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Glamour - December 2002
In Afghanistan, the Women Speak Again – to Old Truths
by Rachel Louise Snyder
It has been more than a year since the Taliban, called by the United Nations
the most misogynistic regime in the world, was ousted from power by U.S.-led coalition forces after a six-year rule in Afghanistan. It was a regime that denied women and girls the most basic rights: education, work, medical care (women were forbidden to see male doctors and few female doctors were permitted to work), and even the freedom to leave their homes unaccompanied by a male relative. The Taliban had promised women safety and peace after two decades of war and violence; what they got was prison. Afghan Woman (Photo: Don Rutledge)   The current government, led by president Hamid Karzai, has promised to build an Afghanistan where women are guaranteed their rights returned and more. $4.5 billion in foreign aid has been pledged to help Afghanistan rebuild, $850 million of which has been disbursed so far. Another $174 million in U.S. aid has been pledged by President Bush, but as Glamour went to press, the proposed funding was held up by budget wrangling in the Congress. Meanwhile, scores of Afghan refugees who fled from nearly a quarter century of continuous war have returned, at the rate of 7,000 to 10,000 a day according to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees; the majority try to settle in Kabul where 20 years of war has destroyed most affordable housing, but where the few opportunities in the country’s battered landscape exist. Afghans are relying on foreign troops to provide security until their own army is established, and on foreign aid to bring their nation into the 21st century. But most women have found that their vision for a new Afghanistan is far from being realized. Agents of change are battling a centuries-old patriarchy that has only become more entrenched in the country’s long history of war and the few women who’ve managed to return to their careers or start new ones often find themselves as sole voices among their mostly male counterparts. Still, they say, they will learn, once again, to shout.
Glamour - December 2002 In Afghanistan, the Women Speak Again – to Old Truths
1) We’re Still Subject to Patriarchal Law “I am afraid,” says Rahima, 35, (like most Afghan women, she refused to give her last name), as she fingers her white veil and tries to pull her twin toddlers--both girls--together onto her slight lap. “I am afraid we’ll be in here a long time.” The “here” that she refers to is the Kabul jail for women, where she spends her days with 28 other Afghan females, including her sister, and their children, who are typically jailed with them. Rahima says she was jailed because she refused to marry her brother-in-law after her husband, a former detective, passed away-a practice that is customary in Afghanistan. She fled her husband’s family and her brother-in-law promptly had her arrested. The women at the jail sit a dozen to a room on dirt floors with tiny barred windows that look out on Kabul’s mountains, where terraced houses in monochromatic color are built into the mountainside. Plastic bags suspended from nails in the walls hold bedding. A single light bulb dangles from the ceiling in the long hallway outside. There is nothing beyond this dank room, no playground for the children, nowhere to walk. At mealtimes the women’s relatives slide food and clothing through a small open window in the main door of the jail. This might be fitting punishment for violent criminals, but almost all of the women here are being held for matrimonial misdeeds--what Western women would call, simply, love. “Many eloped or ran from their homes with a man and under an Islamic government this is a big crime,” says Khatol, the female warden, who has worked at the jail for 10 years. “I’m sad to see them here because they are female, but they did make mistakes. They should have real marriages, not love marriages.” Even in the relatively cosmopolitan city of Kabul, some of the Taliban’s most repressive rules are still being followed by women, out of fear or simply custom. Many continue to wear the burqa, a shroud-like veil that covers a woman head to toe. Most women still need their husband’s permission not only to see a doctor--and will likely not be allowed to see a male doctor-but they still go through the formality of asking to simply leave their homes alone. Outside of Kabul, women are even more restricted: Ismael Kahn, the notorious warlord of the Herat Province in western Afghanistan, recently issued a decree requiring women in his province to seek permission before working for any foreigners and forbidding women from sharing cars with male aid workers. 2
Glamour - December 2002 In Afghanistan, the Women Speak Again – to Old Truths
2) We Still Fear for Our Lives Leila Achakzai, 26, lives with her husband, Fahim, in her mother’s Kabul home. Leila, who is due to deliver her second child, says she has no doctor in Kabul and doesn’t know where she will give birth. Though she was born and raised in Kabul, Leila has never been able to venture beyond her own neighborhood, so the city is a mystery of threatening streets to her. A map with no compass, no direction. She couldn’t make it home without help if she were just ten or twelve blocks away. When a woman is pregnant, Afghans say she is sick. This is not a linguistic quirk; it is a grim reality. At the Malalai Maternity Hospital in Kabul--Afghanistan’s largest--women are often released within hours of giving birth, so great is the demand for beds, which line the hallways of the dimly-lit building. Even with this hospital, 97% of Afghan women give birth at home because, like Leila, they are not allowed to see male doctors and often have no means of transport to get to medical treatment. In a recent report released by Physicians for Human Rights, Dr. Lynn Amowitz, who is one of a handful of researchers beginning to understand that maternal mortality is staggeringly more common than anyone ever grasped, found that 40% of the women who die during their childbearing years are dying as a result of complicated pregnancies--most often complications like bleeding and infection that are easily preventable. Roughly 600 women die in childbirth per 100,000 in Afghanistan, compared to 200 in neighboring Pakistan, and just 12 in the United States. Afghanistan now has the highest maternal mortality rate of any country outside of Africa. To researchers like Dr. Amowitz, these numbers reveal both a health-care and a human-rights crisis. “Maternal mortality is a preventable disease with a preventable outcome,” she says. “Education is the single biggest indicator of health status. There are basic things missing here that would prevent a woman from dying, like control over timing and spacing of children, who and when to marry, access to birth control methods, and denial of individual freedoms.” Indeed, when Amowitz asked women why they’d married so young--the average age was 15--they shot a question right back at her. “What else did I have to do?” Such questions reveal just how important education is for Afghan women, who were not allowed more than a 3rd-grade education under the Taliban. Today 50 of% Kabul’s schoolchildren are girls 3
Glamour - December 2002 In Afghanistan, the Women Speak Again – to Old Truths
but in more conservative areas like Kandahar, they make up only 3 percent, according to UNICEF. Since no census has ever been taken in Afghanistan, it is impossible to gauge how many girls in the impoverished rural provinces have had no education at all and have little hope of ever going to school. Surrounding the Malalai is a concrete wall built by the Taliban, eight inches thick with tiny windows cut out in two places. Outside the wall men camp and wait for their female relatives inside, occasionally rushing off to buy medicines in the bazaar because hospital supplies are meager. The men are still not allowed inside (though they were before Taliban rule), so they speak to their wives through the wall’s tiny windows, eyeto-eye only. “The Taliban are gone,” says Suraya Dalil, an Afghan doctor and project officer for a new Safe Motherhood Initiative from UNICEF, who works with the Malalai staff. “But their walls remain.” Even women with access to medical treatment, who’ve thrown off their burqas and signed up for school and taken a job in the city are not living a life free from Men waiting outside Malalai Hospital (Photo: Don Rutledge) old dangers. Under the mujahideen, violence against women was rampant. Girls were taken from their homes or violated in their living rooms. Old familial scores were often settled with rape. “Rape is used as a tool of war to degrade families and community, to make them subservient to those in power,” says Amowitz. Rural women, who make up the vast majority of Afghanistan’s female population, are fighting now, as they always have, not for their rights but for their lives and the lives of their children. And for many of them, life has gotten worse in recent months. In the post-Taliban power vacuum, Afghanistan’s infamous warlords returned. Reports of gang rapes and increased violence against women soon followed. One man reported to Dr. Amowitz and her research team that armed soldiers had chased all the men from his village, then spent 48 hours raping every woman there. In the dim, two-room apartment Leila and Fahim share with her mother and several of her siblings, Leila leans back on a cushion to ease her aching back. Above her are photographs of her niece and nephew--the only decorations in the room. Her mother is remembering a happier time, 4
Glamour - December 2002 In Afghanistan, the Women Speak Again – to Old Truths
when she was a young bride full of life and the country was not at war and women had more choices. It was, she says smiling, the happiest time of her life. “But what about my life, Mother?” Leila asks. “I have only known war in my life. When will my happy time come?” 3) We’re Relishing New Freedoms Today, though some urban women have begun to attend school and go back to their jobs and shop without men, they are definitely in the minority. But it is the women in Kabul who have witnessed and experienced the most drastic changes in their lives and opportunities over the past few decades. In the 1960s, they had jobs, they had education, they had representation in government, they had choices. Even under the unpopular Soviet-backed regime of the 80s, they retained those rights. But under the lawless rule of the mujahideen, a coalition of several warlords and guerilla groups that held power through most of the 90s, women’s rights were increasingly restricted--partly by custom, partly by decree and partly by the restraints that growing violence imposed on them. Nazifa Satar, a gynecologist trained in Pakistan, returned to Kabul in April. She’d fled in 1991 with her family after the mujahideen stormed into her house, beat her father and brother nearly to death, stole the contents of the entire house in two vans, then tried to locate Nazifa and her mother, presumably to rape and kidnap them. Fortunately, the two women had fled to a neighbor’s house when the soldiers pulled up. The family climbed into a truck at four in the morning and made their way to Pakistan, where most of her immediate family still lives. But Dr. Satar returned to help her people, dividing her time between work at the Maywand Hospital on Kabul’s outskirts and a clinic she heads in the Tangi Saidan village an hour from Kabul. The clinic was opened in July 2002 with funding from the International Foundation of Village near Dr. Satar’s clinic (Photo: Don Rutledge) Hope (70% of Afghanistan’s healthcare is externally funded). In pink and white shalwar kameez (loose pants topped with a long, fitted shirt, a traditional outfit for Afghan women), Dr. Satar arrives in Tangi Saidan at nine a.m. on a sweltering day in August to find nearly forty patients already waiting to see her or her colleague, Ismael Atayee. She and Dr. 5
Glamour - December 2002 In Afghanistan, the Women Speak Again – to Old Truths
Atayee treat up to 50 patients a day. Sometimes, she admits, it is overwhelming to be back. “In a mobile clinic once I and two other doctors treated 700 patients in three days. I wake at five a.m. and sometimes I am busy until midnight,” she recalls. [Though she says there is no prohibition on her treating a man, she has yet to treat a single male patient in Tangi Saidan.] Today there is a meeting between the elders, Dr. Satar and the Foundation, ostensibly to gauge how the clinic is doing. The real message of the meeting, though, is Dr. Satar. She sits flanked by large men in beards as they talk of water and wells because her very presence will begin, both she and the Foundation hope, to someday establish her as an authority in the men’s eyes. She speaks often, but only after an elder addresses a question directly to her. 4) We’re Feeling Real Hope Challenging cultural codes is no small task, and men are not alone in resisting such change. One worker at the International Rescue Committee spoke of a village woman she came across one day. “She wanted the Taliban back,” the worker recalled. “She thought the people were equal then. The Taliban brought the educated women down to their level. Rural women suffered no more under the Taliban than normal.” What Afghanistan’s rural women may not realize is that their suffering will ease only with the help of urban women like Dr. Satar who are making the most of the small window of opportunity that has opened for women in their country. “I thought maybe we’d lost our country during the [Taliban] time,” says Dr. Satar. “People are poor and they can’t support their families, but the women are happy. They feel they are human beings again.”
Author overlooking Kabul (Photo: Don Rutledge)
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