Authors: Rod Nordland
In plain sight is a good hiding place until it becomes the one place searchers realize they have neglected to look. Zakia and Ali were keenly aware that their time hiding in the house of the village’s most prominent citizen was running out. By the end of March, the whole country seemed aroused by the search for the escaped lovers. The Bamiyan police might have been sympathetic to their plight and naturally tended to side with Hazaras, but once Zakia had fled the shelter, she was that most despised of Afghan women, a runaway. The Ministry of Interior in Kabul was leaning on the Bamiyan police to pursue the matter. It was all over Afghan television and radio, on the country’s airwaves and news websites—many of which showed no hesitation about lifting and republishing Mauricio Lima’s portraits of the lovers from NYTimes.com. The police questioned the Bamiyan shelter’s staff and arrested two of its guards, holding them for investigation, although they were ultimately released, since they were guilty of nothing more than falling asleep or not paying enough attention. Fatima Kazimi, the women’s-ministry official in Bamiyan, was besieged in her office by Zakia’s father and a dozen of his male relatives, who accused
her of engineering the escape. Ali’s brother Bismillah was arrested and held for four days, his cousin Sattar jailed for two days, and his other brother Ismatullah, himself a police officer, was pressured by his bosses to come clean on his fugitive brother’s whereabouts.
Najeeba Ahmadi, the director of the shelter in Bamiyan, felt more than official heat. “I believe that her family would do anything possible against Zakia,” Najeeba said. “They even keep calling me using different numbers and threatening me that if they don’t get Zakia, they will run me out of Bamiyan or they will kill me to take revenge for Zakia. They don’t care how peacefully I try to communicate.”
A male voice would come on the line of her personal cell phone. “You’ve taken our daughter and hidden her somewhere. You know where she is, but you are not telling us. So, for us, you and the girl are the same, and you will both face the consequences.”
While all that was going on up in Bamiyan, down in Kabul I was spending an hour every morning wading through reader email, mainly from concerned Americans who assumed I somehow must know how to find the couple and deliver aid to them. Rabbi Shmuley was reenergized to pursue the case. He asked me if I could act as a go-between with the couple, to let them know he had someone standing by ready to rescue them.
“We would like to communicate to them, that we want to help them get out of the country and establish a new life elsewhere where they are not in danger,” Shmuley wrote in an e-mail. “But now we have no way of contacting them. If you can assist us with that, I would be very grateful. Please indeed ask them permission, as to whether or not we can be in touch with them.”
I was uncomfortable acting as anyone’s go-between, but I didn’t feel I should just rebuff Shmuley’s enthusiastic and heartfelt concern for the couple. My editor in New York, Doug Schorzman, took the matter up with Phil Corbett, the paper’s standards editor, and Phil agreed I could introduce Shmuley to an Afghan fixer and translator, so he could have someone who could reach out to Zakia and Ali independently of us. It was also felt that we could share the phone numbers of principals, so long as we had permission from
them to do so. Through our Afghan staff, we found a freelance fixer well respected for his integrity, Aimal Yaqubi, who had previously worked for National Public Radio.
That all proved academic, though. Ali was not answering his phone, which was continually giving an “out of coverage area” message, so we couldn’t get his permission to give the number to anyone. His father and brothers claimed to have no idea where the two lovers were, other than somewhere in the mountains, and said they too could not reach Ali by telephone. It turned out later that the family had been constrained from saying anything about the couple’s whereabouts because Zakia and Ali did not want them to do so.
Zakia’s father was on their trail, too. When we interviewed him, it was clear that he had already developed an intimate knowledge about the couple’s movements in the days after Zakia’s flight from the shelter. He related to us where they had stayed on the first and second nights on the run, the name of the mullah who had attended and tied the
neka
for them, the next place they had stopped farther up the Foladi Valley toward Shah Foladi, and how the police had lost them on the road near the village of Azhdar.
What he didn’t suspect, at least not yet, was that they weren’t in the mountains any longer but had circled back to Ali’s village and were hiding a mere three hundred yards from where Zaman was talking to us at that moment.
“I will not let it go,” he said, sitting cross-legged on the floor of his house, his smallest children clustered on either side of him; from oldest to youngest, his brood spanned nearly three decades, with one wife. “I swear to God that even if it costs me everything, I will try to bring my daughter back home. She is a part of my body like one of my limbs—how can I let her go with that boy? Besides that, she was already married, and it is unthinkable to remarry someone else’s wife who is already married to someone. It is against every law and shariah. There is no way that I should let her marry that boy.”
This accusation of bigamy was a bombshell. Previously Zaman had claimed in court that he had engaged Zakia to his nephew—
and he famously kept changing which aunt had the nephew in question. Now that his daughter had married Ali, he was raising the stakes and claiming that a previous marriage had occurred, that a
neka
had already been tied between Zakia and her first cousin. It is plausible, and even commonplace, for a father to tie a
neka
without his daughter’s presence—that is, to marry her to someone formally. All he has to do is swear before a mullah and other witnesses that she has given her consent. Her consent is required, officially, but in practice there is no requirement that such consent needs to be proved, other than by the father’s oath. So now to support the bigamy charge, all Zaman would have to do is find a friendly mullah and some like-minded witnesses, then backdate a
neka
document. Even within this new account, he kept muddling his story: At one moment Zakia had run away with the boy; minutes later the boy had kidnapped her. She had escaped from the shelter; Ali had forcibly removed her from it. And so on.
Zaman at first glance did not seem formidable enough to do much of anything. He looked much older than his approximately sixty years, with skin as wrinkled as dried fruit; he was slight and stooped. Five of his eleven children were younger than Zakia, some much younger; the smallest appeared to be not four years old. He was obviously poor, but he also had sons, and cousins, and sons-in-law, and they all crowded into the living room to back him up. “I do not give up easily,” he said. “If someone loses his chicken, he will search for it to bring it home. How can I not search for my daughter, who was part of my own liver? I can do everything to get her back. I will try to approach the president, and if that doesn’t work, I will decide myself to do something. We are not weak in that sense.”
He denied he was threatening any violence—he did not have so much as a nail file to use for a weapon, he said—but the spittle that accompanied his words, the harsh tone, all suggested otherwise, as did the death threats he and his sons had uttered in front of many witnesses in the Bamiyan courthouse. Zaman seemed like nothing so much as a dead daughter’s father.
There was no pretense of impotence from Zakia’s brother Gula
Khan, who was about twenty or twenty-one. When I reached him by telephone around this time, he screamed at me over the line. His tone told more than his words, which were themselves so blunt and profane they shocked and embarrassed my Afghan colleague Jawad. It was only after I insisted several times that Jawad not hold back that he fully translated Gula Khan’s responses to my questions.
“If we were men, we would have done something by now,” he said. “If we had cocks, we would take our revenge. How is it possible they steal someone’s wife and do not even pay any attention to how we are suffering?
“She really dishonored our family, and the man she was promised to is asking for repayment. He has told us, either find his wife for him and return her or give him ten lakhs of rupees.”
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“Their whole world was turned upside down when their daughter ran away with a man,” said Women for Afghan Women’s executive director, Manizha Naderi. Her organization runs seven women’s shelters, although not the one in Bamiyan,
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and Manizha is easily the most effective women’s advocate in Afghanistan. “This really shattered their sense of honor within their family and their community. They have no credibility to hold their heads up in front of anyone because of Zakia. And to get their honor back, they think that they have to kill both Ali and especially Zakia. That way they can tell their relatives, ‘We are men of honor. We killed her. Our honor is more important than our daughter who has shamed us.’ It’s really tragic, but most families think this way in Afghanistan. They would rather kill their female family members if they are thought to have committed wrongdoing than lose face in their community.”
“Honor,” as Afghans use the word, doesn’t have the same meanings we would give it, behavior characterized by decency and honesty that brings public esteem and respect to a person. They don’t even use it in the connotation of purity or chastity when applied to women (which is definition 7 in the 2015
Merriam-Webster Dictionary).
“Honor,” to Afghan men, is much more of a synonym for “women,” particularly women of reproductive age seen as the property of their men. The further sense of treating a woman
honorably—that is, not deceiving her sexually or romantically—is missing, which comes as a bit of a surprise considering how often honor is invoked in the treatment of women in Afghanistan.
The Dari word for “honor,”
namoos,
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in the connotations we would give it, does not exist in the venerable Persian dictionary, the
Dekhoda.
Instead the only use of the word that has come down to Afghans as “honor,” from that dictionary, means esteem and respect given for upholding and defending religious faith. Afghans do conflate honor with both religion and women, since they use religion as justification for their treatment of women (often on dubious theological grounds), but that layer of meaning is often lost as Afghans use “honor” today. Consider the notorious Article 398 of the Afghan Penal Code, which limits the punishment of
men
for murder to only two years’ imprisonment for crimes of passion against women in their families. (There is no similar limitation of punishment for women who commit crimes of passion.) Article 398 says, as Kabul University law professor and women’s activist Shahla Farid pointed out, that the punishment of men for murder is limited in cases where actions of the victims affect the man’s honor, and it implicitly defines “their honor” as “including wives, sisters, daughters, nieces, aunts, mothers and other female relatives.” In other words, as Dr. Farid translates it in Article 398, “honor” is legally defined as the women in a man’s life over whom he has ownership or control. And that is how Afghans do use the term.
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When Afghan men say, as they often do, “We are a poor people, and all we have is our honor,” what they are really saying is, “We are a poor people, and all we have is our women.” Hence purdah and the Afghans’ fanatical obsession with keeping their womenfolk out of public view. Hence the attitude that rape is not a crime, since women should never be in a position to be raped. If rape does happen, there has to have been some behavioral breakdown in the family of the victim; either the family did not keep her safe or she evaded their security.
I heard similar words from Zakia’s father, Zaman, repeatedly. “I am a poor man. All I have is my honor.” It was why it seemed logical to him to equate the loss of his daughter with the theft
of one of his chickens; she was just a far more valuable piece of property.
Shortly after we met with Zaman, we went over to the village of Surkh Dar nearby and talked to Anwar, Ali’s father, as well. We told Anwar about Zaman’s intimate knowledge of the first days of their flight. Later Anwar related this information to Zakia and Ali, which persuaded them to set off on the run again. It seemed clear to them that Zakia’s father knew someone who had seen them along the way, so it might not take him long to figure out that turning north at Azhdar village and heading back into the valley would have been much easier for an ill-equipped pair of fugitives than tackling the forbidding, snow-covered heights of sixteen-thousand-foot Shah Foladi.
Anwar was adamant that no previous marriage had ever taken place, that it was a ploy invented by a bitter father after the fact, but he was worried about the implications. Bigamy was both a crime and a terrible sin (for a woman, not a man, who can traditionally have four wives in Afghanistan), and Ali could be charged as well with kidnapping, a capital offense. In theory they could be stoned to death, because bigamy was also adultery.
Anwar tugged at his white beard nervously and asked if we could help Zakia and Ali.
Perhaps, if we could find them.
Jawad was convinced that the old man knew where they were and probably had Ali’s current phone number as well but that he’d stopped trusting us when he realized we had also been talking to Zakia’s family. He had come a long way from the angry father defending the cultural status quo, who beat his son for trying to bring dishonor on the community; just what had led to this transformation would take us a while to work out, but he had definitely taken Ali and Zakia’s side.
The cris de coeur from
New York Times
readers had convinced me that we needed to bring the story up to date and raise its profile beyond just a print effort. Editors agreed and felt that now that the lovers were together, getting pictures of them with each other would be key to keeping interest high. People needed to see
them together for them to become real; it was a love story as well as a look into the dark heart of a deeply disturbed society and the social and cultural obstacles that had prevented much meaningful progress on women’s rights in Afghanistan. Without pictures the lovers’ story would remain essentially abstract, lacking the power to move people—perhaps even someone who could do something to help. All we had was Mauricio Lima’s portraits of the two of them, taken separately, so the paper assigned another photographer, in case we found them again, and a videographer to do a story on their romance and escape.
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