I DISLIKED THE SHOP and the shopkeeper, but above all I hated the garment that I was being forced to buy. I had come to the bazaar to buy a burqa, and I spent as little time as I could in the shop that displayed them so proudly in its window as if they were the latest fashion. I thought they looked like disgusting sleeping ghosts. I saw a blue one—the most common color—that looked about the right size for me, and tried it on over my shirt and trousers. It was the cheapest, made of polyester.
“I can’t see. I’m going to fall down in the street with this thing on,” I complained to the shopkeeper as I struggled with the heavy material. I had had it on for only a short time, but already I was sweating in the June heat.
“Don’t worry, you will practice, and after that you will have no problem,” he replied.
I wrenched it off, handed the man his five hundred rupees as he folded the burqa neatly and put it in a plastic bag, and then I got out of the shop as fast as I could. It made my blood boil to hand over money for something I loathed. If I could have, I would have set fire to the whole shop. But it would have been dangerous for me even to tell the shopkeeper what I thought of his wares. He might have started arguing with me and attracted the attention of a police patrol.
I had no intention of practicing as he had recommended. I knew I would get plenty of chances to get used to it very soon.
It was the summer of 1997, and after almost three years with RAWA I was at last being sent on a mission to my homeland. My task was to see what could be done to help several of our members who had written to RAWA in Pakistan saying that they had problems they wanted to discuss with us. It was too risky for them to describe these problems in their letters, which they smuggled across the border with the help of supporters, and that is how I got my chance.
I was also told to find out whether we could bring women from Afghanistan to take part in a street demonstration that we would soon be holding in Pakistan. The aim was to bring as many as one to two thousand women from Kabul without the Taliban spotting any of them, either on the way out or on the way back.
I was to travel with Abida, a friend and RAWA member who was several years older than I and had been back to Kabul before, and with Javid, a middle-aged male supporter. He would follow us like our shadow and be our mahram.
Javid had been growing his beard for weeks in preparation for a trip to Afghanistan. A driver would take us as far as the border. Apart from my travel companions, only six other people knew about the mission.
I hated packing the burqa into my travel bag. For the Taliban, who would soon be celebrating the first anniversary of their conquest of Kabul, it would serve to guarantee my dignity and my honor, as I would be obeying the decree that a Moslem woman must observe complete hejab, or seclusion from society.
Later, the Taliban did not stop at simply ordering that women wear burqas. They dictated that Hindu women should all wear yellow burqas. In Afghanistan, yellow is the color of sickness, and of hate, and for the Taliban all the members of the Hindu minority were infidels. The women had to wear yellow just as Jews had to wear the yellow stars imposed on them by the Nazis.
I did not expect to see anything beautiful, or anything that would make me happy, during my visit to Kabul.
KABUL WAS a graveyard. The river that gives the city its name was brown and cold, and rubbish floated slowly down it. When our minibus pulled to a stop at the bus station in the center of the city, I could not stop my tears. It was evening and already dark, and the buildings, so many of them just empty shells, looked like tombs. Despite the devastation before me, I understood when Abida breathed in my ear, “Oh, my lovely Kabul,” and I nodded.
As soon as we stepped out of the minibus, the beggars crowded round us, pleading for alms. I had never seen so many beggars—there must have been two dozen of them. Through my tears, I saw one little boy about ten years old who had half his right arm missing. I guessed it had probably been ripped off by a mine that he had picked up, one of the thousands that were the legacy of the fighting since the Russian invasion. As he stretched out his left hand, he sang a song to me, all about potatoes and meat. All he ate was dry, hard bread, he sang, and he had never seen the color of potatoes or meat, never tasted them. It was a sweet melody, but I had no money to give him.
We had taken only a few steps away from the beggars when a woman stopped us. From the way they shuffled toward us, stooped and frail-looking, we guessed they were old women. But we soon realized they were in the pay of the Taliban religious police, the crazily named Amar Bil Maroof Wa Nahi An al-Munkar, the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
I had been warned about such women before I left Pakistan. They helped the Taliban keep tight control of everyone on the streets. It was easier for old women than for the Taliban to check on what you were hiding inside the burqa.
“Show us your bags,” one of the old women commanded.
I felt sick with fright, unable to speak. I thought not only of the RAWA publications in our bags documenting Taliban outrages, but also of the more important letters that were hidden in a pouch tied around my stomach. If the old women found any of our papers, our mission to Kabul would be over before it had even started.
The old women were illiterate and would not be able to understand the documents. But they would know from the photographs in the publications that it was banned material, and report us soon enough. I did not want to think of the fate that would await us in a Taliban prison cell.
I heard Abida at my side speak cheerfully to them. She spoke in Pashto, the language that the old woman had used. “Mother, we have just arrived after a long, long journey,” she explained. “We are simple girls, we are exhausted, and my friend is not feeling very well. We have nothing special to show you, only clothes.”
Thanks to Abida, the old women lost interest in us, and we walked away slowly although we wanted to break into a run. We found a taxi and set out for the safe house where we would stay for the week. I was not told whom it belonged to, and didn’t ask.
When I arrived at the safe house, I had not yet taken off my grimy burqa when I heard a shout and felt someone give me a bear hug. The embrace went on and on until I felt myself suffocating. After what seemed like minutes, I was finally released and got a chance to take off the burqa. I kicked it aside.
I recognized Zeba, one of our most courageous members. I had met her a couple of times when she visited Pakistan. It was Zeba, I knew, who along with others took great risks by filming some of the worst crimes committed by the Taliban, including their public hangings and executions.
I will never forget the film of a woman in a light blue burqa, the same color as mine, kneeling near the goal markings on the pitch of a former soccer stadium while a Taliban in a turban pressed the end of his Kalashnikov against her headband. She tried to get up, but a mullah pushed her down again. And then the shot, which kicked up a small spurt of earth as the bullet hit the ground after going through the burqa and through her skull.
The executed woman was the mother of seven children, and the Taliban accused her of killing her husband in a family quarrel. The husband’s family forgave her, but the Taliban decided to go ahead with the execution anyway.
Later, another execution was captured on film: in the middle of a big crowd as the Taliban used cranes to hang two men on the edge of a busy street. The men were accused of cooperating with anti-Taliban forces. They were blindfolded, their hands tied behind their backs, and a rope slung around their necks. They died almost instantly when the cranes lifted them off the ground, and they were left to hang there for a whole day, their feet swinging at the height of people’s heads.
At the main stadium in Kabul, Zeba filmed a public qasas, a religiously sanctioned slitting of throats. A man convicted of killing two people was forced to kneel in the stadium, his eyes covered by a scarf. He was given ten minutes to pray, then his hands were tied behind him with another scarf. Then a brother of one of his victims walked up to him, carrying a knife. The brother drew the knife across the man’s throat.
I realized that I could not begin to imagine the dangers that Zeba and others were running. Their lives and mine were as different as the earth and the sky.
“About time! I thought you’d never come,” she said, smiling at me. Zeba was in her midthirties, but she had so many wrinkles and her hair had so much gray in it that she looked twenty years older. Yet when I asked her how she was, she answered only “Fine, fine.”
I sat up until three o’clock in the morning, drinking countless cups of tea as I talked to Zeba and other RAWA members. Then she suddenly stood up and said, “Right, off to bed. We shouldn’t keep you up like this. You’re going to need all the sleep you can get. In two days’ time there’s going to be a public cutting of hands at the stadium. I’d like you to come with me and help me photograph it.”
“Bed” meant the carpet. I was too tired to think about what lay in store for me, and fell asleep as soon as I lay down.
WHEN THE NOISE of my RAWA friends making breakfast woke me up a few hours later, at first I thought I was in Pakistan. Then I realized where I was, and I was happy to be back. When I went into the yard to wash my hands at the tap and saw Kabul in the daylight, even the mountains beyond the city—which had seemed so peaceful to me when I was a child—looked sad. But the fact that I had seen them again, after so many changes in my life, made me feel stronger.
Saddest of all, for me, was the fact that there was not even one kite in the sky. The Taliban had stamped out one of the oldest traditions of my country and emptied the sky.
I went back into the house and noticed that most of the windows had been draped with curtains that were black on the side facing out into the street but all different colors on the inside. The Taliban had decreed that houses where women lived must have black curtains always covering the windows so that no one could see them from the outside. But the people I was staying with had insisted on some color.
Again I had to put on the burqa before I could leave the house. Because I was not used to walking with it, I grabbed Abida’s hand as we walked through the streets with Javid. For a report that we had to write up, I was being taken to meet a woman whose teenage daughter had been raped by a Taliban commander in the street. A RAWA member knew one of her relatives.
We had walked not very far from the house when I heard a whistling sound very close to me and, a fraction of a second later, felt a sting on my hand. I thought I had been bitten by a snake, but when I turned I saw a Taliban with a lash in his hand.
“Prostitute!” he shouted at me, the spittle spraying his greasy beard. “Cover yourself and go from here! Go to your house!” He wore a black turban, and I thought his stare was strange until I saw that he was wearing surma, a thick black eyeliner, to make himself look more aggressive.
Abida apologized for me and quickly pulled me away. She told me that my hand must have come out from underneath the burqa while we were walking. “Please be as careful as you can,” she said. “We can’t afford to draw any attention to ourselves.”
When we knocked at the door of the woman whose daughter had been raped, I told her that we were from RAWA and wanted to help her, at the very least with some words of comfort. She was small and weak, and the strength of her reaction took me completely by surprise.
“If you are from RAWA, you’d better leave right now,” the woman snapped.
“Why? We only want to help you,” I insisted.
“You say you are fighting for democracy and for women’s rights, but your methods are completely wrong. If you have a gun to give me, then you can come in. That’s all I need, a gun. I know who raped my daughter. He is a very powerful commander, and I have no other way of avenging her.”
I thought for a moment that if only I could have taken off my burqa, she could have seen my eyes and understood how much I wanted to help her. But she was in such pain that I could find nothing to say. I was not angry with her. I felt only pity, and I was sorry that I could do nothing. I hoped that with time she would agree to talk to us.
Thousands of women had suffered the same fate as her daughter. In the areas of central Afghanistan populated by the Hazara tribe, the Taliban kidnapped young women as kaniz, or servants, and then gave them to their soldiers to marry. Theirs was a strange creed: they could rape women and force them to marry, but they stoned to death women suspected of adultery.
No tribe suffered at the hands of the Taliban as much as the Hazaras. A few months before my journey to Kabul, in September 1997, the Taliban carried out a massacre of Hazaras in the village of Qezelabad in the north of Afghanistan: An eight-year-old boy was decapitated, and two twelve-year-olds had their arms and hands broken with stones as soldiers held them.
I WAS TO FEEL frustrated several times in Kabul. When I visited a hospital with Abida and Javid to determine how risky it would be for us to take pictures there, I saw dozens of patients, young and old, lying on the filthy concrete floor of the corridors with no one paying any attention to them.
Many of the children showed clear signs of malnourishment, the skin taut over their faces and their arms as thin as sticks. I had read that parents sold their children in the street because they could not afford to feed them, or simply gave them away to anyone who could offer them a better life. The toilets were in an awful state—there was urine and excrement all over the floor. There were more Taliban than doctors in the hospital. We saw them patrolling the corridors in their black turbans, lash in hand, picking their way among the sick people.
The women suffered more than the men, because the Taliban would not allow them to be treated by male doctors. For the Taliban, if a woman was sick, it was better for her to die than to be treated by a man. If she refused to let a male doctor touch her, she would be certain of going to Heaven. If she let herself be treated by him, she would be condemned to Hell. Of course, there is nothing in the Koran to justify this belief.
The only woman I was able to speak to in the hospital told me she could not afford medicine because she was not allowed to work, and had been waiting for days to see a doctor. She was forced to wait so long because there were not enough women doctors left in Kabul. Many doctors, both men and women, had abandoned Afghanistan under the Russians to make a better life elsewhere, in Pakistan, Iran, or in the West, and many more had fled under the Mujahideen and the Taliban. There were no new women doctors to take their place, since the Taliban prohibited women from studying medicine as well as everything else.
In Pakistan I had met a woman surgeon who had left Kabul. She told me that under the Mujahideen, she had been forced to operate by candlelight because there was no electricity when the city was being bombed, and that her shifts lasted as long as twenty-four hours at a time. She had been pregnant, and she lost her child because she had spent so many hours standing in the operating theater. Despite this sacrifice, she felt ashamed that she had left Afghanistan.
Abida pretended she had kidney problems, and managed to talk to one of the few women nurses who were working there. But she was able to ask only a few questions about the hospital before the nurse became suspicious. Taking photographs in the hospital would be a very dangerous task.
A few days later I found out that the Taliban did not hesitate to use their whips against the sick, even in the hospital. I was out walking in the street when I saw a woman sitting in the middle of a busy road, surrounded by a small crowd. She had tried to commit suicide by throwing herself into the middle of the traffic. “Let me die, let me die,” she said again and again. She was lucky that there were no Taliban nearby, as they would surely have beaten her right there in the street.
Later, when I managed to speak to her in a quiet place, she told me that her mother suffered from asthma and had gone to hospital for treatment. Soon after reaching the hospital, she had suffered an asthma attack and had taken off her burqa as she fought for breath in the ward. A Taliban had burst into the ward and given her mother forty lashes while the daughter watched, helpless to intervene. The nurses had done nothing to stop the beating.
The daughter, who was twenty years old, explained why she had wanted to commit suicide: “If I can’t even help my mother when she is sick, then what is the good of living?” she asked me.
I thought of Grandmother, the asthma attacks she suffered, and of how I would have reacted if I had been in the girl’s place. It was one of the worst moments of my visit to Kabul, and for a time I felt discouraged. The burqa not only killed women mentally, it could also help to kill them physically.
I noticed more signs of the toll that war and the Taliban had taken on people’s mental condition. As I walked in the streets, I often saw people behaving strangely. Some men walked around aimlessly, a glazed expression on their faces. I saw one talking loudly and endlessly to himself, without stopping for breath. Another burst out laughing like a madman as I passed. There were certainly no doctors qualified to deal with this.
In the streets of Kabul, the chants of the beggar boys were the only music I heard. As a child, I was used to loud music coming from the shops and the cars. Now, the only cassettes that people were allowed to play in their cars were religious chants with no music, which go on and on, just one voice that has no melody to it at all.
That was also the dominant, hypnotic sound coming from Voice of Shari’a, the Taliban radio station, on which, of course, no woman was ever allowed to speak. The only exception that I heard was a phone-in program, a daring innovation in Taliban broadcasting history, during which male listeners could question a panel of mullahs exclusively on religious matters.
The program did not go quite as planned. One insistent listener who said he was from a small village kept asking how he could decide which was the senior of the two mullahs in his village. The answer “The one who knows the Koran best” did not satisfy him. Neither did the answer “The one who is a better Moslem.” He kept asking how he could tell the mullahs apart, until one of the so-called experts told him that he should find out which one had the most beautiful wife. Then the listener was cut off. Never in my life have I heard such a ridiculous and absurd program.
Zeba told me that the only time she could listen to her music tapes was before going to sleep, and she would keep the volume as low as possible out of fear that the neighbors would inform on her if they heard the offending sound.
Before, there were pictures of the most famous singers in all the shops, but now photographs of any kind were banned. So was television. Still, in several of the houses I visited I saw that people not only had illegal television sets, they also had homemade satellite dishes in the yard to catch foreign channels. They would throw a sheet over the dish if anyone knocked at the door. They usually managed to catch only one Pakistani or Indian channel, but that opened up a new world for them. The most technically accomplished even managed to tap into CNN and BBC World Service. For free of course.
The Taliban regularly raided houses that they believed harbored televisions. But they were not always as strict as they were supposed to be. One family who had been caught watching a video of an Indian film were pulled out of their home and given a public lashing in the street. The Taliban shouted at them that it was anti-Islamic to watch such films. Then the Taliban left them outside and reentered the house. When the family dared to return, they found the Taliban sitting around the television set watching and commenting on the film, which was still playing. The Taliban took a bribe from the family and did not arrest them.