of God, these vandals destroyed our history.
The world took notice of this cultural vandalism when they blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan. These ancient stone statues were regarded as one of the wonders of the world. They were built in the remote region of Bamiyan in the sixth century AD, during the reign of the Kushans, great patrons of art, before Islam was brought to Afghanistan. The giant Buddhas were not only an important piece of Afghan cultural history and a sign of our diverse religious past but also a representation of the livelihood of the Hazara people who live in Bamiyan. The Buddhas had long attracted visitors from all over the world as well as elsewhere in Afghanistan, and a healthy tourist industry had developed in Bamiyan because of them. In an otherwise poor province, this industry represented essential income for the people.
In shocking and tragic TV footage that was broadcast around the world, the Taliban were seen blasting the statues with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy artillery until these great monuments collapsed into smithereens.
Then the Taliban started destroying our minds. They burned the schools and university buildings. They burned books and banned literature. I had only recently started my medical degree course, which I loved. That weekend, I was supposed to have an exam, and I had been studying hard for it. But I was told not to bother going, as my medical faculty had closed. Women were no longer allowed to study medicine at university, let alone be doctors.
In an instant, so much of Kabuli life, the things people took for granted, were gone. Even in the war, small, pleasurable activities, such as meeting friends for a cup of tea in the bazaar or listening to music on the radio, and bigger events, such as a wedding party, had still been possible. But under the Taliban, they disappeared overnight. In our culture, as in most other cultures around the world, a wedding is a rite of passage that involves the whole family and circle of friends. Afghan weddings are traditionally very large; anywhere from five hundred to five thousand people attend. Owning a wedding hall or hotel can be a lucrative business. The best ones can command high prices, and it’s not unusual for families to pay the whole bill of twenty or thirty thousand dollars in advance.
During their first weekend in power, the Taliban banned all weddings in public places. Hundreds of couples had to cancel their big days. Not only did they lose their wedding day, the day little girls all over the world dream about, but their families, already struggling because of the war-ravaged economy, lost their money. The Taliban ordered people to have private ceremonies at home with no guests, no music and no fun. The wedding anniversaries of the couples who married that day are a kind of anniversary of Taliban rule. It wasn’t the wedding day they expected, but it’s something they will certainly remember until the end of their lives.
Of course, many people tried to defy the ban. Proud fathers refused to allow these upstarts to destroy such an important family day and tried to go ahead as planned. Some hotel owners ignored the new rule and carried on business as usual. But the Taliban drove around town in pickup trucks, in their black turbans and carrying guns and whips; when they heard wedding party music, they raided the premises. The so-called angels of rescue had become the harbingers of violence. They burst into the wedding halls shouting and yelling, smashing speakers, ripping tape from video cameras and tearing photographic film. And they beat people senseless. They beat the grooms in front of their brides and knocked elderly grandfathers to the ground in full view of their frightened guests. I kept hearing these stories, but I still could not believe they were true. I think I was in denial.
The next day, my sister, who routinely wore a burka, went to the market to get some vegetables. She came back from the market in a flood of tears. She had seen the Taliban beating all women who weren’t in burkas and were wearing only head scarves—women who dressed like me. I listened in shock.
She sobbed as she told me how she watched a man and wife pushing their bicycles along the street laden with shopping bags. The woman wasn’t even in modern jeans or a skirt. She was wearing a traditional shalwar kameez and had covered her hair with a large scarf. The couple were chatting when the Taliban came from behind and attacked the woman. Three of them set upon her, beating her with wire cable and thumping her around the head so viciously she fell to the ground. When they started to beat the man, he denied she was his wife. To save himself, he denounced his own wife.
The idea that an Afghan man could denounce his wife so easily was horrifying. In traditional Afghan culture, men will fight to the death to protect their wives and families, but the Taliban brought such fear and evil with them that they perverted some of the men of our nation. Not all, but some men—who had previously been good men and kind husbands—were swayed, by fear or the excitement of a mob psychology, into believing this warped ideology.
For the next week, I didn’t go anywhere. TV had been banned. The state radio station had been taken over for Taliban propaganda purposes. Woman presenters, even the old, ugly ones with no makeup whom the Mujahideen favoured, had been banned. A popular young male news presenter who had used the wrong word in a report about the death of a Taliban commander was beaten on the soles of his feet and left in a shipping container for three days with no food or water. In his nervousness, he had mistakenly used the word “joyous” instead of “tragic” to describe the death—an understandable slip when you consider that men with whips were standing behind him as he broadcast live. Who wouldn’t be nervous?
I couldn’t even listen to the propaganda they called news. I wanted real news that would make me feel connected to the outside world. Not having it made me feel like I was in prison. But local grapevine news, delivered from neighbour to neighbour, could not be stopped and each story I heard was more horrible than the one before.
The fighting outside Kabul continued. The Shomali Plain, the area between Massoud’s stronghold of Panjshir and the city, became the new front line. Most people were still expecting Massoud’s troops to come back. We couldn’t believe this Taliban reality was going to be permanent. The only place where I could meet other girls and talk was on the communal balcony of the apartment block when I was cleaning the house. Watching from the balcony, I could see other young girls in the other apartments. Young, beautiful girls were being deprived of their basic rights, of breathing the fresh air and feeling the sun. As soon as these girls heard the sound of Taliban voices they scarpered, running as fast as they could back inside.
I needed to connect with my mother. I missed her badly but was thankful that she didn’t have to witness this latest abomination against her country. I wanted to visit her grave but I co
uld not bring myself to put on a burka. I didn’t even own one. So I borrowed a black Arab-style niqab from my sister. It was like a large cape that also covered the whole face, so I thought I’d be safe wearing it. The streets were deserted, the air so thick with fear you could almost cut it.
Few men and even fewer women dared to go outside; the women who did were dressed in blue shuttlecock burkas, the new uniform of Afghan women. They scurried along silently, doing their shopping as quickly as possible so they could get home to safety. No one talked to anyone. Shopkeepers handed over bags wordlessly; women took them without looking up or making eye contact. Occasionally a Taliban pickup truck would drive by, the men inside glowering menacingly, looking for new victims to beat, as loudspeakers on the top of the truck blasted out religious teachings. I thought that by now I knew fear in all its forms and shapes, but this was a new one. I was cold, clammy and tinged with an icy fury. My fury. After that, I didn’t leave the house again for almost two months.
We hadn’t heard from my brother Mirshakay since the first Taliban had taken control. Like him, many former Mujahideen and government workers had fled, taking their families with them. The Shomali Plain and the Panjshir Valley—in the province northeast of Kabul—were scenes of fierce fighting but still very much under the control of Ahmad Shah Massoud. But his men weren’t the only ones fleeing. Others, former Communists, university professors and doctors, were also fleeing. Grabbing what they could—a few clothes, jewellery, food supplies—they loaded up the car and left town. They left behind everything they had worked for. People who only weeks earlier had congratulated themselves on their good fortune because their houses had survived the civil war intact were now locking the gates of those houses behind them and walking out without a second glance.