The Favored Daughter (28 page)

Seeing their suffering triggered something of an epiphany about who I was, where I had come from, and what my calling in life was to be.

We were in an area called Kala Panja, one of the Ismaili communities. We'd been invited to have dinner and stay the night at the house of the local leader. I had never met him, but he greeted me like an old friend. It was slightly embarrassing and my colleagues were beginning to laugh at me when he revealed the reason. He had known my father. As we sat he told tales of my father. He talked of a hard-working, dedicated man, one who did all he could to bring changes to the poor. He smiled at me and said: “Now Miss Koofi, I see you sitting here and I see you are the same as your father.”

It was the first time in my entire life anyone had likened me to my father and I flushed with pride. As I sat in the room surrounded by elders, doctors, and villagers, all people coming together to try to make a difference, I was transported back in time. To a time when my mother ruled her kitchen, and servants and brothers stood in a line to hand out piping hot pots of rice to that mysterious room where my father met with his guests. As a child I had yearned to enter, to see what happened, to know what discussions took place in that mysterious secret room.

I smiled to myself as I realized the mystery had lifted now. Those meetings my father had were actually just like the one I was in now. They were simply dinners with delegations of aid workers, doctors, engineers, and local elders. How many nights had he sat and dined and discussed plans and projects and ways to bring development to his people? How many meals had my mother cooked for visitors like this? I sat there barely engaging in the conversation, lost in my thoughts and feeling secretly thrilled to be here, to be understanding such a critical part of my father's life.

In the morning when we left the man gave me a gift of a sheep for my baby Shuhra. Wakhan sheep, short and fat, are famous for their tender meat. The other Afghans on the trip were jealous and teased the man: “Where is our sheep? Why did you give it to Miss Koofi?”

But he just smiled and said: “It's a gift for Miss Koofi's father. I am honored today to have hosted his daughter and his granddaughter. And to see how his daughter has grown like him.” Once again, the man's words made me flush with pride.

As we traveled the districts I met more people who had known my father. And I gained a deeper understanding of the political role my family had held. I had only been hired as a translator on the medical survey, not a senior role. But people heard my name and thought I was somehow here representing my father, that the Koofi family were once again back in Badakhshan mobilizing communities.

Villagers started to come and seek me out personally, presenting problems to me. I tried to explain to them I hadn't organized the survey, I was just a low-level helper. But they kept coming, and they came with problems unrelated to the survey, like a salary problem or a land dispute. I found it a little unnerving and overwhelming. But at the same time I had a growing sense of purpose and determination. And of belonging.

Here, with my father's political legacy, with my mother's personal values and my baby at my breast, I realized I wanted to be a politician. I don't even know if “want” is the right word. It was what I had to be. It was what I was meant to be.

The survey took six weeks. Shaharzad was only 18 months old and I missed her terribly while I was away. Hamid was more than happy to take care of her because in his heart I think he knew his days were limited and I think he enjoyed those few weeks of bonding, just him and his beloved daughter.

After the survey ended I went back to my job at the orphanage. This further mobilized me.

The children all had different stories. Terrible stories. Some had lost both parents, others had a parent who remarried and refused to allow them in the house, others had been placed there by parents too poor to feed them. It was heartbreaking and I wished I could have taken every one of them home with me. I spent the first three months of the job interviewing them about their backgrounds and organizing their individual histories into a database. There were 120 students, 60 boys and 60 girls. Despite the sadness of the children's stories the orphanage was a happy place. I was able to take both my daughters to work with me. Baby Shuhra stayed quiet, hidden under her scarf, and Shaharzad played with the children. I still see some of those same children every
once in a while. Some of them are at university now and I still try to help them as much as I can.

But things really changed for me when a few months later the United Nations opened a UNICEF office in Faizabad. I applied for and got a job as children's protection officer. It was a small office and I was effectively the second in charge. Working for the United Nations was a big step up for me. And the job was tough. It involved working with children and internally displaced people (people who had lost their homes during the fighting).

Part of my job was to network with youth and civil society organizations. One of them was called the Badakhshan Volunteer Women's Association. In my spare time I volunteered for them, trying to fundraise and organizing things like micro-credit for women wanting to set up small businesses. I was also involved with a team that planned annual International Women's Day celebrations every March 8. International Women's Day is not celebrated everywhere and certainly isn't celebrated all over Afghanistan, but in Badakhshan we recognized it as an important symbol. We traveled to the villages giving gifts and organizing a Mother of the Year contest. It was a way of giving the village women a sense of pride about who they were.

We organized a big day of events in Faizabad and it was there in 1999 that I made my first ever public speech. I talked about how women were treated and how the civilians were treated in Kabul during the civil war. I spoke freely, angrily about the strength and power of Afghan women, how during all the atrocities of the civil war, when they had seen husbands and sons murdered and suffered rape and torture themselves, they didn't lose their strength or their pride. I called them the unstoppable Afghan women.

Although the Taliban controlled the rest of the country, they didn't control Badakhshan. Rabbani's government was still very much in control. Rabbani was a former mujahideen and many people thought my speech went too far in blaming the mujahideen for torture. In those days people didn't want to criticize the mujahideen, something that's true even today. These were the men who saved us from the Russians, so to criticize them for anything is seen as unpatriotic, almost treasonous. I admire and am proud of what the mujahideen did in defeating the Russian invaders, but there is also no denying that in the civil war years that followed they were responsible for many barbaric acts committed against innocent civilians, including my own family.

There were a few pursed lips and shocked silences among disapproving government officials when I spoke of this. But afterward many ordinary people, teachers and doctors and community volunteers, came up to me and told me what a good speech it was. I was finding my voice. And I was finding my rightful place.

Hamid was getting weaker and weaker and in a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable I spent most of my wages trying to source new medical treatments to help him. My sisters were harsh with me, they told me not to bother wasting my money and to face the fact that he was dying. But this was the man I loved. Just as I could not sit back and wait when he was in prison, I could not now sit back and calmly wait for him to die. And this man was so supportive to me in those days, so happy to see his wife succeeding that I felt I owed it to him to keep him alive. After Shuhra's birth our physical relationship died, but in some ways our love came back. I think he felt guilty for his treatment of me for giving him a second daughter and so he worked even harder to prove to me that he was completely behind my work. When I came home in the evenings he always made a point of asking me about my day, persuading me to share my problems and work worries with him. I felt for him, he was in so much emotional pain. After all those years of waiting for me, of persuading my brothers to allow us to marry, the result was a slow descent into death. With sorrow in his eyes he once held my hand and told me it was like having a dish that you'd wanted to taste for so many years. A dish you'd dreamt of eating every day, a dish you could taste and smell in your imagination. When this dish was finally served to you, you had nothing to eat it with, no spoon or fork, so all you could do was look at it.

Part of my job involved traveling to Islamabad in Pakistan for conferences. I would fly to Jalalabad in Southern Afghanistan and then across the Torkham border pass, the same drive Hamid and I had taken with my brother for that brief happy week we had spent in Lahore before he was arrested for the final, third and fatal time. I loved the trips to Pakistan and they gave me a chance to buy Hamid more medicine. But arriving in Jalalabad, which was in Taliban control, was horrible. I hated seeing them and hated the way they snarled at me when I showed them my United Nations identification.

I was scared of them even though I knew I was under UN protection and they couldn't do anything to me. I would walk off the plane and straight into a waiting UN vehicle. But I felt their stares as I walked past them. I used to repeat a little mantra to myself to calm myself down: “You're UN now. You can work. You can deliver. They can't stop you.”

One day I was about to board the plane to Jalalabad when I was stopped by Afghan security officials. They told me that Rabbani government officials had told them my husband was a suspected Taliban and I was a security threat. I was incredulous and enraged. I said: “Thank you so much. My husband was in prison for three months just because he met Rabbani in Pakistan and now you are telling me he's a traitor?”

Later on I discovered that someone, I don't know who, had given the intelligence services false information about us deliberately. It was another reminder that your enemies can be hidden everywhere and that in Afghanistan gossip can be deadly.

Badakhshan was the only place in Afghanistan not under Taliban control where women could work, and I was the only Afghan woman in all of Afghanistan working for the United Nations. It was high profile and of course that came with certain dangers. Pretty much all of Faizabad now knew who I was and what I did. Many people were pleased for me and pleased to have the UN presence. For others I was a constant source of scandal and gossip. Even my direct boss couldn't get his head around having a female deputy and used to tell me to close the door so I couldn't be seen if he had male visitors to the office.

There was a mosque close to our house and one Friday afternoon the mullah started preaching about women working for international organizations. He was preaching about it being
haram
(forbidden) and said no husband should allow his wife to do this. His view was that women should not work alongside non-believers and that any salary was also
haram.

On this day poor Hamid was sitting in the yard playing with Shaharzad. He says he managed to laugh as he sat there listening to this. His wife was the only woman in the entire province working for an international organization so it had to be me the mullah was referring to. There was Hamid babysitting his daughter while I worked. Of course, our roles are much more common today. Not only in the West but also in Afghanistan many younger men of the modern generation take a much larger role in sharing childcare duties, and in many households both husbands and wives work. But back then we were almost unique.

When I got home Hamid told me he chose to laugh at the mullah's sermon and then went inside, so he didn't have to hear it all. But I was desperately upset at what had been said. Perhaps it was easier for the mullah to try to turn an entire community against one family, rather than speak to my husband man to man about what he perceived to be an errant wife's behavior?

Ironically, when I became a member of parliament (MP) a few years later this very same mullah came to ask for my help. He was also a religious teacher and had been kicked out of his job and he wanted me to intervene with the Ministry of Education. Back at the time when he preached against me he would never have come to me for help, but years later even a man like that could accept that women now played a role in government and society. That is why it is so important to have women in public and governmental roles, because by doing so people's views can slowly change.

The United Nations was a wonderful organization to work for and were very helpful to me at that difficult time. Sometimes I was able to take the kids and Hamid with me to Pakistan. One time I took him to the Shafa Hospital, which is one of the most famous hospitals in Islamabad. He received a different type of new medicine there but the prescription was $500 a month—$3,000 for six months. I managed it for six months but after that my salary just couldn't cover the expense.

I suppose I was still in denial about him dying. He was so young. It was early 2001 and he was only 35 years old.

By now the fighting between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban had almost stopped and there were rumors the UN Security Council was about to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. That was something that many Afghans found terrible to accept. It seemed that the world couldn't see what we saw, nor could it see the danger the Taliban presented. In the spring of 2001 Ahmed Shah Massoud went on a political trip to Europe on behalf of the Rabbani government. He was invited by then European president Nicole Fontaine to address the European Parliament in Strasbourg. He used his speech to warn of the emerging threat of the Taliban, and the imminent large-scale threat of an Al Qaida strike on Western targets. During his brief visit to Europe he also traveled to Paris and Brussels, where he held talks with European Union Security Chief Javier Solana and Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel.