Authors: Rod Nordland
Sit in a garden and remember me.
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At the wedding, where both sexes mixed together, they say the bride fell in love with the singer. While Ahmad Zahir was singing, Ghul Ghutai “burst into tears, and people noticed it and didn’t like it,” according to Abdul Jalil Sadid, a violinist and composer who was a contemporary of Mr. Zahir. Rumors of the subsequent love affair between the singer and the president’s daughter were rife and infuriated the president and people around him, Mr. Sadid said. Soon after the wedding, Zahir was killed in a car crash along the dangerous Salang Pass, but few thought it was an accident.
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“I believe the pro-Communist regime at that time was behind his murder,” Mr. Sadid said. No one ever found out for sure, because a short while later, in early 1979, pro-Soviet troops rushed the presidential palace, killing President Amin and much of his family
in a coup d’état that ushered in the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. That wedding story is a distant memory in the Afghanistan of today, some of its details inconceivable in their liberalism.
When Ali finally answered our phone calls, he said he had made up his mind to do as his family asked. “All we want in life is that we should get to a place where it is safe for us to live together, where we can spend life in a happy and peaceful environment,” Ali said. “We are now happy and ready to leave the country for someplace safe and friendly. Can you help us? You’re the only ones we trust.”
First they would need passports. Now that their marriage was legalized, that process was straightforward. They could get passports at the passport office in Bamiyan, but news of their application would be all over town between the day they applied and the day, a week later, when they returned to pick them up. They thought this seemed dangerous—it would be too easy for Zaman’s relatives to lie in wait for them on their return. The national passport office in Kabul was crowded and busy and could do passports for any province. For that and many other reasons, going to Kabul was their best move. They’d been caught there once, but they’d been careless.
This time, we told them, if they wanted our help, they were going to have to listen to our advice. Stay somewhere far from the center of town, in a Hazara neighborhood where the in-laws were unlikely to go. Once there, stay indoors and off the streets. Either together or singly, they risked being recognized wherever they went. We would pick them up in our car and accompany them to their appointments, which would keep them off the streets and out of public buses and give them a measure of reassurance.
They finally flew down to Kabul on August 12, after Women for Afghan Women sent them air tickets paid for with the donors’ money. Jawad took off from work to meet them at Kabul International Airport. Anwar was with them, looking rumpled and small in his farmer’s clothes and beat-up old turban; Zakia and Ali were in their finest, she in white leather high heels and a powder-blue
dress laced and buttoned up the front from feet to neck, he in pointy white leather shoes, a
shalwar kameez,
and an elaborate gray jacket with blue piping around the pockets, both of them shabbily splendid. Just starting to show, Zakia was hiding her pregnancy well. It was the first flight of any sort that Anwar and she had ever taken and the first time Ali had been in a civilian aircraft. “We could see people down below,” Zakia marveled, “and they looked so small.”
The lovers returned to Kabul to find they had become yesterday’s story. The celebrity they never knew they had was proving transitory. The news beast, its attention span challenged, had lumbered on past them. Since nothing much new had happened, the
Times
had understandably lost interest and my editors told me to stand down on the Romeo-and-Juliet story. The couple would have had to get killed to make our news pages in those days. A few local publications did articles on them, and the BBC ran a video journal off an interview with them that August,
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just before they left Bamiyan, but their lack of accessibility had cooled the interest of the local press. Zakia’s family’s interest, however, remained high. We called her kin from time to time, just to check in and take their temperature, and it was still on the boil. Otherwise, though, without all the intense press attention, they were just Zakia and Ali, a couple of farm kids from the middle of nowhere in a country with a war that America was both losing and losing interest in, rather than the story of Zakia and Ali. Even Rabbi Shmuley had stopped calling me so often, as Gaza blew up and Hamas lobbed rockets into Israel and Europe took the Palestinians’ part, fueling
perhaps Israel’s worst public-relations crisis—at least since the previous one—and provoking an ugly manifestation of anti-Semitic attacks throughout Europe that summer. Shmuley had asked me to bring him up to date on the couple’s situation, which I did later that August, but I could tell he was distracted and no longer quite as stirred up by their case. “So basically what’s special about their case is your interest in them, but you’re not doing any more stories on them?” Sheepishly I conceded that was the case—barring either some great success in their lives, which did not seem imminent, or some disaster, such as an attack on them by her brothers, which remained a real possibility. I was no longer so sure that further stories about their situation would help them much just then. For me they were an unquieted guilty conscience. It was bad enough to break all the rules to help them, but to have broken them without helping enough—that would just not do.
The American embassy did arrange for its refugee officer to meet with Zakia and Ali, along with Anwar, after they came back to Kabul that August. Now that they were no longer fugitives, it was no problem for them to come in and meet with American officials as well as Afghan staff and translators. As I explained to the American officials before the meeting, Zakia and Ali had hoped that they could find a solution that would allow them to stay in Afghanistan and with Ali’s family, but as time went on, it became clear to them that Zakia’s family would never relent and they would always be hunted in their own country. Enduring exile in the mountains as her pregnancy became more advanced focused their minds (and, importantly, those of Ali’s family) on their future and what that held for them and their child. They just had to go through that period of cutting off all possibility of escape in order to confront what life would be like without escape. Now they had, and after narrowly escaping from Gula Khan, they were much more determined to leave. The embassy officers again outlined to them what U.S. policy would be in their case: Get to a third country, either Pakistan, India, or Tajikistan, and apply to UNHCR for refugee status, and then the American government could possibly take an interest in their case. They came away from the meeting
encouraged by the attentive concern, although they had been promised little of substance.
After the embassy visit, we met with all three of them at the New Design Café in Kabul’s Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood. Quite possibly the most pleasant restaurant space in Afghanistan, the café was designed by Afghan architect Rahim Nomad, with walls of mud plaster and handcrafted brick, with soaring interior domes and a quiet central courtyard, with heavy Nuristani-style wooden furniture and native fabric cushions. The place has a charmingly authentic Afghan character, which has made it popular in Kabul’s expat community. More to the point at the time, though, it had become all but deserted as the worsening security situation in Kabul had made restaurant life off-limits for most foreigners. Around the corner from the New Design Café, Taliban insurgents had burst into the Taverna du Liban in January 2014 and gunned down every patron they could find, most of them foreigners, diplomats, and aid workers, killing twenty-one in all.
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The New Design Café is on the same street as the Norwegian embassy, however, and benefits from its security. With virtually no other customers during the daytime, it made for a discreet but safe rendezvous.
I asked them if they had thought about where, given the embassy’s guidance, they might go. Their reply was a question: Where did
I
think they should go? I protested that it was not up to me, that we could not be in the position of telling them what to do with their lives. I didn’t bother to try to explain, yet again, that it was beyond what any journalist should ever consider doing for them. Jawad and I explained in more detail what the embassy’s advice meant to them in practical terms, though by now they had heard it many times. Iran was a dead end, and while they said they realized that, they did not want to rule it out—they knew people who had gone to Iran and had found jobs and a life there and had come back, although they’d been told of others who had gone and never been heard from again. Much more reasonably, they could go to Pakistan and would not need passports to do so. The border is porous, well traveled, and a minor bribe on the order of ten or
twenty dollars suffices to cross it. Once in Pakistan they could go directly to the UNHCR office in Islamabad and apply for status as refugees and asylum seekers. The big problem with Pakistan was that although it was home to 2 million Afghan refugees, most of them were Pashtun refugees, and Dari would not be the common tongue. The couple had also heard nothing but bad things about how difficult life was in Pakistan, and the preponderance of Pashtuns there worried them. The Taliban, after all, were Pashtun in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, and Pashtuns hated Hazaras.
If they waited until they had passports, there were two other options. They could go to India, where there was a small Afghan refugee population, but, again, relatively few people would speak Dari. Finally there was Tajikistan. The former Soviet republic was, after all, populated by Tajiks, and while many Tajiks spoke Russian, most people spoke the Tajik dialect of Farsi, which was nearly the same as Dari. However, there were relatively few Afghan refugees in Tajikistan, the poorest of the former Soviet republics, and getting there would require not only a passport but also a visa—and visas were not easy to get for Afghans. Still, it was possible, and Tajikistan, they agreed, seemed like their best bet.
We began to describe what they would have to do to apply for passports, and it quickly became clear that even such a simple process was going to prove daunting for them, and not until Jawad offered to go along did they agree to do it. “You have to help us,” Zakia said. “Without you we are three blind people.”
They were fortunate, because the passport office in Kabul had recently undergone a reorganization in order to stamp out corruption. Previously, unless huge bribes were paid, it had taken weeks and months to get an Afghan passport. Now anyone could go and, if the applicant’s documents were in order, be assured of a passport in days with the payment of the government’s modest fees. It was a huge and rare success for the country’s anticorruption efforts.
The next day Jawad took the three of them down to the passport office, in a ramshackle compound full of government offices of various sorts, all with lines of supplicants outside and knots of
people gathered around scribes, squatting on their haunches before low boxes used for writing or copying out documents by hand. Photocopy machines sat outside in the courtyards, easy enough to manage in a place where for three hundred days a year it never rains.
The moment Zakia and Ali walked in, they caused a sensation. “I was really worried about them,” Jawad said. People photographed them with their phones, some approached them, others wanted to be photographed with them. Overall the response was positive and admiring, particularly among younger people. There were mullahs there as well, and many people who made phone calls to share the news that they had spotted the Afghan lovers. Jawad was all too aware that one of those people might be a distant relative getting in contact with Zaman and the clan, or just a social conservative or a Tajik nationalist. “It’s a big chance we were taking, going there,” Jawad said. “Anything could have happened.” Fortunately, Jawad was permitted to take their receipts so he could return and pick up their completed passports for them, without Zakia and Ali risking a second visit in person.
The passports would be issued on the basis of their
tazkeras,
national identity cards that all Afghans are supposed to have. These list only the year of birth, the person’s name, and the father’s name, not much more. To conform to international passport standards, Zakia and Ali both had to choose a surname, and each picked the name of the father’s family, Ahmadi in Zakia’s case and Sarwari in Ali’s. They also had to choose a birthday. Most Afghans do not know their dates of birth; many have only an approximate idea how old they are, since birthdays normally are not celebrated. Coincidently they both picked the twenty-third of August. Ali and Zakia’s twin birthdays, the first ones in their lives, were just six days away; they would turn twenty-two and nineteen.
When I saw the identical birth dates on their passports, I asked them about it, and they burst into amused laughter at the realization that, officially, they’d both been born on the same day.
Around this time I managed to bring their case to the attention of the Canadian authorities. The comparative numbers of Afghans in Canada and the United States offer a revealing contrast. Canada,
which pulled its last combat troops out of Afghanistan in 2011, had 62,815 Afghan refugees and migrants;
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the United States, ten times as populous as Canada and with a much larger military and civilian presence in Afghanistan, had only 70,000, according to the International Organization for Migration. Canada was much more sympathetic to Afghan asylum requests, so much so that Afghans who do manage to sneak into the United States usually head north of the border before applying for asylum. Another advantage—potentially an important one in the case of Zakia and Ali—was that the Canadian immigration process provided for something called a ministerial exception, in which Canada’s minister of citizenship and immigration can exempt applicants from the usual procedures and admit them outside normal asylum requirements. Whereas the analogous American procedure, humanitarian parole, often takes many months, Canada’s system can take a matter of weeks. The Canadians have been enthusiastic supporters of women’s causes in Afghanistan, and their diplomats’ initial reaction to the case, although voiced only in private, was one of sympathy and concern. It seemed worthwhile for the couple to hide out for a few weeks and see where the Canadian inquiry went. In addition, I had gone to a back channel in the American government to see if there might still be some hope there. Again it was likely to be weeks before there was any word.