Authors: Rod Nordland
Breshna, quivering with indignation, spoke up, dropping her veil from her face for a moment. “What was it like, then?”
He shushed her with a contemptuous gesture but did not look her way. “Whatever I confessed to in Kunduz, it wasn’t like that.” She started to speak again, and the prosecutor shushed her as well. Then the judge shushed her. She retreated back under her veil; I could hear her chest heaving.
The prosecutor interrupted his narrative to read from the mullah’s confession: “ ‘I took her hand and dragged her to the mosque.’”
“No,” the mullah said. “She came. Breshna came and said, ‘I love you.’”
Breshna again unveiled to speak up. “Hey, liar, hey, liar! God hate you! You are dirt, you are dirt! You are a vampire!”
The mullah continued, “She came and hugged me, and I told her, ‘In the name of God,’ she came and told me, ‘Do this with me. If you don’t, I’ll go to my father and mother and say that you did this to me.’ Satan brought this into my heart and made me indulge it. They say I did this by force, but I did it with her consent.”
No one challenged his facts, such as they were, aside from Breshna, but she was never given an opportunity to address the court, and the judge kept trying to still her outbursts of outrage at the mullah’s version. Neither prosecutor nor judge noted that her injuries had been so grievous that she’d needed major surgery, that she’d been tied up during the rape, that the mullah had threatened to kill her family if she told, that he had blasphemed in the holiest part of the mosque. As far as the judge was concerned, it was enough
that the mullah confessed to having sex with the girl. Given her age, that was evidence enough of rape, and the hearing was soon over. “How can you commit adultery with a ten-, eleven-years-old child?” the judge said. “It’s rape.” He rejected the defense’s argument that shariah-law punishment should be applied. By that reasoning, the judge said, the girl would have to be sentenced similarly. “She would have to get lashes then, too.” He told her to approach his desk and lift her veil so he could verify her age. “She cannot commit adultery. She is a child. This is rape.”
The girl continued to clamor to be heard between her bouts of sobbing. Breshna had little knowledge of courts and courtrooms and had somehow formed the idea that the judge’s title was “director.”
“You shamed me, liar!” she shouted at the mullah. “You brought shame to my father! Director, please hang him!”
Waiting in the corridor for the judge to rule on the punishment, Breshna’s father, Najimudin, and her maternal uncle, Mohammad Rasoul, both said that the family would never assent to her marriage to the mullah and that they had never plotted to kill her. “That was totally false, wrong. She was raped and was a child,” said Mr. Rasoul. “If we killed her, how could we answer to God on the day of judgment?” Her father added, “We want to see him hang for this.” Ten minutes later Judge Rasuli delivered his verdict, which was the maximum under the EVAW law of twenty years in jail.
“I’m not happy with the verdict,” Breshna said. “I want him to be hanged. He shamed us. He shamed my father. We want the government to give him execution.” When the trial was over, the girl walked out alone, following her father and uncle but some twenty feet behind them; they still had not looked at her.
It would surprise no one if the mullah were later released on appeal, or pardoned quietly, or released early for good behavior, and if he finally ended up marrying his victim and sacrificing his thirteen-year-old niece’s life in
baad
as well. In November the German embassy secretly dispatched a representative up to Kunduz to offer to send Breshna to an Afghan private school, all expenses paid. Her father turned down the offer.
Only a few weeks earlier in Kabul, five men had been convicted in the Paghman gang rapes, in which four married women returning from a wedding were set upon in front of their husbands. The accused were subjected to a rushed trial, without meaningful benefit of defense counsel, and found guilty on the basis of confessions obtained from torture and from lineups in which they were the only suspects.
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Those men were also charged with rape under the EVAW law, but authorities imposed other charges, including armed robbery, that carried the death penalty; they could just as easily have done something like that in the mullah’s case if authorities had wanted the death penalty (kidnapping, for instance, for dragging Breshna back into the mosque). The Paghman case transfixed Afghanistan for the less than two months that elapsed between the attack and the alleged rapists’ executions, but, as many women’s leaders pointed out, it was not really about what had happened to the women. The Paghman rapists’ real sin was to have humiliated the women’s husbands by attacking their wives in front of them. After the gang rape, the husbands dropped off the four women victims, who had been brutally raped, beaten, and gratuitously tortured and were badly injured, at the Rabia Balkhi Maternity Hospital in Kabul. None of them remained with their wives through that part of their ordeal, not even the husband of the pregnant victim, who was only eighteen.
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The following month, in November 2014, Afghanistan’s new president, Ashraf Ghani, summoned Breshna’s father and uncle to a meeting at the presidential palace, chaired by his legal adviser, Abdul Ali Mohammadi. The palace issued a statement afterward:
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“Breshna, the little girl who was the victim of rape, is not at any risk from her family.” Among those present were women’s-ministry, foreign-affairs ministry, and human-rights officials, the statement said; conspicuously absent was anyone from Women for Afghan Women,
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Dr. Sarwari or anyone else who had worked with Breshna, or her lawyer Kim Motley. “Breshna’s father and uncle rejected the report that she is at risk and emphasized that their child was the victim of an unlawful act, so they have been trying to
protect her, not to harm her anymore,” the presidential statement said. Under the circumstances it is implausible that Breshna’s family would have confessed to the president’s staff that they intended to murder their child.
On December 8, 2014, Mr. Mohammadi summoned Dr. Hassina Sarwari from WAW for a separate session at the presidential palace. She went expecting encouragement and support for her efforts to protect the girl; she saw the earlier meeting with the family as the palace’s way of scaring Breshna’s relatives into not harming the girl and thought they now would be eliciting her independent view on the matter. “I told him the truth. Indeed her life
was
at risk,” she said. Mohammadi showed her a pile of what he said were a hundred forty letters from human-rights groups throughout the world about the case and accused her of causing that to happen. “You’re exploiting this case,” he said. “I want no more stories on this. You have been exploiting this case in your own interest.” Mr. Mohammadi said the president had ordered Dr. Sarwari to step down from her job at the women’s shelter; the government would find her a women’s-ministry position in another part of the country. Never mind that WAW, as an independent charity, was not under the control of the government. If she did not agree to take the job offered, she should just quit her work and remain at home, Mr. Mohammadi told her.
I saw Dr. Sarwari an hour after the meeting. Her eyes were red, and she broke down in tears recounting what had just happened. “I don’t know what to do,” she said.
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By the summer of 2015, Breshna’s village of Alti Gumbad had been overrun by the Taliban. Her fate is unknown.
MARRIAGE BEFORE PUBERTY
By some estimates 57 percent of Afghan brides are under the legal age of sixteen.
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Often far under. In late August 2014, a ten-year-old girl named Mina was formally married to a twelve-year-old boy named Sardar in northern Mazar-i-Sharif, the country’s fourth
largest city and capital of Balkh Province, considered a progressive part of the country. The union was sanctioned by a local mullah, who defended his actions on shariah-law grounds. The authorities prosecuted the girl’s father, a man named Abdul Momin, who said he’d sold his daughter into the marriage for two thousand dollars because he was so poor he had no other prospects. Mina and another vulnerable daughter were removed from his home and put into the care of a shelter, after Afghan news organizations disseminated pictures of the two children at their wedding ceremony.
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No charges were brought against the mullah who married them. The pictures showed a girl who was not much more than half the boy’s height, dolled up in traditional bridal dress; he wore a starched white
shalwar kameez
with a spiffy jacket. It looked as if they were a couple of little kids playacting at something grown-up. They were both children, so the consummation of their marriage would normally wait until the girl reached puberty—although it would often happen long before she reached the legal age of sixteen. Until then the child bride would usually live in her husband’s home and be put to work as a servant to her husband’s family. Rape and sexual abuse of girls in such situations is a frequent occurrence; beatings and lesser forms of abuse are commonplace.
HE SOLD HIS DAUGHTER, BUT NOT HIS BIRDS
In early 2013 the
New York Times
reported that an impoverished refugee named Taj Mohammad had sold his six-year-old daughter for twenty-five hundred dollars to settle a debt with a money-lender.
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The previous winter Mr. Mohammad, whose family lives in a camp on the outskirts of Kabul, had accumulated the debt in the course of buying firewood and paying for medical treatment for his wife and children, who fell ill during terrible winter snows that resulted in many vulnerable children freezing to death in the camps; one of those who died was Mr. Mohammad’s own three-year-old son, a tragedy that I reported on at the time.
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When the moneylender later asked Taj Mohammad for repayment, he was unable to comply, and after a
jirga
held in the camp, the camp elders
decreed a
baad
arrangement in which Taj Mohammad would have to give his youngest daughter, Naghma, then six, to the moneylender’s seventeen-year-old son if he was not able to repay the debt by the end of the year. Naghma was a bright girl and was attending school in the camp, but after the betrothal her prospective mother-in-law came by to demand that Mr. Mohammad’s family withdraw her from school. They did not want an educated wife for their son.
In that case publicity about what had happened saved the girl—at first. Taj Mohammad’s plight was already well known from reports about the freezing death of his son. After news of his daughter’s sale, an anonymous foreign benefactor hired the American lawyer Kim Motley, who arranged to settle the debt and cancel the marriage. Publicly the elders and Naghma’s family agreed to a settlement in which the girl would go to music school in Kabul on a scholarship and the family’s debt would be repaid and the betrothal canceled.
Dr. Sarmast at the Afghan National Institute of Music offered Naghma a residential place and a scholarship. Taj Mohammad had been a musician previously, playing a lutelike Afghan instrument called a
rubab,
and Dr. Sarmast said he would try to find Mr. Mohammad a job playing that instrument somewhere, because the father insisted he did not want to be separated from his daughter. However, when Mr. Mohammad showed up with Naghma for enrollment, he also wanted to enroll two of her older brothers, who were outside the school’s enrollment age. Dr. Sarmast demurred. Young enough children can always learn music, but the boys were too old to fit into a music curriculum. “Her father just wanted to do business on his little daughter,” Dr. Sarmast said in May 2015.
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Then Naghma and Taj Mohammad disappeared from Kabul and the camps. According to women’s activists who followed the case, the camp’s elders had divided the foreign benefactor’s money up among all the parties to the dispute, the marriage contract was confirmed, and Naghma was handed over to her purchasers, one year later as originally planned.
When I had visited Taj Mohammad the morning after his son froze to death, I noticed that despite having no money for firewood, Mr. Mohammad did own a brace of partridges, birds that
are used for fighting and gambling and when trained can be quite valuable. He did not answer when asked why he had not sold them to buy fuel.
PARLIAMENTARY IMMUNITY
Shakila
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was a sixteen-year-old girl from a remote mountain village in Bamiyan Province who was drafted by her pregnant sister, Soraya, to come stay with her on the outskirts of Bamiyan town to help her during her pregnancy. Soraya’s husband was a bodyguard for a local big man in the village of Zargaran, a member of the Afghan parliament from Bamiyan, and Soraya worked as a maid for him, but her pregnancy was making it difficult for her to cope. Shakila was a shy girl who never left the home and knew no one in the local community. On January 27, 2012, Shakila’s sister and brother-in-law were not home, but his AK-47 was—and so was his boss, the MP Wahidi Behishti, and a couple of his retainers—Abdul Wahab, Behishti’s nephew, and Abdul Wadi—plus Mr. Behishti’s wife. Shakila was alone without any of her own family members present. When her sister Soraya came home, she found Shakila in the room where she had left her, bleeding from a massive gunshot wound in the chest. The murder weapon, the AK-47 assault rifle that belonged to Soraya’s husband, was nearby. Shakila was still alive but could not speak and soon died in her sister’s arms.
Mr. Behishti and his retainers claimed that although they were home, they had not heard a gunshot and postulated that the girl had committed suicide. They took her body to the forensic medical examiner, who discovered that not only had Shakila allegedly shot herself in the heart with a long rifle, at an angle of sixty-five degrees from above (a much more plausible angle for someone standing above and behind her), but she had managed to lose her virginity in the process. There was still fresh semen in her vagina. Nonetheless the medical examiner declared her death a suicide, positing that she would have killed herself because she was distraught about losing her virginity.