A WOMAN’S PLACE IN TRIBAL LAW
Our cultural traditions bind the hands of women like chains.
—Habiba Surabi, from her acceptance speech when appointed
Governor of Bamiyan, March 7, 2005
ON THE STREETS OF KABUL there is plenty of evidence that women are shrugging off their centuries-old oppression, but the usually untold stories from behind the walled compounds in this and other Afghan cities and villages tell a different tale. One of the worst is depicted at the burn unit at Kabul’s Esteqlal Hospital, which is located not far from the lustrous new institutions of equality and democracy, including the human rights commission and parliament. It is eerily quiet in the ward. The paint is peeling and the beds are rusty. Rickety poles hold up opaque intravenous bags containing painkillers and antibiotics. An air of fatal futility fills the room in which a dozen patients writhe in agony. It’s like a surreal ward of the damned.
A girl I’ll call Annisa startles me the most. Her face is burned as black as charcoal. Her eyes stare out from beneath scorched eyelids, sending a message of unspeakable pain. Her arms, bent at right angles, are wrapped in gauze and suspended like the limbs of a marionette over a charred chest that is rutted like a tire. Her lips are grotesquely swollen, stretching her mouth into a silent scream. It will take this blameless eighteen-year-old five or six days to die.
This is the face of the violence that still plagues the women of Afghanistan. Annisa is a victim of badal, a tradition of trading daughters without dowries from one tribe or family to another for marriage. It is, in essence, a sentence of hard labour, abuse, and humiliation. Badal is common in this country. What happened to Annisa is not unusual, although such incidents are rarely reported. She disobeyed her mother-in-law, so the woman held her down while her son, Annisa’s husband, doused her with gasoline and then struck a match that lit her up as though she were tinder. (A survey done in 2007 by Global Rights, a Washington-based human rights organization, found that 30 percent of reported incidents of violence were perpetrated by female household members, often a mother-in-law.)
Badal is one of dozens of practices accepted under tribal law. While only civil and sharia law are sanctioned by the constitutionally mandated judiciary, it is tribal law (or “traditional practice”) that is most commonly administered. In tribal law, women and girls can be bought, traded, or given away like any other property. Child marriages are still the norm—girls as young as four are betrothed to old men—and bride prices still exist, meaning that young girls are sold to the highest bidder. Women are raped to dishonour an enemy tribe and daughters are used to settle scores: If someone is killed in a dispute, the killer’s family gives a girl child to the victim’s family to make amends. The cases of tribal law recorded at the human rights commission and by the Women and Children Legal Research Foundation (WCLRF) read like tales out of the Dark Ages, but this is post-Taliban Afghanistan. The country is in the process of nation building. It has a new constitution, a human rights commission, and is stepping forward, full of hope, into the twenty-first century. While the international community wrings its hands over warlords, drug barons, and the insurgency in the south, the women of Afghanistan are demanding reform and an end to the tribal laws that have kept women in bondage for a millennium. The process is slow, complex, and precarious, but by all accounts, the reformers are chipping away at the traditional structure that uses women and girls as plunder.
Historically, the rule of law developed from traditional practices. When Islam emerged almost fourteen hundred years ago, there were a number of practices that were contradictory to the Prophet’s teaching. Some of these—for example, the custom of burying a newborn girl alive because girls were considered a shame to the family—were dropped. The customs that were considered acceptable to Islam, called marrof, were confirmed in the Quran. The Hadiths (speeches or comments by the Prophet that explain the holy text) contain dozens of anecdotes about changing the mentality of society towards women. These commentaries clearly denounce the traditions that violate women’s rights.
In the absence of a formal judiciary, tribal law is meant to be the keeper of peace in the village, the court where disputes are aired, shared, and settled, so that families can forgive and be forgiven. This traditional law is used to settle land claims, water quotas, and personal grievances. But, over time in Afghanistan, it has become brutal, vindictive, and irreversible, and the vast majority of the people harmed are women or, more precisely, young girls. Customs such as badal, bad, forced marriage, underage marriage, trading women for animals or drugs, and the idea that giving birth to baby girls rather than boys is shameful all are commonplace. There are even names given to exemplify the unwelcome birth of girls. For example, if a baby boy is born, although he is named, he also bears the moniker Neek Sar, which means “good person.” If a girl is born, she too is named, but is referred to as Bad Sar, or “bad person.” The nickname for women is Aajeza, which means “disabled” or “bad luck” person.
Convincing the perpetrators—the village chiefs, elders, and mullahs—that these traditions constitute crimes against women is an immense challenge. Fledging attempts at changing these entrenched beliefs were made under King Amanullah in the 1920s, and again under King Zahir Shah in the 1950s and 1960s, but they were brief, timid, and short-lived.
The Russian occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s was a relatively permissive era for women. Photos from that time depict women in miniskirts and jeans meeting their friends at restaurants and discos and walking along the river’s edge with their boyfriends. Even during the fratricidal bloodbath fought between the seven factions of mujahedeen when the Russians departed, women played a role in civil society. Seventy percent of the teachers in urban centres were women. They also made up 40 percent of the civil service and half the students at Kabul University. Those public gains were wiped out in 1996, when the Taliban emerged victorious and virtually put women and girls under house arrest.
Now, with women in parliament, and a women’s movement starting to take action, the real test of the resolve of Afghans and the international community for women’s rights has begun. The hardened underbelly of village life, the heretofore unassailable bedrock of tribal law, is under attack.
At a groundbreaking conference in November 2004, the WCLRF highlighted tribal law as the major cause of violence against women in Afghanistan. Founded in 2003 by a group of women lawyers, the foundation’s goal was to provide human rights defenders with reliable evidence and facts so they can begin the long, complicated process of altering the way disputes are dealt with. At that conference, they did what no one had dared to do before: They used documented evidence and statistics to identify the common types of traditional practices, the impact they have on women’s lives, and the ways and means to stop them.
They began by examining how and why these practices have passed uncontested from one generation to the next, despite the introduction of civil and sharia law. They explored the power of tradition, particularly in the absence of peace, and in a culture where crimes against women go unpunished. And they pointed out that Afghanistan has solved its disputes through jirgas (a gathering of Afghan communities) or shuras (a local board of community elders and trustees) since the time of the Bactrian Aryans. From that time to this, the problems within the village were viewed from a male perspective. The customary laws were never codified, and no organization was ever mandated to monitor the lawful implementation of these practices. The researchers also raised the question of the consequences that can result when the decision of the jirga or shura is not obeyed: Violent punishments, or nagha, are applied. The alleged violator’s home may be burned to the ground; he or she may be forced out of the community or be subjected to enforced removal and isolation from the tribe and other forms of authorized revenge. There is no time limit to punishment: the enmity of the tribe towards transgressors can last for generations. With the highest illiteracy rate in the world, and a narrative of more war than peace in the long history of Afghanistan, it is no small wonder that tribal law has not only survived but thrived. The WCLRF delegates then produced the evidential details of each of the practices.
They began with bad. Although it is against sharia law, as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, international norms and standards, and indeed the civil law of Afghanistan, it has persisted. Its roots can be traced back to ancient Egypt and the story of “The Bride of the Nile.” According to this tale, every year the Egyptians selected a beautiful young girl and threw her to her death in the Nile River to stop the river from overflowing. In Afghanistan, the tradition has taken another form. The family that loses in a conflict gives a girl, or sometimes two or three girls, depending on the size of the harm done, to the offended family to slake the misogynist thirst of the tribe and presumably to stop the inter-family conflict from overflowing. Although it is applied differently in different parts of the country, bad never produces amity rather than animosity and always results in misery, if not death for the girl. It is so entrenched that, until the WCLRF study came to light, even the government felt that it didn’t have the right to intervene in such cases. And it isn’t isolated to the rural villages. More than fifty cases of bad were reported in Kabul during the research for the report. The WCLRF also claimed that bad affected not just the women and girls, but also entire family systems, which disintegrated in the aftermath of the penalty. The authors of the report concluded: “We are witnessing women’s slavery in the twenty-first century.”
The 486 cases collected by the WCLRF over a twelve-month period described penalties handed out to toddlers as young as three years old and to mature women of fifty, and painted a horrific picture of women treated as chattels. Girls are exchanged for better livestock, to settle drug debts, and for any manner of goods prized by a man who has a daughter to barter.
For example, a girl I will call Fariba (the names of the victims are protected in the report) was fourteen years old when her brother killed a man during a gambling dispute. Fariba was given in bad to the deceased man’s family for the crime committed by her brother. A few years later she went missing. The family said they didn’t know where she went. It is presumed they killed her.
Another girl was given in bad because her brother killed a man in a dispute about the water quota. After three years of beatings, sexual assault, and near starvation, she escaped but was captured and murdered by the patriarch of the family.
A nineteen-year-old girl was given to a fifty-year-old man in bad because her father couldn’t repay a debt. He gave his daughter instead of money.
In another case, when several sheep were killed by wolves, the young shepherd who was minding them was forced to give his sister in bad to the owner of the sheep. She is now used as a beast of burden. And when a girl ran away from home to escape her forced betrothal to an old man, the local jirga gave her ten-year-old sister in bad to the boy’s family to keep the peace.
When a marriage ceremony is being arranged, tradition dictates that the groom’s family kill an animal—a goat, sheep, chicken, or cow—to welcome the bride to the in-laws’ home. The report cites a case of a father of the groom who gave one of his daughters to the landlord of the village in exchange for a cow because he didn’t have any livestock to kill.
And during a game of buzkashi (a traditional polo-like sport that uses a dead goat as the “ball”), the report notes, one player’s horse was injured. Rather than missing the rest of the contest, he traded his daughter for a new horse so that he could finish the match.
Even though the tradition is widely accepted, the researchers found that families were reluctant to tell the truth. It is a case in which everybody knows the truth, but nobody is willing to step forward to speak. It is also further proof that girls and women are being punished for crimes their fathers and brothers commit.
Tribal elders told the researchers that while they are aware that this is a terrible way to settle disputes, they feel they are obliged to use it as it is part of their tradition. Their justification is in the belief that bad will reduce conflict, repair family relationships, and wipe away the stain of dishonour. But in reality, it doesn’t stop the tension between the families: The angst is perpetuated and an innocent girl has her life ruined. And it doesn’t end there. By not punishing the actual perpetrator, criminal behaviour within the tribe goes unchecked and leads to a culture of impunity.
The report found that the tradition is followed blindly and irrationally by tribal members who never question the inhumanity of their actions. The results frequently are tragic. Victims who run away often turn to crime and become unreported statistics in the legions of mentally unbalanced citizens in a country that has known too much war. Deprived of growing up in a family with parental guidance, and subjected to uncivilized behaviour, they frequently succumb to a life of crime, drug dependence, and violence. Then the cycle repeats itself, the children become drenched in mistrust, hatred, and disgust for the family and the tribe. Mercilessness, ruthlessness, and animosity replace the amnesty and forgiveness the tribal law pretends to foster.
Forced marriage is another custom that defies civil and sharia law. It is estimated that from 60 to 80 percent of all marriages in Afghanistan are forced. The term covers a wide array of practices, from giving a female in marriage as repayment for a debt or to end a feud to simply determining who a daughter should marry without her consent.
While the practice varies between regions and ethnic groups, it is a common feature throughout all social, ethnic, religious, tribal, and economic divisions of Afghan society. What these practices have in common is the unlawful violation of women’s human rights. To see a wide-eyed little girl—sometimes as young as four—standing next to her betrothed—a twenty-, thirty-, or forty-year-old man—is such shocking evidence of child abuse that it is hard to imagine how it can be understood or condoned at any level, much less accepted as tribal law.
The unchallenged presumption in the village, and indeed in many homes in the cities, is that women are a subspecies: chattels for trading, vessels for begetting a son, or a punching bag to relieve rage. Says Sima Samar: “Men beat up women because the dinner isn’t ready on time, because it isn’t cooked properly, has too much or too little salt, or because the children are fighting amongst themselves. He’ll pull her hair, hit her with shoes, electric wires, sticks. He’ll beat her until his rage is spent for a reason that has nothing to do with her.” She says, “The difference between a bad woman and a good woman in this country is a bad woman won’t put up with the violence, she’ll leave. A good woman is quiet, bears it all, and says nothing. We have to change that.”
WHEN WOMEN ARE DENIED AN EDUCATION and kept away from their friends and family, when they are economically dependent on a man and repeatedly told they are unworthy, it is a tried-and-true formula for subservience. Today the women of Afghanistan want these conditions altered. In one of the cases presented to the WCLRF conference in November 2004, a man had cut off his wife’s nose and ears and poured boiling oil on her because she had kissed her son-in-law. As long as such a case is decided by a jirga rather than by the judiciary, there is little hope for change.
At the conclusion of the conference, a statement signed by all the participants was released, calling for an end to violence against women and making the following demands:
As this list of demands suggests, the multiple layers of authority that need to be involved in the reform include tribal elders, families, local commanders, local administrative agencies, provincial governors, judicial bodies, police, and the courts: a labyrinthian task for a country struggling with corruption at every level. The good news is the publication of the report received immediate attention by President Karzai, who called bad “a cruelty” in his speech on the occasion of Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. Then, on International Women’s Day in 2004, he referred to bad as “one of the worst non-Islamic and inhumane acts,” and called on religious leaders to combat it. The chief justice, the deputy chief justice, the minister of women’s affairs, and the chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission signed a statement that read: “Bad is a crime against humanity and a clear violation of human rights.”
So the people with the power to stop the practice of these traditional laws do also have the will. But extrapolating that blessing from the higher-ups into action is a monumental task that starts with a highly controversial subject: the status of women. In Afghanistan, a wife must consult her husband and ask his permission for everything she does. In the absence of her husband, she must ask her brother-in-law or father-in-law, regardless of his age or hers. If she is not married, she needs permission from her own father or brother for anything she wants to do.
Versions of these societal rules existed for women the world over until women themselves demanded change. Until 1968 in Canada, for instance, a woman was expected to say, “I obey,” when she took her marriage vows. A married woman could not open a bank account without her husband’s signature. It was conferences held in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the one held in Kabul in 2004, that altered the status of women in Canada. There is every indication that Afghan women have embarked on the same journey.
One woman at the conference told a story about hiring staff for the health education program she was running. She knew a woman who would be suitable for the job, and who badly needed the money to feed her family. But the woman’s husband was away and she couldn’t accept the job without his permission. She asked her brother-in-law, a nasty man who wished the worst for her, and he refused permission. Most employers would simply have hired someone else, but because she knew of the restrictions that applied in the case, and the consequences that would follow if her preferred applicant was denied the job, the health educator waited them out and finally got the husband’s permission for the woman to take the job.
Because women have less access to education and their social lives are limited to their family, most women don’t even know their rights in civil law or within the constitution of Afghanistan. Neither do they have access to law enforcement, so they are unable to seek justice for themselves. Until now, the notion of interfering with traditional customs was seen as a challenge too great for the government to tackle.
The conference was a strong starting point for the reform of family law. It took three more years to get the funding, assign the tasks, and coordinate the organizations that would get the movement off the ground. But while the lawyers and human rights activists struggled with the exceedingly slow process of putting reforms in place, the violence continued.
BACK AT THE BURN UNIT AT ESTEQLAL HOSPITAL, head nurse Shakilla Walizada, a strikingly pretty woman garbed in surgical scrubs, is ticking off the survival rate of the dozen female patients in her care this day. She says, “There’s little we can do for these women.” She is an efficient, no-nonsense professional but confesses the recent increase in burn cases is getting her down. “It’s very hard to work here now. We can’t do much. Most of them die because the injuries to their heads and necks are so severe,” she says.
The rise in self-immolation cases has taxed the already overcrowded, underequipped hospital. These women have chosen death rather than face a forced marriage or another beating. In the last year alone there have been 230 reported cases, and an untold number of others that go unreported. The victims are usually between twenty and thirty-five, and most suffer burns to 95 percent of their bodies. They almost always die an agonizing death. What’s more, their families are ashamed of them.
While the human rights commission’s mandate is to look out for all Afghans, on the second floor of a building in Kartese in western Kabul, ironically situated in the section of the city that suffered the most damage and the worst human rights abuses during the mujahedeen era, a cramped office is dedicated to women’s issues. Inside, Homa Sultani, the director of the commission’s women’s project, keeps a thick log of complaints and intends to hold someone accountable for every one. There are floor-to-ceiling files containing details of unimaginable crimes against women. As if the darkness of their contents is not enough to cast a pall over the office, Sultani no sooner starts her description of the cases she is examining than the power fails. It is a daily nuisance she copes with. The computers go down and the room feels airless. We move our chairs to the window to take advantage of the available light, and an increasingly impatient Sultani sends one of the two women who share the space with her for tea. Pots of green tea are served along with heaping plates of almonds, as if to remind a visitor that there are some dependable customs in this country, despite its turbulent present.
Sultani opens an album that reads like a book of horrors. The cases come from the north, south, east, and west of the country and include rich and poor, urban and rural, women and girls. The first photo is of an eight-year-old girl, covered with scars, who was given as a four-year-old in bad. “The girls given in bad are treated terribly,” Sultani says. “After all, they are the enemy’s daughters; they come from the family who killed the son. And in Afghanistan, the families love the sons much more than the daughters.”
She explains that now, with the emphasis on education, people know bad is wrong. It is against both Islam and civil law. But it still goes on. The hapless child in the photo managed to escape after four years of brutality and now lives in an orphanage. Her abuser has been named by the human rights commission, and an investigation has begun. But getting justice from a still-dysfunctional judiciary, and a police force that is corrupt, is another challenge for Sultani.
She turns the page to a woman who used self-immolation to escape her abusive husband. This woman survived: Her head is lashed to her body with strings of immoveable scar tissue, her hands are stumps, her face fixed in an expression conveying both pain and frustration because of her failure to escape. Sultani is already turning the page, so familiar is she with this history of violence. When I ask her why a woman would choose such a horrible way to commit suicide, she explains:
Women are watched. They have no access to guns, pills aren’t available, they can’t hang themselves, because setting up the noose would attract attention, and they don’t know about slitting their wrists. Every woman has access to petrol, so setting yourself on fire is seen as a fast way out of an intolerable situation.
Sultani turns another page. This woman had her face slashed by her husband because she was working outside the house. Another is the victim of a money-for-opium marriage. Her father owed money to the drug baron and had to give him his daughter when he couldn’t pay the debt. Her arms are broken. This one is Nadia Anjoman, a famous poet bludgeoned to death by her husband on November 5, 2005, because her mother-in-law said she left the house without permission. “He’s out of jail now,” says Sultani. “He is getting married again.” And the photo on the last page, of a woman whose face is beaten black and blue, tells a story of a husband who demanded to have sex the way he had seen it in a pornographic film. She refused. He fisted her vagina until she couldn’t walk and pummelled her face with his knuckles.
She has a list of 327 women who miscarried this year due to beatings. “And that’s only the reported cases,” she says.
The list goes on, but so does the work for change. Sultani’s team is spread all over the country, teaching groups of women what their rights are in Islam, and in the laws and constitution of Afghanistan. “We tell them the difference between Islam and tradition, between criminal courts and tribal laws. Most women think that being beaten by a man and bearing many children is the place of an Afghan woman. They think Islam has given all the rights to men. We tell them that is wrong, and that Islam gives equal rights to women.”
The teapots are empty, the power surges back on, and the buses that ferry the women in this office to their homes are waiting outside when Sultani closes her book of horrors and calls it a day. The oppression of women in this troubled place won’t stop overnight, but the difference today is many more women are part of the growing demand for change because now they know what their rights are.
The case of Annisa, the eighteen-year-old burn victim in Esteqlal Hospital, may be a turning point, a sign of a growing demand for accountability. Her father heard about the fate of his daughter and reported it to the human rights commission. Homa Sultani sent officers to the hospital, gathered evidence, and presented it to the police. Although the sentence for this hideous crime is a scant two years in prison, she knows it will send a message, one that will travel as fast as fire across the country.
THE HUMAN RIGHTS SEED WAS PLANTED in 2002 by a Canadian plan designed to right wrongs for the women of Afghanistan. Human rights was as bizarre a concept to most Afghans then, as terrorist attacks were alien to North Americans prior to 9/11. To women who are not even registered as citizens, to girls who are fed last and least after the men and boys, the notion that they have the right to vote, to an education, and to health care created a buzz all across the country. Now Afghan women are talking the talk with Canadian financial backing.
The brainchild of Ariane Brunet at Rights and Democracy in Montreal, the Women’s Rights in Afghanistan Fund started in September 2002, with a donation of $1.7 million from CIDA over two years, to educate women about the empowering concept of human rights. It has turned out to be one of the most ingenious programs in Afghanistan. Says Brunet:
A window of opportunity opened when the Taliban fell. If women were ever to get out of the oppressive bind they were in, they had to be part of the emerging civil society. It takes rights to do that. Most women had no idea they had the right to anything at all.
Once she secured the funding, she hired Palwasha Hasan, a thirty-three-year-old woman who spent her young life walking the walk of the disenfranchised, first under the communists and then under the Taliban. “By pushing for a Women’s Rights Fund headed by an Afghan woman, you accomplish two things,” says Brunet. “You ensure that women are visible and make it clear to funders that this is a long-term project.” Soon, Hasan was running nineteen projects from Mazar-e Sharif to the streets of Kabul. No one guessed the program would flourish as quickly as it did—it soon was hailed by the Afghan government as well as the U.N. Security Council. But everyone knew the backlash would be ferocious. The fundamentalists and religious extremists threatened the leaders, looted their offices, and lambasted the plan as un-Islamic.
From literacy training and radio broadcasting, to magazine publishing and family health care, every program uses human rights as its base. For example, on the second floor of a mud-brick building in Baymaro on the outskirts of Kabul, twenty-five women are gathered around the classroom table learning to read and write. The lesson that day was based on the upcoming general election. The concept of democracy, and all that it entails, travels outside the classroom and back to the villages, where the women carry their new-found knowledge to their sisters, mothers, and mothers-in-law. One eighteen-year-old woman, Mary Mohammadi, explained, “I have six brothers who always said I couldn’t argue with them because I was illiterate. One brother slapped me on my face for speaking about my rights. Now I know more about the constitution and citizens’ rights than they do.” But the women all acknowledge the men in their lives are against these upstart ideas. “We tell them it is written in the Quran and the constitution, but it’s always a big argument,” said Mohammadi.
Hasan is proud of her projects but wary as well. Her office was ransacked by intruders who left the payroll and computer but took the list of people she was working with on the human rights file. She said, “If necessary, I’ll hire bodyguards. But I won’t quit. The work we are doing is too important for the future.”
While I am in her office in 2003, disturbing news arrives from Herat, where Governor Ismail Khan rules: Women have been yanked off the street and subjected to abusive gynecological examinations to prove their virginity. Hasan is trying to get these issues into public discussion. The quickest way, she says, is to get people talking, to train women as advocates, and to raise a generation of activists. But first she has to find ways to reach them, in this country with its 85 percent illiteracy rate. One of the projects she was funding was radio broadcasting. Journalists such as Jane McElhone from Canada were training young women to be radio technicians, to conduct interviews, and to create programming that teaches human rights. The broadcast was reaching two hundred thousand listeners in the northern province of Mazar-e Sharif, where some of the most militant warlords in the country hold power. Radio programs encouraged women to stand for public office, to work on the constitution, and to convey information about human rights to villagers. The newly minted broadcasters took their jobs seriously, while trying to avoid the warlords’ henchmen, who lurked around the tiny broadcast centre waiting for an excuse the shut the project down.
For those who can read, she funded a magazine called Women’s Mirror, a four-page weekly that reaches three thousand readers in sixteen provinces. The editorials are about women’s participation in the political life of the country, and the articles are critical of everything from the disarmament program to higher education. In one issue, the editors took on the government for closing schools during the Loya Jirga and depriving students of classes. Editor Shukria Barakzai said, “We were called up in front of the minister of culture and information to explain ourselves. They accused us and judged us as if their office was a court.” She knows she publishes at her peril. “Fundamentalists threaten us all the time. We have to be careful about every word we print because they’ll use them against us.” One lesson she learned is that the term human rights may be tolerable, but women’s rights is a flashpoint that is better avoided.
In Shakardara, west of Kabul, women walk more than an hour from all over the district to get to the human rights classes. More than 650 students had completed the four-day workshop started six months earlier. When the father of one student forbade his daughter from attending the class, the teacher, Nafisa Naseeb, invited him to come and check it out for himself. “I wanted his daughter in my class, but I also knew he had a car, and hoped I could convince him to drive the others who had such a long distance to walk.” She won on both counts and says, “If we don’t teach the men, we’ll never get through to the women.”
These women know they are in the early stages of a revolution. And Hasan admits it will take time, perhaps ten or twenty years. “You can’t legislate change like this. It has to come from the people requesting it.”
Hasan left her post in 2006 to study for a master’s degree in England. She was replaced by the able and affable Roya Rahmani, who had just returned to the country after completing her studies at McGill University in Montreal. The idea for Reform of Family Law had flourished in her absence, and Rahmani saw it as the perfect next step for the Women’s Rights Fund. She and Brunet presented the plan to CIDA and in early 2007 received the go-ahead. The announcement outlined the initiative’s three main objectives:
Rahmani joined forces with the Women and Children Legal Research Foundation, the human rights commission, and half a dozen other groups that were working on family law reform. She said, “Women need to come together—urban, rural, poor women, and women from different tribes. They need to talk to each other, establish credibility, and become a voice of authority.” She said it is the women who have to push for reform of family law, for standardized marriage contracts, and for trained mullahs and judges who can interpret Islam and the constitution correctly. She called for regional and provincial networking to support the women members of parliament. But this takes funding and planning. “People like funding women’s rights, but in reality, there’s never enough money to do it. Compare the budget for drug eradication to the one for women’s rights, and you’ll see how far down the priority list women really are.”
She was frankly discouraged when I met her soon after the Kabul riot in 2006. She said:
I was born in 1978; all I know about my country is war. There is insecurity everywhere. We don’t know from day to day whether we’ll have jobs, whether a missile will hit the house. We have no trust in the government or the police. And we can’t leave because no other country wants us. People have been living like this for decades.
When Palwasha Hasan returned to her post at the Women’s Rights Fund in the summer of 2007, she had a $5 million project budget and a four-year time frame to kick-start the reform of family law. “I know the work, it’s dear to my heart, and I feel I can do something,” she told me when I caught up with her five months later.
She began by collaborating with the leading reform association, Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), which has played a vital role in family law reform in countries such as Egypt and Morocco. Using their methods, Hasan established herself as a facilitator with the Supreme Court, the mullahs, women’s groups, the women’s affairs ministry, and the human rights commission. “This is about the relationship of men and women within the family, which is very important in Afghanistan. But it’s equally important that women have a legal space in the relationship.” She is focusing on the constitutional status of women in marriage, inheritance, child custody, and divorce. And she has a collection of homegrown strategies for the process. First, talk to the community. “This has to be an Afghan solution. There has to be ownership.” Second, use a multi-level approach. “It can’t just be the legal officials who solve the problem; it has to be the women and men in the community who come up with the ways and means to reform the law.” And finally, timing is everything. “Four years ago everyone wanted to talk about the constitution. Now, for the first time, they’re ready to talk about reform.”
She adamantly points out that the objective is not reconciliation between tribal and civil law. “The objective is to get people talking about it, finding out where the problems exist. Customary laws are oral, so talking is the way to a solution,” she says. Badal, for example, was simply an accepted custom. Now even village elders are talking about the fact that, while it may be traditional, the result is never good.
Homa Sultani, who works closely with Hasan, describes the distance they have travelled:
Three years ago, we had the first meeting with mullahs in Kapisa province, at a workshop to discuss Islamic law and human rights. The mullahs were angry that a woman was present, and were not ready to hear a single word from me. One said, “It’s not allowed that a mullah hear the voice of a woman.” Three years later, they are helping us. In fact, I saw a mullah solving a woman’s problem. He was doing mediation, and telling the husband, “Islam says she is a human being, she’s equal to you. If you want her to respect you, you have to respect her.”
But the process isn’t easy, she admits. Most people still do not know the difference between civil and tribal law. For every man who is willing to deal with change, there is another, maybe two or three others, who see it as unthinkable. Sultani had just had a meeting with an elder and asked him what he would do with a girl who leaves the family to marry. “We’ll kill her according to tribal law because she is a shame on us,” he said and then went into a tirade about women and family honour. Homa interrupted his murderous ravings and said, “According to the Quran, a woman can get married to who she wishes.” His reply? “I don’t want to talk to you. The thought of a woman talking about the Quran is impossible.”
The organization holds workshops with the mullahs, elders, and tribal leaders who are the protectors of tribal law. One of the problems Sultani is dealing with is that the tribal laws give these religious leaders so much power. It benefits them financially because the mullahs are paid by the tribes, not by the government. They tell her: “We’ll solve our problems according to our culture, to the will of the people.” So she says her task is to explain civil law in a way that it isn’t against tribal law. “It takes skill to do this. You need to be clever like a politician.”
The human rights commission uses the media to assist with the program by broadcasting spots on television about tribal law and showing films about its dire consequences. Sultani feels that most mullahs are coming around. But she is aware that this is just the beginning: “This is very new for us. Our grandmothers didn’t know about human rights, neither did our mothers. In some ways I’m grateful to the Taliban. They motivated us to become activists.”
Reflecting on the changes made for and by women since 2002, Palwasha Hasan says the road has been and will continue to be bumpy, but there have been improvements. There are women in the workplace who have gathered experience. The training programs offered by dozens of non-governmental organizations are bearing fruit. You would be hard-pressed to find a government office refusing a woman a job because of her gender. But Hasan says the challenges still are enormous. “There aren’t enough skilled people and professionals to do the jobs we need done. We’re running on a single tier.” To make her point, she says, “If something happened to Sima Samar, I don’t know what would happen to the human rights commission.” She knows it takes strong, dedicated women to take on reform. “I was three blocks from a suicide bomb last year. I’ve had threatening messages, although not lately. The lack of security makes you function in an abnormal way.”
The key to this bold reform program is that the women’s movement is taking shape. “It’s not strong yet,” she says. “But we all know each other and we’re starting to come together.” Life is better, she says. “I’m happy and I love my job.” The transformation is visible: Hasan greeted me in a long flowing dress and a hijab that trailed to her mid-thighs when we met in 2003. This time she is wearing jeans and a funky jacket with a bright red scarf that spends more time on her shoulders than covering her hair.
Today the incidence of bad is decreasing because people know they will be prosecuted and could spend up to two years in jail. Underage marriage and forced marriage are also beginning to wane, again because of the spread of information. Badal stubbornly persists. As for Annisa, she died of her injuries two days after I met her. Her husband offered her father money if he would withdraw the complaint the commission had made to the police. Annisa’s father accepted the cash, the charges were dropped. The case is closed.
In Afghanistan today there is law, if not order. There is some justice, if too little and too late.