CHAPTER 3

THE DAUGHTERS OF AFGHANISTAN

Feminism has fought no wars. It has killed no opponents. It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies, practised no cruelties. Its battles have been for education, for the vote, for better working conditions, for safety on the streets, for child care, for social welfare, for rape crisis centres, women’s refuges, reforms in the law.

—Dale Spender, For the Record: The Making
and Meaning of Feminist Knowledge (1985)

LIKE FLOWERS, THEY BURST OUT OF THEIR CASINGS as soon as they dared in the promising spring of 2002, gutsy women with the skills and ambition to lead their sisters out of the enforced dormancy they had endured for five long years. Some came back from self-imposed exile in India, Canada, and the United States; others from refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran; and the rest from the stifling confines of their own Afghan homes. The women who had dared to challenge the Taliban from behind a veil doffed their burkas and sallied forth to stake a claim for women. While masons were slapping cement on the new Ministry of Women’s Affairs building, teachers went back to school, midwives went back to work, human rights activists strode into women’s centres, and women found their way to the offices from which they had been banished. When the media started reporting again, some of the bylines in the newspapers, the faces of TV presenters, and the voices of radio broadcasters belonged to women.

Not that all was smooth sailing. While the constitution was being written in 2004, and the first-ever national election was being staged in 2005, there were complications and complaints: The wrong people had found their way into the transitional government. International aid wasn’t arriving fast enough. The Afghan habit of criticizing one another, pulling down those who rise, was reasserting itself. Nevertheless, the country was taking tentative steps towards nation building.

After the 2005 election, it was clear that the ever-stronger Taliban insurgency, now joined by discontents from across the country and from Pakistan, was trying to crush not only the democratically elected government, but also the shiny new concept of women’s rights. Stories of extremists assassinating female journalists, threatening women members of parliament with death, bombing girls’ schools, and beheading teachers made disturbing headlines. What’s more, with the blessing of President Karzai, the vice-and-virtue police who had whipped women for showing an ankle under a burka, beaten them for not covering a hand while paying for groceries, and chopped off one girl’s fingertips for wearing nail polish was re-established. It felt like another siege could begin.

Despite the turmoil, the tender shoots of a women’s movement were starting to emerge. They turned up in every province and at all the national meetings. Some of these activist women were sent in delegations to international meetings where women’s issues, theirs included, were discussed. They tapped into the solidarity of sisterhood and brought their deliberations home. Thousands of smart, courageous women were risking the ire of their conservative families, if not their lives, to pave the way forward for women. They included Jamila Afghani, who started an education centre in Kabul; Farida Nekzad, who became the editor-in-chief of a countrywide news agency; and Najia Haneefi, a human rights activist from Mazar-e Sharif. Connected by their bold determination to emancipate women and girls in the face of innumerable obstacles in a country where women’s rights barely exist, these thirty-something women are the daughters of the new Afghanistan.

JAMILA AFGHANI, THIRTY-FOUR, is a woman who brings new meaning to the phrase against all odds. She was stricken with polio when she was one and walks with one leg in a brace. Untreated scoliosis means she struggles with constant back pain. As if this were not enough to bear, she was shot in the head by the Soviets as a fourteen-year-old and still suffers from pain in her left ear. But it was actually a benign incident that shaped her life. “When I was a child, I couldn’t move anywhere unless someone carried me, so I sat all day on the floor, listening to the women who came to visit my mother. They talked about the violence in their homes, the beatings, the restrictions that forbade them from visiting family members. And they would always look at me and pity my mother. They’d say, ‘Poor you, Jamila cannot walk. She’ll be a burden to you, she will never marry.’ I was only about eight years old, but I vowed that one day I would not be a burden, and in fact I’d take their burden away myself.” Despite the extraordinary odds, Jamila, a devout woman who covers her head and wears layers of ankle-length, conservative clothing, is leading a movement to enfranchise women at the Noor Education Centre.

She was born in Ghazni in the central highlands of Afghanistan, moved with her family to Kabul as a baby, and went to school in the capital city until grade eight. Then the Soviet Union occupied the country and the family, realizing that her father would be targeted by the invaders, made the decision to beat a quick retreat to Pakistan. On the day they were to leave, her father, a well-known and successful businessman, was arrested by Soviet soldiers and sent to jail. He was released four months later, but the family was being watched, which meant their escape had to be postponed for another year. Even then, the road to Pakistan was blocked, so they went to India before eventually finding their way to Pakistan and settling in Peshawar, a northern city near the eastern border with Afghanistan. It was in this hotbed of religious and cultural conservatism that Jamila began a journey that would ultimately estrange her from her family and put her on the front line of the women’s war against stifling societal rules, the rules kept them behind purdah walls, as servants to men.

She graduated from high school, went on to Peshawar University, and graduated with a degree in political science and Islamic education. Then she began working towards a master’s degree in international relations and continued her study of Islamic education in private. “My studies opened my eyes about what was going on in my family. They were using religion to punish women.” Now she saw in a different light the stories the women had told in her childhood home. She knew she had to take action. “I wanted to become a lawyer, and stand in court to fight for women, but my brothers wouldn’t let me do that.” Instead, after completing her master’s degree, she went to work for the Afghan Women’s Network in Peshawar. Two months after 9/11, she returned to Kabul. She had been travelling back and forth to Afghanistan during the Taliban regime, to visit the schools the network supported, so she was acutely aware of the size of the problem the women and girls were facing. “I knew this was the time to begin my work.” She started small. A group of eight women—all friends—came together to collect medicine and money for women whose situation was desperate. “But eventually I saw this as a form of begging. What these women needed was education, wellness, and psycho-social therapy to alter their lives.” So they opened the Noor Education Center, taking the name from noor, which means “light.” The funding for the program comes from CW4WAfghan. “I love those women,” she says. “They are supporting the category of women that really need help here.” She describes some donors as “show-offs” because they show up and take off. The Canadians are different, she says. “The Canadian women have become friends and colleagues, they network for us and stay with us for the long term.” Her quarrel with other funders is that they want to dictate terms to her. They demand the money be spent in certain ways that Jamila knows aren’t effective. “It’s not always beneficial to the women we serve.” Some say she can’t put boys in the same classes as girls, but she sees that as a missed opportunity. “There’s a small window open to us now; what they are suggesting would shut it down. We’re going to live with our people forever; the foreign donors will be gone in a few years. We don’t consider the needs of the people enough; we tend to only consider the happiness of the donor.”

Says Janice Eisenhauer of CW4WAfghan: “We first learned about the work of the Noor Education Centre in mid-2003 and gave our first grant to them six months later.” They were drawn to the grassroots, volunteer element of the work and wanted to be part of the early funding because they felt it was crucial for a youth-focused organization to get off the ground. As well, the goals and objectives of the education program were aligned with CW4WAfghan’s focus on women and girls. “There was a refreshing sense and awareness of the importance of community about their programming, and unique and innovative methods to involve youth and volunteers, and engage parents in the learning process as well,” says Eisenhauer. “They needed to change attitudes about the importance of education and that’s obviously happening.”

The library is the hub of the place. Colourful, clean, and stacked with a variety of books on history and Islam, as well as storybooks, primary readers, novels in both Dari (one of the two official languages in Afghanistan, the other is Pashto) and English. The library also has computers, educational toys, puzzles, and games. It is more like a community resource centre than a library, as it also offers literacy and English-as-a-second-language classes, skills-development workshops, community and maternal health classes, and operates a mobile library. The library encourages young people to write articles for a newsletter, Baz Tab e Noor (reflection of light), and has an internet café that is a welcome resource for women and youth throughout the region. “It’s an interactive process,” says Eisenhauer, “that ensures the participants take ownership, and that the success of the library depends on their efforts. This kind of community work is the foundation of peace-building in Afghanistan.”

This group of eight women started with a grant of $10,000. To date the Noor Education Centre has received $163,205 from Canadian women.

Jamila and I sit with the ubiquitous green tea and almonds while she describes the situation she faced when the centre first opened. “The women were in terrible condition. They had no homes, no jobs, were suffering post-war trauma, domestic violence, and harassment,” she says. Not everyone agreed with Jamila’s plans to emancipate the women, but she’s as wily as those who would shut her down. The library, for example, was used at the beginning as a magnet to draw women to the centre. “At first the women were too afraid to come. They feared the Taliban weren’t really gone, so the women would send their sons to our library to get books. When I realized it was mostly boys coming to the centre, I told them for every five girls they brought with them, they’d get a present. Soon enough we had lots of girls.” But more than that, she started discussion groups, an opportunity for the women to share their stories—which was therapy in itself—and find out what else they needed in their lives. “These were the seeds that started the program.” The topic they talked about most was the violence they all experienced at home, so Jamila went to the human rights commission and got a manual for conflict resolution and a trainer to talk to the groups.

Jamila knows about conflict. A single mother of five adopted children (three because her sister-in-law died, and her brother didn’t want the kids when he found a new wife; and two others because a woman was left with eight daughters and couldn’t take care of all of them), she hired a widow who badly needed work to care for the kids while she went to her office. Her decision sent shock waves through her family, which was already furious because of her insistence on being a career woman.

She pours another cup of tea, adjusts her scarf on this blisteringly hot June day in 2006, and tells me she added fuel to the family fire a week ago when she announced her engagement to—horrors!—a man of her choice and now must suffer the wrath of her mother and father as well as her siblings. “They say: ‘We knew it would happen. We said she should not leave the house, go to school, become a working woman. Now look at what has happened! She’s selecting someone for herself.’” Her family called her a whore and a prostitute when she decided to go to university in Peshawar. Now that she’s engaged to a man they didn’t choose, they are barely speaking to her. “They have never spoken of my career or my accomplishments, and always tried to restrict my movements. ‘Don’t go here!’ ‘Never go there!’ They wanted me to marry and become a housekeeper, but my life is more than that. I wanted a man who could understand me, who knew I had a soul, someone with a spiritual personality.” The man she plans to marry, Fazal Dhani Kakr, was her teacher in Peshawar. He sent a proposal of marriage to Jamila’s parents two years ago. “At first I said ‘no,’ I wasn’t prepared to lose the work I do for a man.” But she began an email exchange with him, got to know him better, enjoyed the messages he was sending, decided this was the man she wanted to marry, and eventually said “yes” to his proposal. Her parents, who had studiously ignored Fazal’s initial letter, were apoplectic. Even her sisters in Germany and Australia wrote to tell her it was her duty to stay at home and take care of their parents.

Her uncle, a man she describes as the family member who carries the most weight, acted as their intermediary. Fazal made contact with him, had a meeting, and got the result he and Jamila had hoped for. “He told my father, ‘Fazal is a good man. Jamila is not only your daughter; she is the daughter of all Afghans. I want this marriage to happen.’” Although the engagement is not blessed, it is at least permitted. Together with Fazal, a widower with five children of his own, they will have a combined family of ten children. The engagement is only one week old. She is still living under her father’s roof and says, “The best thing for me is to get out of the house early in the morning.” The last thing they told her this morning was that she was an insult to Islam.

Although the chastisement hurts, Jamila says she sees herself as the way forward for women. “I am educated, a strong social activist. I have the same problems with my family as others do, and I stand on my own two feet.” Her family feels she is too open-minded, but she claims it is her open mind and her studies in Islamic education that qualify her to speak out. “They use Islam as a tool against women, and the culture as an excuse for the violence. It’s because they are uneducated and don’t understand wrong from right.” She says those who don’t want change accuse women of adopting Western values.

She admitted, while sitting in her peaceful office, that the situation had become precarious. “Everything came to Afghanistan with high speed,” she said. The massive SUVs driving around the cities and villages, the huge foreign presence, and the rapid changes they brought with them, were unsettling to many. “People weren’t ready for it. After a time, people began to say, ‘These changes don’t suit us,’ so it started to lose its appeal. Now it’s going down. Restrictions are increasing again, schools are being burned, some families in rural areas are stopping their daughters from going to school. I’ve heard of three cases in the last month of girls being kidnapped and raped—all because they went to school.”

While women flocked to the centre in ever-increasing numbers—now twenty-five hundred a month—Jamila said the rumbling distrust and fear spread by the Taliban insurgency, and by the stubborn fundamentalists who were its advance guard, were being felt everywhere. There was an unsettling feeling in Afghanistan that spring, as if everyone were waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Eighteen months later, in January 2008, I met Jamila again. In her arms was her eight-month-old son, Hamza Salahuddin Whab, and at her side was her husband, Fazal, who is now the co-director of the Noor Education Centre. He doesn’t shake hands with me but is quick to say that this is part of his faith. Jamila, who is obviously smitten by this man, explains: “When the people converted during the Prophet’s time, the men put their hand in his, but when women converted he put his hand on top of the water, and the woman’s hand was placed below the water. The Prophet didn’t touch women he wasn’t married to. Fazal follows that tradition.” In other ways, he is entirely untraditional. He carries Jamila’s laptop, the baby, and the diaper bag up the long staircase into the office and makes sure she is safely settled into a chair, her crutches by her side, before handing her little Hamza. She says throughout her pregnancy he played the role of mother, father, sister, and brother to her, running the household despite the fact that, traditionally, it is her job to serve the family, whether she is pregnant or not, and whether she works outside of the home or not. The story of her pregnancy and delivery is an interesting combination of the old and new Afghanistan. Her polio afflictions were aggravated by the pregnancy, and her scoliosis created more problems. She was confined to bed for the last two months. A month before her due date, she had an emergency Caesarean section, and her premature son was taken to the intensive-care unit (ICU) weighing a healthy 3.3 kilograms, but his early birth meant he would spend ten days in the ICU. Jamila sat and slept on a chair beside him because there were no facilities in the unit for mothers, but she knows that without the medical care she received, care that isn’t available to some women because their husbands refuse it, and to others because it isn’t reachable, she would not be holding this child in her arms today.

She sees her husband, her child, and her happiness as her reward for the struggles she has had to overcome for most of her life. She blooms with contentment while the staff in the bustling education centre buzz around her, and Fazal hushes the baby and starts to work on the computer. And then she takes a minute to talk about love. “Love is a power. It gives you strength. When I married Fazal, I thought I was in love with him, but the reality was this: He was a way for me to escape my situation at home.” Although she is now in touch with her mother occasionally, the family has basically boycotted her. “When I picture my father and brother, I realize I’m part of them, we have a blood-and-soul relationship. But they were harsh with me, gave me no value, and beat me, slapped my face. I never got the knowledge of love from my family. The longer I lived with Fazal, the more I saw what love is. He respects me; he’s a humble, intelligent, patient man.” He is also tall, studious, and attractive, a man who is clearly comfortable with their relationship.

“The truth is I fell in love with him after we were married.” While she says it is not culturally acceptable for a woman to show her love for a man (even her own husband) lest she be called a whore, Jamila has been transformed. The shy smiles directed at him, the confidence she exudes, the contagious happiness that seeps from her facial expressions give her away. “I know I’m lucky,” she says. “It’s not common for a woman to be in love. We may have a life with a good person, but being in love is totally different. It’s time Afghans talked about this.”

Her cellphone rings. She glances at the incoming number and her expression changes abruptly. “Bali,” she says as she clicks open the phone, listens with growing intensity, and speaks in rapid Dari. When she disconnects, she tells me she has to leave immediately. A single phone call has reactivated the ancient script of this troubled country, turning a page that connects the brutal past to the realties of today. Jamila’s uncle, the one who took her side when Fazal proposed marriage, has been kidnapped. A successful businessman, he is being held for a $1.5-million ransom. Kidnapping wealthy people has become a curse in Kabul, with local thugs looking for quick cash, or extremists in need of funding, plucking hapless men from the street, threatening their families, and almost always receiving the ransom. The police, who sometimes are involved in the kidnappings, are useless when it comes to tracing the kidnappers or rescuing the hostage. Jamila, Fazal, and baby Hamza have to go home. In the few seconds it takes to absorb the news, the curtain falls on the blissfully happy wife and mother, and a new drama begins in the family.

She contacted me by email a month after I left Afghanistan to say her uncle had been released after a $1-million ransom was paid. She was back at work. The baby was fine. She would be in touch again soon.

ACROSS THE CITY FROM THE NOOR EDUCATION CENTRE, Farida Nekzad, the thirty-year-old editor-in-chief of the Pajhwok Afghan News agency, is recovering from the fright of her life. She had taken a taxi to a meeting and carefully fixed the price before leaving, which likely alerted the taxi driver that he had an independent woman in the car. He looked at her through the rear-view mirror and asked, “What do you do?” She didn’t answer him. Then he started yelling, “I know who you are. You’re a journalist. You write all those things about warlords and mujahedeen. You’re going to be killed. You’re a woman—you should just go home and stay there.” He kept up the tirade, accusing her of being an American spy, telling her she had better quit what she was doing. Farida told him to stop the car. He wouldn’t. When he slowed down to go around a corner, she opened the door and jumped out, falling to the ground and cutting her arm and hand. People on the street gathered around her while she was yelling, “Get the plate number of the taxi.” Nobody did. She picked herself up, wrapped her bleeding arm in a scarf, went back to her office, and wrote the story. Her colleagues, even the foreign ones, were astounded. The old adage about writers having either to publish or perish takes on new meaning in a country that’s grappling with the right of a woman even to be seen outside the house, never mind be editor-in-chief of a news agency. Here the aphorism could be “publish and perish.” But Farida is undaunted. She sees journalism as the way forward for Afghanistan. She loves her job and vows the fundamentalists and crackpots will never force her to quit.

She attracts attention. Tall, slim, dressed in a chic, pinstriped pantsuit, with fashionable high-heeled boots, and a jaunty silk scarf barely covering her long wavy brown hair, she has the look of a hunter: huge watchful eyes and long legs that seem ready to spring. She walks me through the newsroom, sharing quips with her colleagues, and checking wire copy on a co-worker’s computer. She is every inch a journalist, as interested in the news of the day as she is in investigating the history of the women of Afghanistan. She has been married for three months to Rahimullah Samander, who is director of the Afghan Independent Journalists Association, and unlike Jamila Afghani, she has the support of her family. But she admits bucking an old system is exacting a heavy toll.

She had been threatened before the incident with the taxi, once even when she was returning home from the funeral of her friend and fellow journalist Zakia Zaki, a broadcaster, who had been shot seven times in the face in front of her eight-year-old son. Zaki was killed not only for being a woman journalist, but also for daring to expose the truth about the religious fanatics and corruption in government. That message came via Farida’s cellphone, the caller saying, “You are a bitch, the daughter of America. We’ll kill you as soon as possible, just like Zakia.” The Committee to Protect Journalists in New York offered her a scholarship so she could get out of the country, but she refused. While we sit in her office, huddled by a stove to stay warm on a January day when the temperature is minus twenty degrees, she says, “No one in Afghanistan is secure. If I leave, they’ll go after the next one, then she’ll leave, and soon enough they’ll have silenced the women.”

In 2005, a popular music-show host, Shaima Rezayee, was shot to death. In 2006, three journalists were murdered. In 2007, the murder of Zakia Zaki, the director of Radio Peace in Parwan province, and Shokiba Sanga Amaaj, a news presenter in Kabul, sent a shudder through the media community. Dozens of threats came to Farida. They were vile and frightening, hooking her work as a journalist to so-called sexual impropriety and accusing her of being anti-Islam—a crime punishable by death in Afghanistan. One caller said, “At least your friend Zakia could be recognized by one side of her face. We’ll shoot your face so that nobody will recognize you.”

Soon after, Bob Dietz, the Asian program director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, nominated Farida for the 2007 International Press Freedom Award given by the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. In his nomination letter he wrote: “The award would send a message that the rest of the world is paying attention to the case of this valiant editor, and that the crimes committed against individual journalists will not go unnoticed.” The jury easily selected Farida Nekzad. When she stood before a capacity crowd at the Toronto gala, she accepted the award on behalf of all female Afghan journalists.

Back in Kabul, she had to face a new onslaught by fundamentalist critics who accused her of speaking out of turn to the Canadian media. “Are you Talib or American? You are not Afghan.” The messages continue to arrive by email and phone, incessantly. “I pray they won’t kill me because it would be very difficult for my family, my husband, and for the women,” she says matter-of-factly.

Farida was born in Kabul but left during the Taliban regime and vowed she would never return after seeing people hanged from lampposts and dead bodies on the street. But when the hated Taliban were ousted, the draw to the land she grew up in was stronger than the urge to continue the good life she was living in India as a freelance reporter. “We need to show the people that women can work freely, and someone needs to tell the truth about what happened here,” she says of her decision to return. She started writing profiles, beginning with a woman who opened a beauty salon and a man who had served time in prison. Her reports were considered both groundbreaking and outrageous because going behind the scenes to find out how people feel or how they actually live their lives had not been done before. When people suggested this personal style of journalism was out of line, she felt she had to make excuses. “It’s not my voice, it’s the people who are telling their stories,” she explained. She admits now that she was scared because it brought attention to her (never a wise move in Afghanistan) but says, “These were the voices of others who need to be heard.” Her reputation grew. She took on radio as well as print assignments and ventured into the provinces, which women journalists rarely did, to report everything from snowstorms and accidents to corruption and women’s rights. “I did it because how else would the government or the international community know the needs of the people, if the media didn’t report them?”

Then she met Jane McElhone, the Canadian woman who came to Afghanistan to train women broadcasters for the Institute for Media, Policy, and Civil Society (IMPACS). Started in Canada in 1997, IMPACS has an international program designed to foster the development of free, critical, and effective communication to enhance the media’s role in the process of democratic development, good governance, accountability, and transparency. Unfortunately, the institute closed in late 2007 due to lack of funds. But, while it operated in Afghanistan, McElhone and her colleagues trained dozens of women journalists. The newly minted reporters also began broadcasting information to women. In the run-up to the election, it was these radio broadcasts that walked civil society through the process, explained the need to vote, the rules of an election, and the right of women to cast ballots. McElhone explains:

When I first travelled to Afghanistan as a radio trainer in January 2003 for IMPACS, I had already worked for many years as a radio producer and journalist, and more recently, as an international media trainer, press freedom activist, and media developer. They asked me to take this job and I didn’t hesitate. As a Canadian woman and journalist, I had had so many professional opportunities, including working for Canada’s internationally respected public broadcaster, and the idea of sharing those experiences with Afghan women, and assisting them with their efforts to become good journalists, producers, and managers was irresistible, as was the thought of experiencing first-hand the rebuilding of Afghanistan, and of sitting down face-to-face with Afghan women.

That first training stint was meant to last several weeks, but it turned into two and a half years, and six years later, her work has expanded in scope, just as her relationship with Afghan women journalists who inspire her continues to grow.

In 2003, Farida was hunting for a new challenge and a salary that would allow her to support her family when McElhone hired her for a job-share working both with IMPACS and the Institute of War and Peace Reporting, producing radio stories about and for women and writing articles about post-war recovery. “When some friends and colleagues began setting up Afghanistan’s first independent news agency, Farida decided she wanted to become editor-in-chief, so we happily released her from her previous commitments and gave her our full blessing to prosper and grow in her new challenge,” says McElhone.

But she stayed close to the budding journalist because she had identified Farida as a “leader in the field of media, freedom of the press, and journalists’ protection.” Throughout the years they collaborated, McElhone says, Farida worked tirelessly to establish the first independent journalists association in Afghanistan and the first independent news agency. She played a leading role in the coverage of the constitutional Loya Jirga (general assembly) in 2003 and of the first presidential election in 2004. When she became editor-in-chief of Pajhwok News, a job that she continues to hold today, she joined the ranks of a very small group of Afghan women media managers.

Farida has a reputation as a strong leader of Afghan women who speaks publicly and tirelessly on their behalf. When a young friend took her own life, Farida gathered women and men together for a memorial service and spoke eloquently about the lives of young women and the seemingly inexplicable choices they make. When Zakia Zaki was assassinated, she spoke courageously about the importance of women’s role in public life, media, and politics, firmly proclaiming that despite the threats and killings, women were not afraid and would continue working, speaking out, and using the media to tell their stories and to fight for their rights. “It was during this time that she herself received threats and became concerned about her own safety and her family’s security,” says McElhone.

Were the threats serious? Was she in real danger? It is always hard to say. Yet one of the things I have learned from working with Afghan women is that you never really know if and when they are in danger. What is even more wrenching is that they often don’t seem to know themselves. Given that they are fighting so hard and crossing so many new boundaries, it is all a risk and it is all unpredictable.

When McElhone’s career took her to a new post in London, England, to work with the Open Society Institute, she stayed in constant contact with Farida, knowing she was being threatened. “Every morning, I would go into Skype [an internet communications service] and check that she had made it to her office in Kabul and was online. She was the only one who could really decide what to do. People like me, who were far away, could simply let her know there were options, if she wanted them and, more than anything, provide moral support.”

They still get together. Last year, at Farida’s joyous engagement party at a cavernous wedding hall on the outskirts of Kabul, Farida and Jane sat among her women friends, colleagues, and family members, with the men hidden away on the other side of wooden dividers, where they were visible to the women only on a large video screen. And recently, at Laurier University in Canada, McElhone proudly introduced her Afghan women journalist colleagues at a photo exhibit and invited them to tell a rapt Canadian audience their stories.

Farida admits it is not easy to run a news agency with seventy reporters and eight bureaus but scoffs at the notion that the editor-in-chief’s chair is not a woman’s place:

I’m a journalist, just like a teacher or a social worker; it’s my job. Why can’t these people understand that I’m not a spy or a promoter of America? I am the bridge. I don’t take sides. I don’t belong to a political party. I report what I’m witness to. I’m trying to bring peace to Afghanistan.

She is recovering this day from laryngitis and says casually, “Oh it’s just from stress.” Her family, including her husband, worry about her constantly. “I feel badly that they have to deal with the whispering campaign against me. I told them not to tell people where I am, just say I’m out doing my job.” She knows she is sometimes followed, and her car was vandalized only a few weeks ago. The police know about these incidents and have told her to change her route to work often, and to sleep in a different part of her house every night. She says, “There are a lot of marked women in Afghanistan, but I won’t show that it bothers me.” She admits taking on subjects such as corruption or poppies or warlords is an invitation to be kidnapped or killed. “Warlords are still powerful. They have their militias and publicity and guns.” While the government supports the journalists verbally, she says, “They don’t ever ask who did that, who’s threatening you? And if one of us is killed, there’s no investigation, no one is arrested. They just say ‘sorry.’”

Recently elected vice-president of media at the South Asia Free Media Association, Farida has gained international recognition and, despite the threats and danger to herself, feels that the rights for women will come eventually and the future will be better. “In the end, those people who want to stop me will see that I’m right.” She has made an alliance with other women, including members of parliament, development workers, teachers, and other journalists, who are beginning to see the value of collaborating on women’s issues, making their voices known, and lobbying the government for change. One of those women is Najia Haneefi.

A HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST, thirty-year-old Najia Haneefi was born in Mazar-e Sharif. She graduated in journalism studies, which was not of much use to her when the Taliban took over her city. So her adult career actually began with pasta- and bread-making when she managed to get a job working for the United Nations Habitat program. Grateful for an income when women around her were forbidden to work, she soon moved to the communications division, which led to a partnership that the sassy Najia giggles about today. “The Taliban allowed the radio station to operate, but only if it broadcast strictly religious programs. They knew I had a journalism background, and hired me to write those radio shows.” She had gone to a religious school, read the Quran, and regularly prayed five times a day. She says:

They wanted shows that would appeal to women and children, so doing the research meant I had to read a lot about women’s rights in the Quran, and I began to realize how disgusting things are from a religious point of view for women, not only in Islam, in every religion. So I became secular while the Taliban were paying me to write their shows.

She laughs now at the memory of the misogynist Taliban compensating her while she changed her mind about religion. She also was running a youth group that was becoming increasingly disgruntled about the rules imposed on women. In the process, she recalls, she almost got busted. “We were celebrating International Women’s Day. Someone tipped us off that the Taliban were coming to arrest me, so we quickly tore down the banners, and when they arrived I told them it was a birthday party for one of the women.”

The ruse seemed to work, but it didn’t prevent a member of the Taliban giving a speech about the place of women. Najia tried to hold her tongue, but when the Taliban representative said, “Women are not complete. They don’t have a full brain,” Najia spoke up and said, “That’s wrong. There’s no place in the Quran that says that.” She was promptly hauled off to court for her audacity. Unbowed by the reprimand, she argued in court: “If women are not complete, how can it be that the first person to accept Islam was a woman?” The Taliban brought forty women to the court to testify that Najia had committed blasphemy and was encouraging immoral behaviour among women. They stepped forward, one by one, and took her side, vowing that she had done no such thing. Miraculously, the court let her go. She admits, “I was braver then than I am now!”

After the Taliban era, she went back to Balkh University and studied civil engineering. In 2003, she became the gender adviser for the government repatriation committee because, she says, “I wanted to be involved in political decisions.” Soon afterwards, her friends introduced her to Jane McElhone, and she joined the growing number of women being trained by IMPACS to take their human rights campaign to the mostly illiterate population by creating radio programs. Najia was in her element. McElhone remembers:

I met her in 2003 in Mazar-e Sharif. She was working for the U.N. high commissioner for refugees and, in her spare time, for Radio Rabbia Balki, a women-managed radio station that I helped establish. One of the very first independent stations operating after the fall of the Taliban, it was named after the famous Afghan woman poet who was killed by her brother. Najia was committed to that station, and to ensuring that the spirit of Rabbia Balki lived on, and that women’s stories could be told.

For McElhone, Najia was one of the very first Afghan women who belied the burka-covered stereotype. “She was gutsy, strong, opinionated, and funny, and in constant motion, rushing from the United Nations, to Radio Rabbia Balki, to her cool dark home, where we would seek refuge from the blinding northern sun.” There is a photograph taken from that time, at a picnic on the leafy shores of a river outside of her dusty town, that depicts the friendship among the women. “We sat on the grass and ate pilau [a rice dish] and barbecued meat,” says McElhone, “and then joined her Afghan friends as they jumped into the river fully dressed.” But it was after the camera recorded the moment that McElhone saw Najia’s real character.

We were drifting along peacefully, but the current suddenly overcame Najia, and she started struggling, and had to be pulled out. She was scared but, as always, exhilarated. That is the image that I have kept of her; plunging into new challenges with determination, at times without knowing or considering where she was going, but always, always setting new limits and new heights for Afghan women. Given the constant uncertainty, I often think that is the only way Afghan women can move forward.

Soon after that incident, Najia moved to Kabul, where she took a variety of jobs and established a reputation as one of the rising women leaders of Afghan civil society. “She kept a poster of Afghan women refugees above her desk in Mazar-e Sharif, and when she moved to Kabul she gave it to me as a present,” says McElhone.

Then, when I left Kabul, I carted it with me to London. Ripped and worn, the poster is now hanging above my own desk, making me ponder the many women like Najia who have worked so hard to create better lives for their Afghan sisters and to tell their stories and who have had to flee Afghanistan themselves to seek safer and better lives.

Najia’s interest in being close to the centre of change made her agree to take the job of director of the Afghan Women’s Educational Center, a national organization whose mandate is the promotion of rights, self-sufficiency, empowerment, and understanding among Afghan women and children. The centre includes health services, peace education, trauma and conflict resolution, counselling, psychological services, literacy programs, vocational training, and a wool-spinning facility to teach income-generating skills to women.

It was while working as the director of this centre that Najia made the boldest play of her young life. She took on the government, the mullahs, and the extremists when the vice-and-virtue department was re-established. A natural storyteller, she sits cross-legged on the couch in tight black pants and leans forward like a coach, her round mischievous eyes flashing when she recounts the play-by-play action.

The formidable supreme court chief justice, Fazl Hadi Shinwari, had retired. President Karzai had given him an office to keep the eighty-five-year-old fundamentalist busy.

“Everyone knew he was re-starting the vice-and-virtue squad, even though it wasn’t announced officially. The president wasn’t doing anything to stop him. I knew we needed to take action,” she says. She called all the civil-society networks and they said, “Najia don’t touch this. You could be accused of being un-Islamic.” She ignored them. “They already have a minister of hajj [having to do with the pilgrimage to Mecca required of Muslims] who has corruption charges against him, and a ministry of mosques to take care of religion. And we have police—they’re corrupt, but they are supposed to be handling things like vice, so we don’t need another structure.” She called moderate religious leaders, but they ignored her. She asked the media to cover it, but they felt the vice-and-virtue department was an Islamic order. So she went to the women. The women parliamentarians supported her. So did Sima Samar, the chair of the human rights commission, and Husah Bano from the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. She took her protest to the international community and says, “Canada and Italy helped me the most. The U.S. wouldn’t help at all.” On July 22, 2006, she issued a statement from the Women’s Political Participation Committee, an organization founded two years before with about thirty other women. The statement (excerpted as its English version originally appeared) said in part:

The Women Political Participation Committee expresses their strong protest against the violation of the Article 24 of The Afghan Constitution through the proclamation on the re-establishment of Vice and Virtue Department.

The formation of such department appears designed to … interfere … in the personal domain and is [a] violation of personal dignity of the citizens. This … is against all democratic values.

The Afghan government … is revitalizing the very institution which left the marks of abuse, insult and inhuman behavior on Afghans memory by the dictator regimes of the past.…

Also according to Article 6 of the Afghan Constitution “The state is obliged to create a prosperous and progressive society based on social justice, protection of human dignity, protection of human rights, and realization of democracy.…”

In respect of all the above mentioned the Women Political Participation Committee rejects the formation of Vice and Virtue and asks for reconsideration as women are always the sacrifice of customs, tradition and partial interpretation.

It took forty-five days from start to finish. The vice-and-virtue department was dismantled. Five months later, on December 5, 2007, Najia won the coveted International Service Award for Women’s Human Rights for her work to establish her countrywomen’s rights at a ceremony held in the British parliament. The judges commented that Najia showed “immense personal courage” to remain committed to her cause despite threats to her life. They also noted the “sustainable and effective” work of the Afghan Women’s Educational Center, and, in particular, its successful combination of practical projects and political campaigning. Sima Samar quips, “Whenever I see Najia in the corridors of the Human Rights Commission, I think there’s a revolution going on.” Najia also led a campaign to have women appointed to the Supreme Court but hasn’t won that one—yet.

THERE IS NO TRANSLATION for feminism in Dari, so Najia uses the English word and says, “I describe myself as a feminist without hesitation.” This stand is like waving a red flag to a bull in Afghanistan, but she takes the criticism with equanimity. “Most women are scared to call themselves feminists because Afghan leaders condemn feminism as anti-Islamic, although it’s not. But the women in my social circle are feminists, even without knowing it.”

She reflects on the Taliban days, when women’s lives were very constrained, when she had to wear a burka whenever she left the house, when lessons for girls were organized secretly by networks of women. “Things have changed dramatically since then. The presence of the international community here means that women’s rights are kept on the agenda; they were never on the government agenda before.” She notes that women now are visible in the cinema and the arts, on television, and in the government. She readily admits that they have not yet achieved what they had expected and hoped for but says, “Considering the tribal values—settling disputes by trading women, selling girls as brides—which are not Islamic values, fundamental changes still have to be made. I am optimistic about the future for Afghan women, but sometimes I find myself wishing I had been born somewhere else.”

By the time the hot summer of 2007 began, the worrisome backslide in security was leading to a rise in fundamentalism. Women such as Najia were being watched and threatened. Suddenly, in September, Najia left Afghanistan. She has enrolled in a women’s studies program at an undisclosed university in Canada and has applied for asylum. When McElhone read the email saying Najia had been seriously threatened and had to leave the country, she says, “I was saddened. I can’t help thinking what a loss it is for Afghanistan to be, once again, losing women like her.” She also saw the happy photos of Najia’s wedding in Canada. “I know she is building a safe and happy life there. She is now married, settled, and as active as ever, and running an Afghan women’s network, already contributing to her new country, but not forgetting her old one.”

Najia should not be counted out too soon. When I sat with her in Canada during the Christmas holidays, she said, “I’ll go back to my beautiful Afghanistan when warlords cease to have power to threaten human rights activists.”