I HAD BEEN at the school only a couple of years when Saima and I decided to organize a meeting of a few friends to discuss our future. I was sixteen years old, and I was becoming more and more frustrated with having to go to class every day and worry about math exercises while my country was plunging deeper and deeper into the nightmare of war.
From my teachers, and from the BBC Persian Service, which we listened to on a radio we borrowed from them—making notes as Soraya had taught us—I learned that life had only got worse for those who, unlike me, had no choice but to stay behind. The shelling of Kabul had continued practically without a pause since the Mujahideen had taken power. Over the past year, 1994, rival factions had imposed a food blockade on Kabul, and many in the city were at risk of starving to death.
But there was a new protagonist in the fighting. The failure of the divided government to set up an Islamic state had prompted many former Mujahideen fundamentalists to rally behind Mullah Mohammed Omar, and this new faction had come from nowhere to strip local warlords around Kandahar, a city in the south of Afghanistan, of their weapons and, in November, to take the city.
This was the birth of the Taliban. In their thousands, they went to give thanks to Allah at the shrine of the Cloak of the Prophet Mohammed, which makes Kandahar one of the most sacred places in Afghanistan.
But their success was not a matter of divine intervention. Mullah Omar could count not only on the support of the most fundamentalist forces among the Mujahideen but also on the men from the madrassa Islamic schools, which existed both in Afghanistan and in refugee camps in Pakistan. The Taliban should also have thanked the Pakistani authorities, who had given up on the Mujahideen government and decided to back the Taliban instead as a better tool through which to try to wield influence over their neighbor. Pakistan became the Taliban’s biggest supplier of arms.
On the December night when we had decided to hold the meeting, the BBC Persian Service reported that the Taliban had seized control of several more provinces as they spread like a cancer through Afghanistan. After switching off the radio, we met in the study room where we usually did our homework. We sat on the carpet huddled under blankets, sipping black tea to keep warm.
“How many years do you plan to spend at school?” Saima asked us. “Do you realize that if we stay here much longer, we will become adults, and we still won’t have done anything for our country or for RAWA?”
“What on earth do you think we could do for RAWA? We’re only teenagers,” another girl said.
“Wrong,” I said. “There’s a lot we can do. There’s a lot of work, and if one thing is certain it’s that we’re not taking any part in it by sitting on our backsides in class.”
We talked late into the night. Saima and I argued that we were old enough to write for RAWA’s publications and to take part in the demonstrations that it held in Pakistan. We were so fired up that several of us spilled our tea on the blankets. The meeting ended when I said, “Tomorrow Saima and I are going to speak out, whether everyone here likes it or not.”
When we went to find Soraya, we told her that we had very much appreciated our time at the school, but we felt that now was the time for us to contribute to the work of RAWA. She showed no surprise at our request. All she asked was that we think hard and long about what that meant before making up our minds, and then come back to her.
I did not want to lose any more time. “Sister, we have thought as much as we need to. Our minds are made up, and we want to start tomorrow,” I told her.
A few days later Soraya called us to her. RAWA had discussed our request and would arrange for us to leave the school and go to live in a safe house, one of several that RAWA had in Quetta and other Pakistani towns. They were mostly for the association’s younger supporters, groups of whom would live in the houses with RAWA members watching over them.
Soraya told us that we would start our work once we had moved to the safe house.
After so many years of waiting, I was finally to start fulfilling the promise I made on the death of my parents. For the first time in my life, I felt the joy of independence. The decision to leave Afghanistan, to go to the RAWA school, had been taken for me by others. But this was my decision, and I had no regrets about leaving the school.
As soon as I could, I rushed to tell Grandmother. “Daughter,” she said, “your life is a special life. I want to see you like your mother and your father.”
I WAS PROUD of the fact that we girls ran the RAWA safe house. We had our own daily budget, and we divided up the different jobs and drew up a timetable of who would do what and when. None of us could cook properly, and we ate just because we had to. One of the jobs was sentry duty, and at night we organized a series of two-hour shifts for watching over the house. We kept a gun in the house and hoped that we would never have to use it.
I no longer had to wear a uniform and could wear my own clothes, many of which Grandmother made for me. I still had classes, but only in history, political studies, and English, which the teachers from the school came to give us at our house. They rushed us through only the most important subjects on the history and political studies syllabus, gave us a crash course in English, and after a year the classes were finished. That was the end of my schooling.
Apart from the classes, I was free to read anything I wanted, and I raced through the writings of Bertolt Brecht, in Persian translations. More slowly, I read the speeches of Martin Luther King in English. For days I repeated to my friends the maxim of Abraham Lincoln, which I discovered in Brecht: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.”
The first work I did for RAWA was to write articles on Afghan events for Payam-e-Zan (Women’s Message), a magazine that the association had started a dozen years earlier. I learned to write as if I had to defend the choice of every word. For years I had believed that the more complicated a word, the more beautiful it was. When I read poetry, I thought the best words were the ones I didn’t understand and had to look up in a dictionary. But Soraya taught me to use words that were as simple as possible, partly because many Afghans could barely read and write.
She also taught me that politics was not about long discussions among what she liked to call white-collar politicians; it was about talking to poor, ignorant, and backward people and showing them that they had a future. “Never speak to the poor as if you are a teacher who knows everything,” she said. “Never forget that even the most backward peasant can teach you something.”
Three months after we had started living in the safe house, Soraya brought us a thick sheaf of papers that had been clipped together. It was a manual, a collection of accounts by RAWA members of their experiences, and Soraya told us that we should read them attentively and profit from them.
When my turn came to read the manual, I was transfixed. So much so that I read it aloud to Saima and the others. I would also read it late at night, using a flashlight under the blanket so as not to disturb the other girls in the room. The accounts were handwritten, the pages well thumbed.
One member recounted how she had been arrested and jailed in Kabul, and was told while she was in prison that her brother had been killed by the authorities. To force her to reveal RAWAs secrets, she was kept awake for several days at a stretch. The guards would beat her every time she closed her eyes. But she did not betray the association and was eventually released from jail.
Another member was arrested at her school, one of the best in Kabul, when the Russians were still occupying it. She was a teacher, and had passed some RAWA publications on to a colleague of hers. The men of the KHAD, the Afghan secret service that was inspired by the KGB, found the documents during a search of the colleague’s house and arrested her. The papers were against the puppet regime that did the Russians’ work for them at the time, and called them traitors to Afghanistan.
The police released the colleague when she denounced the RAWA member, and arrested her instead—even though she had a three-month-old baby girl. Her baby went to jail with her. The member denied that she belonged to any illegal organization, but they kept her in a prison for a whole year. Today, her daughter is grown-up and is very active in RAWA. I am always joking with her that she was a little young to be a dangerous criminal so fearsome that she must be kept behind bars at three months!
The accounts described the different tortures inflicted by the KHAD—the way they would tie up prisoners and leave them in the hot sun for days on end, pull out their nails one by one, or give electric shocks to their sexual organs.
I felt sorrow over the suffering inflicted on these people who had been members of our association. When I discussed the manual with Soraya, she told me that it was impossible to predict how someone would react under torture. But I swore to myself that whatever happened to me, I would never betray my friends. I could never live with the thought that a friend had died because of me.
It was Soraya who told me in detail about the life of Meena, the poet who had founded RAWA. I had seen her picture at the entrance of the school. She was a student of Islamic law at Kabul University when she created the association at the age of twenty in 1977, and originally its aim was only equality for women. Then the Russians invaded, and RAWA went underground and started fighting against them, but only with nonviolent means. RAWA did not campaign for any particular party but for a free, democratic Afghanistan.
In her writings, Meena called the women of Afghanistan “sleeping lions,” who would become powerful when they finally awoke. One of her poems is called “I’ll Never Return”:
I’m the woman who has awoken,
I’ve arisen and become a tempest through the ashes of my burned children.
I’ve arisen from the rivulets of my brother’s blood,
My nation’s wrath has empowered me.
My ruined and burned villages fill me with hatred against the enemy.
Oh, compatriot, no longer regard me as weak and incapable,
My voice has mingled with thousands of arisen women,
My fists are clenched with the fists of thousands of compatriots
To break together all these sufferings, all these fetters of slavery.
I’m the woman who has awoken,
I’ve found my path and will never return.
Although she went to live in exile in Quetta, where she set up the Malalai Hospital, she knew that she was still in danger. She received several death threats and even told the authorities in Pakistan about them, but the police ignored her and gave her no protection whatsoever.
She was at her home in Quetta when an Afghan agent of the KHAD strangled her with tow. She was thirty years old.
Soraya told me that one of the men suspected of involvement in the murder plot was Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, the warlord who for three years shelled the people of Kabul from the mountains to the south after the Russians had left. He was responsible for the deaths of twenty-five thousand people in the capital. The life Meena led still inspires us.
“You know the dangers,” Soraya said to me. “Are you prepared to accept them? You may achieve nothing in the way of money or power. But if you choose this work, you must prepare yourself for the possibility of being arrested and of being tortured to make you reveal what you know. You may lose your private life, and you may also lose your life. Remember that the door is always open if you want to leave. Maybe the time will come when you will be too scared or too tired. At that time you should leave, but you should always keep RAWA’s secrets in your heart.”
I did not hesitate. “I know that you have made many sacrifices, and I am ready to do the same,” I replied.