Authors: Rod Nordland
The concept of honor and killing women to uphold that honor is not unique to Afghanistan. In ancient Rome the paterfamilias or dominant male within a household had a legal right to kill a sister or a daughter who had extramarital sex or a wife who committed adultery.
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Othello’s murder of Desdemona was an honor killing and typical of honor killings in that the woman is given no real recourse to plead her case; the victim’s guilt or innocence becomes subordinate to the man’s sense of the violation of his honor. This goes some way to explaining the murder of rape victims by their own families in Afghanistan.
The eminent anthropologist Thomas Barfield
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of Boston University, who is president of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, says there is a sort of blood-feud belt, where honor killings of women were historically endemic, that stretches from Spain throughout the Mediterranean basin, across the Middle East, Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan and then ends in Pakistan. East of that, north of that, south of it—in China or Mongolia, Southeast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa, Northern Europe or Russia—the concept of honor killing is pathological and rare, rather than socially acceptable and widespread.
With the notable exception of Saudi Arabia,
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however, most modern societies, including Islamic societies, in the honor-killing belt have successfully criminalized the practice, just as nearly all societies have moved away from the concept of men’s ownership of women. Even Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in fundamentalist Iran has condemned the practice of honor killing, and as with most Islamic scholars, Sunni and Shia, he insists that honor killing has no theological basis in Islam.
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A weak central government throughout Afghanistan’s modern history, three and a half decades of war, and low levels of education and literacy
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have helped to sustain abusive customary practices like honor killings.
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“Dealing with the status of women has
brought down more regimes in Afghanistan than anything else,” Professor Barfield says. Both King Amanullah’s premature reforms and the Communists’ excessively ambitious efforts provoked a strong backlash, contributed to prolonging abusive customs, and made most modern leaders unwilling to confront conservatives on such controversial issues. Even today women’s groups that protest honor killings typically refrain from challenging the concept underlying them, that women are the property of men, who are in absolute control of regulating their behavior.
In that ancient honor belt, Afghanistan has been a major holdout.
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“The state in Afghanistan has not been able to move its writ into family affairs. The Afghans feel that is not a state responsibility,” Professor Barfield says. Other states throughout that belt developed strong ruling systems where the state could and did inject itself into family and social affairs. “The state in the rest of the world has moved its power all the way down to the family level, but in Afghanistan, even today, the state is very hesitant to regulate family affairs. If there’s a revenge killing, because it’s murder, when it’s brought to their attention, they will act, but on the other hand if it doesn’t come to the state’s attention, they don’t look for it.”
Given the attitudes of Zakia’s family, she and Ali were doing their best to stay hidden, but in the crowded little house on the side of the Chindawul Hill, Ali was increasingly irritable. With the aunt and her children, as many as eight people were sharing perhaps four hundred square feet and a tiny yard. Every food purchase, every bucket of water, involved an exhausting climb up the steep hill. Complicating matters for them, Zakia was not feeling well and was constantly complaining of stomach cramps and pains and nausea—dysentery is rampant in a city that long ago outgrew what primitive sewage system it had. She did not suffer as much from the inability to go out, but she sensed that Ali’s aunt resented her presence there and did not approve of her marriage to Ali. The aunt tolerated them because her brother Anwar had asked her to do so. Zakia was also lonely. She still missed her mother and father
and brothers and sisters, the populous household in which she had spent her entire life, however much they wanted to kill her. She especially missed Razak, her lively nine-year-old brother, the much-doted-upon youngest male of the family. “I love him so much,” she told Ali. “It’s hard to think I will never see him again.”
Zakia and Ali began arguing with each other over little things, and Ali was confused and defensive. This was not what he had expected their life together would be like. The long days of hiding at home were uncomfortable, but when Ali went out, Zakia worried constantly that her family or the police would find him. Suddenly one day, impulsively, he decided to rejoin the army. He had one year left on his enlistment, and he could go back without any real penalty as a deserter. Zakia was against it, and they argued, but she eventually agreed.
“I couldn’t stay jobless forever,” he said. “I have to do something to make back that money that we borrowed from people. They will not let us keep their money forever, one day they will ask for it.” He’d had two months of freedom with his wife, and now it was time to work, as he put it. But the two-hundred- to two-hundred-fifty-dollar monthly army salary was not going to make much of a dent in their debts. There was a more practical reason to reenlist: Once in the military, stationed on a base, he would be virtually immune from arrest by the police. “I was going out a lot, and it wasn’t good for me—it was dangerous—and I thought, why not join the army and be safe, plus make money?” He had managed, through the uncle of one of his sisters’ husbands, to be allowed to rejoin as a bodyguard to a Hazara commander in the Afghan National Army. The commander was stationed at the Kabul International Airport, so Ali would not be far away from Zakia and could visit her on weekends. Even the uniform would help him to hide, although it meant that all his long black hair would be shorn to a military close-crop. The haircut proved to be not a bad disguise. One day when he was heading home on weekend leave to see Zakia, he passed right by his father-in-law, completely unnoticed by Zaman.
During this time we had begun talking with Ali and Zakia
again, and we decided that it was time to engage with them about the Rwanda option that Shmuley had put on the table. It seemed like they were never going to deal with Aimal Yaqubi directly, and Shmuley was insistent that we offer them this opportunity. It put me in an awkward position, but I didn’t feel right letting them pass it up for lack of the right messenger. We got Ali and Zakia to sit down with Anwar, Jawad, and me, to talk it through. Again we explained what they could expect in Africa, a minimum of six months of isolation in Rwanda while they waited for onward visas—and no guarantee of those, though chances would be good. It was clear they had soured on the idea, but in any case their lack of passports was a deal breaker. Zakia had a new
tazkera,
or ID card, by then, but they were unwilling to risk going to the passport office with criminal charges still lodged against them, and without passports Rwanda was a nonstarter. Rabbi Shmuley was disappointed, but not daunted. Within a few days, he called to say that he was fed up and ready to make a move, and he wanted my advice on what to do about Fatima Kazimi.
“We’re friends, right?”
“Sure.”
“So tell me the truth.”
“Okay.”
“Should we save Fatima?”
I stalled for a moment to collect my thoughts, realizing what he probably had in mind. “Save her how?”
“Get her out, save her. Rwanda.”
“Okay, I see. Can I get back to you on that?”
That June we were all getting frustrated and anxious for some sort of action. Stasis served no one’s interest, least of all that of Zakia and Ali, who remained elusive and unpredictable even toward Jawad and me. The fixer Aimal Yaqubi and the American embassy were having a still-harder time pinning down Ali. The embassy began calling me to try to get him to pick up calls from them, and Aimal called us to complain that he was getting nowhere. At one point Aimal accused us of using our influence with the couple to obstruct his efforts. Aimal had five hundred dollars to
give them as a donation from Rabbi Shmuley’s mystery benefactor, he said, and they still wouldn’t cooperate (the amount had shrunk since we’d first heard about it).
Shmuley was more frustrated with this inaction than anyone. He related to me a long conversation he’d had with an embassy official, public-affairs officer Robert Hilton, about the case. “Here we have a story that encapsulates why we’re there, a story that has fired the American imagination, and you guys are not even involved in helping. You left it to a bunch of laypeople like us who don’t know what they’re doing.”
Mr. Hilton told him, as Shmuley explained, that the embassy had to consider the sensibilities of the host country, which only incensed him. “What about the sensibilities of American readers? What about the sensibilities of a hundred thousand troops there and the trillion dollars we spent, and you can’t get a woman who’s going to be killed out of the country? A fricking trillion dollars, I told him.”
Hilton pointed out that there were criminal charges against the couple that would somehow have to be adjudicated, and the United States couldn’t be seen to be circumventing Afghanistan’s legal system, in which it had invested more than a billion dollars over the past decade.
“Are you telling me you’re going to abide by a corrupt judge’s order to send her back to her family to be killed or raped?” Shmuley in righteous mid-rant was a force to be reckoned with. “This is ridiculous. This story has crystallized for all of us why we’re there. We’re there to protect people like Zakia.” He had her name down by now. “All we have to do is get this woman a passport.”
Shmuley was livid after he recounted this conversation to me. “I don’t think the embassy is going to be helpful, but one way or another we’re going to get them out, and it’s going to be a big story when we get them out, and the U.S. government had no role whatever,” he said. “After a trillion dollars, we can’t save a woman from an honor killing because we’re worried about hurting someone’s feelings in the government? The American government can’t do it? The American government is afraid of the Afghan government? Let them be more afraid of the American public. What the hell are
we doing there? What have we managed to change there? We can’t have these people die and achieve zero. So now a couple of bozos in New Jersey are going to do what the U.S. government cannot do. They seem to be under strict orders: Let’s tiptoe out of Afghanistan and make no waves.”
This kind of accommodation is rampant in the waning days of the Western intervention in Afghanistan. The case of a girl named Gulnaz, who was forced to marry her rapist, is a good example. The European Union suppressed a film it had commissioned that featured her plight, concerned that it would embarrass the Afghan government. British-based filmmaker Clementine Malpas found Gulnaz, then only nineteen, in Kabul’s female prison, Badam Bagh, where she had been held for more than a year, and featured her in the EU-financed documentary on women in Afghanistan, which she called
In-Justice.
In the film, Ms. Malpas related how Gulnaz had been given a three-year prison sentence after she was raped by a cousin, Assadullah Sher Mohammad; Gulnaz gave birth to their child while in prison. When she appealed the case, her sentence was increased to twelve years,
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but an Afghan judge offered her freedom if she would marry her rapist.
When officials at the EU mission in Kabul saw the film, they decided to withhold it from release, threatening the filmmaker with legal action if she allowed it to be aired. Ostensibly the reason was to protect the women in the film, Gulnaz as well as two other victims, from retribution. The EU rejected the position taken by the filmmaker that Gulnaz and the others in the film had given informed consent. It was a surrender by EU diplomats to Afghan cultural sensitivities. That was confirmed when the
New York Times
reported that e-mails from the EU’s attaché for rule of law and human rights, Zoe Leffler, had told the filmmaker that the EU “has to consider its relations with the justice institutions in connection with the other work that it is doing in the sector.”
In the ensuing furor, President Hamid Karzai ordered the girl released from prison—but made it clear that he expected her to marry her rapist as the court had ordered, according to the
Times
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account by Alissa J. Rubin.
“Gulnaz said, ‘My rapist has destroyed my future,’” Ms. Malpas said, recounting their conversation. “ ‘No one will marry me after what he has done to me. So I must marry my rapist for my child’s sake. I don’t want people to call her a bastard and abuse my brothers. My brothers won’t have honor in our society until he marries me.’”
Women’s groups objected and lobbied to have Gulnaz given refuge in a shelter. Then the news moved on and everyone lost interest in the case; the documentary was never officially released—another fifty thousand euros down the EU drain, part of some 18.2 million euros the EU spends annually on gender-focus programs,
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not counting bilateral donor money from its member nations.
By 2014 history was being rewritten in Gulnaz’s case. Mary Akrami, the head of an organization called the Afghan Women Skills Development Center, who says she was the first to open a women’s shelter in Afghanistan (reportedly financed by the UN Women organization, as with the shelter in Bamiyan), claims that the international press and particularly Gulnaz’s lawyer, Kimberley Motley (who took on the case after the documentary controversy erupted), deliberately distorted what had happened to Gulnaz. “The court married her by her consent,” Ms. Akrami said. “She was not raped, but in fact she loved the guy and had a love affair with him. She then agreed to marry him. Her family reconciled with the man’s family. They live together now and are happy. They have a child and are living in Kabul.”