Glamour - December 2002

In Afghanistan, the Women Speak

Again – to Old Truths
by Rachel Louise Snyder

It has been more than a year since the Taliban, called by the United Nations
the most misogynistic regime in the world, was ousted from power by
U.S.-led coalition forces after a six-year rule in Afghanistan. It was a regime
that denied women and girls the most basic rights: education, work,
medical care (women were forbidden to see male doctors and few female
doctors were permitted to work), and even the freedom to leave their
homes unaccompanied by a male relative. The Taliban had promised
women safety and peace after two decades of war and violence; what
they got was prison.
Afghan Woman (Photo: Don Rutledge)
 
The current government, led by president Hamid Karzai, has promised to build an Afghanistan
where women are guaranteed their rights returned and more. $4.5 billion in foreign aid has been
pledged to help Afghanistan rebuild, $850 million of which has been disbursed so far. Another
$174 million in U.S. aid has been pledged by President Bush, but as Glamour went to press, the
proposed funding was held up by budget wrangling in the Congress. Meanwhile, scores of
Afghan refugees who fled from nearly a quarter century of continuous war have returned, at the
rate of 7,000 to 10,000 a day according to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees; the majority
try to settle in Kabul where 20 years of war has destroyed most affordable housing, but where the
few opportunities in the country’s battered landscape exist. Afghans are relying on foreign troops
to provide security until their own army is established, and on foreign aid to bring their nation into
the 21st century. But most women have found that their vision for a new Afghanistan is far from
being realized. Agents of change are battling a centuries-old patriarchy that has only become
more entrenched in the country’s long history of war and the few women who’ve managed to
return to their careers or start new ones often find themselves as sole voices among their mostly
male counterparts. Still, they say, they will learn, once again, to shout.
Glamour - December 2002
In Afghanistan, the Women Speak Again – to Old Truths

1) We’re Still Subject to Patriarchal Law

“I am afraid,” says Rahima, 35, (like most Afghan women, she refused to give her last name), as she
fingers her white veil and tries to pull her twin toddlers--both girls--together onto her slight lap.
“I am afraid we’ll be in here a long time.” The “here” that she refers to is the Kabul jail for women,
where she spends her days with 28 other Afghan females, including her sister, and their children,
who are typically jailed with them. Rahima says she was jailed because she refused to marry her
brother-in-law after her husband, a former detective, passed away-a practice that is customary in
Afghanistan. She fled her husband’s family and her brother-in-law promptly had her arrested.

The women at the jail sit a dozen to a room on dirt floors with tiny barred windows that look
out on Kabul’s mountains, where terraced houses in monochromatic color are built into the
mountainside. Plastic bags suspended from nails in the walls hold bedding. A single light bulb
dangles from the ceiling in the long hallway outside. There is nothing beyond this dank room, no
playground for the children, nowhere to walk. At mealtimes the women’s relatives slide food and
clothing through a small open window in the main door of the jail.

This might be fitting punishment for violent criminals, but almost all of the women here are being
held for matrimonial misdeeds--what Western women would call, simply, love. “Many eloped or
ran from their homes with a man and under an Islamic government this is a big crime,” says Khatol,
the female warden, who has worked at the jail for 10 years. “I’m sad to see them here because they
are female, but they did make mistakes. They should have real marriages, not love marriages.”

Even in the relatively cosmopolitan city of Kabul, some of the Taliban’s most repressive rules are
still being followed by women, out of fear or simply custom. Many continue to wear the burqa,
a shroud-like veil that covers a woman head to toe. Most women still need their husband’s
permission not only to see a doctor--and will likely not be allowed to see a male doctor-but
they still go through the formality of asking to simply leave their homes alone. Outside of Kabul,
women are even more restricted: Ismael Kahn, the notorious warlord of the Herat Province in
western Afghanistan, recently issued a decree requiring women in his province to seek permission
before working for any foreigners and forbidding women from sharing cars with male aid workers.

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In Afghanistan, the Women Speak Again – to Old Truths

2) We Still Fear for Our Lives

Leila Achakzai, 26, lives with her husband, Fahim, in her mother’s Kabul home. Leila, who is due
to deliver her second child, says she has no doctor in Kabul and doesn’t know where she will give
birth. Though she was born and raised in Kabul, Leila has never been able to venture beyond her
own neighborhood, so the city is a mystery of threatening streets to her. A map with no compass,
no direction. She couldn’t make it home without help if she were just ten or twelve blocks away.

When a woman is pregnant, Afghans say she is sick. This is not a linguistic quirk; it is a grim reality.
At the Malalai Maternity Hospital in Kabul--Afghanistan’s largest--women are often released within
hours of giving birth, so great is the demand for beds, which line the hallways of the dimly-lit
building. Even with this hospital, 97% of Afghan women give birth at home because, like Leila,
they are not allowed to see male doctors and often have no means of transport to get to medical
treatment. In a recent report released by Physicians for Human Rights, Dr. Lynn Amowitz, who is
one of a handful of researchers beginning to understand that maternal mortality is staggeringly
more common than anyone ever grasped, found that 40% of the women who die during their
childbearing years are dying as a result of complicated pregnancies--most often complications
like bleeding and infection that are easily preventable. Roughly 600 women die in childbirth per
100,000 in Afghanistan, compared to 200 in neighboring Pakistan, and just 12 in the United States.
Afghanistan now has the highest maternal mortality rate of any country outside of Africa.

To researchers like Dr. Amowitz, these numbers reveal both a health-care and a human-rights
crisis. “Maternal mortality is a preventable disease with a preventable outcome,” she says.
“Education is the single biggest indicator of health status. There are basic things missing here
that would prevent a woman from dying, like control over timing and spacing of children, who
and when to marry, access to birth control methods, and denial of individual freedoms.” Indeed,
when Amowitz asked women why they’d married so young--the average age was 15--they shot a
question right back at her. “What else did I have to do?”

Such questions reveal just how important education is for Afghan women, who were not allowed
more than a 3rd-grade education under the Taliban. Today 50 of% Kabul’s schoolchildren are girls

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In Afghanistan, the Women Speak Again – to Old Truths

but in more conservative areas like Kandahar, they make up only 3 percent, according to UNICEF.
Since no census has ever been taken in Afghanistan, it is impossible to gauge how many girls in
the impoverished rural provinces have had no education at all and have little hope of ever going
to school.

Surrounding the Malalai is a concrete wall built by the Taliban, eight inches thick with tiny
windows cut out in two places. Outside the wall men camp and wait for their female relatives
inside, occasionally rushing off to buy medicines in the bazaar because hospital supplies are
meager. The men are still not allowed inside (though they were before Taliban rule), so they speak
to their wives through the wall’s tiny windows, eye-
to-eye only. “The Taliban are gone,” says Suraya Dalil,
an Afghan doctor and project officer for a new Safe
Motherhood Initiative from UNICEF, who works with the
Malalai staff. “But their walls remain.”

Even women with access to medical treatment, who’ve

thrown off their burqas and signed up for school and
Men waiting outside Malalai Hospital taken a job in the city are not living a life free from
(Photo: Don Rutledge)
old dangers. Under the mujahideen, violence against
women was rampant. Girls were taken from their homes or violated in their living rooms. Old
familial scores were often settled with rape. “Rape is used as a tool of war to degrade families
and community, to make them subservient to those in power,” says Amowitz. Rural women, who
make up the vast majority of Afghanistan’s female population, are fighting now, as they always
have, not for their rights but for their lives and the lives of their children. And for many of them,
life has gotten worse in recent months. In the post-Taliban power vacuum, Afghanistan’s infamous
warlords returned. Reports of gang rapes and increased violence against women soon followed.
One man reported to Dr. Amowitz and her research team that armed soldiers had chased all the
men from his village, then spent 48 hours raping every woman there.

In the dim, two-room apartment Leila and Fahim share with her mother and several of her
siblings, Leila leans back on a cushion to ease her aching back. Above her are photographs of her
niece and nephew--the only decorations in the room. Her mother is remembering a happier time,

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In Afghanistan, the Women Speak Again – to Old Truths

when she was a young bride full of life and the country was not at war and women had more
choices. It was, she says smiling, the happiest time of her life. “But what about my life, Mother?”
Leila asks. “I have only known war in my life. When will my happy time come?”

3) We’re Relishing New Freedoms

Today, though some urban women have begun to attend school and go back to their jobs and
shop without men, they are definitely in the minority. But it is the women in Kabul who have
witnessed and experienced the most drastic changes in their lives and opportunities over the
past few decades.

In the 1960s, they had jobs, they had education, they had representation in government, they had
choices. Even under the unpopular Soviet-backed regime of the 80s, they retained those rights.
But under the lawless rule of the mujahideen, a coalition of several warlords and guerilla groups
that held power through most of the 90s, women’s rights were increasingly restricted--partly by
custom, partly by decree and partly by the restraints that growing violence imposed on them.

Nazifa Satar, a gynecologist trained in Pakistan, returned to Kabul in April. She’d fled in 1991
with her family after the mujahideen stormed into her house, beat her father and brother nearly
to death, stole the contents of the entire house in two vans, then tried to locate Nazifa and
her mother, presumably to rape and kidnap them. Fortunately, the two women had fled to a
neighbor’s house when the soldiers pulled up. The family climbed into a truck at four in the
morning and made their way to Pakistan, where most of her immediate
family still lives. But Dr. Satar returned to help her people, dividing her time
between work at the Maywand Hospital on Kabul’s outskirts and a clinic
she heads in the Tangi Saidan village an hour from Kabul. The clinic was
opened in July 2002 with funding from the International Foundation of Village near Dr. Satar’s clinic
(Photo: Don Rutledge)
Hope (70% of Afghanistan’s healthcare is externally funded).

In pink and white shalwar kameez (loose pants topped with a long, fitted shirt, a traditional outfit
for Afghan women), Dr. Satar arrives in Tangi Saidan at nine a.m. on a sweltering day in August to
find nearly forty patients already waiting to see her or her colleague, Ismael Atayee. She and Dr.

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Atayee treat up to 50 patients a day. Sometimes, she admits, it is overwhelming to be back. “In a
mobile clinic once I and two other doctors treated 700 patients in three days. I wake at five a.m.
and sometimes I am busy until midnight,” she recalls. [Though she says there is no prohibition on
her treating a man, she has yet to treat a single male patient in Tangi Saidan.]

Today there is a meeting between the elders, Dr. Satar and the Foundation, ostensibly to gauge
how the clinic is doing. The real message of the meeting, though, is Dr. Satar. She sits flanked by
large men in beards as they talk of water and wells because her very presence will begin, both she
and the Foundation hope, to someday establish her as an authority in the men’s eyes. She speaks
often, but only after an elder addresses a question directly to her.

4) We’re Feeling Real Hope

Challenging cultural codes is no small task, and men are not alone in resisting such change. One
worker at the International Rescue Committee spoke of a village woman she came across one
day. “She wanted the Taliban back,” the worker recalled. “She thought the people were equal then.
The Taliban brought the educated women down to their level. Rural women suffered no more
under the Taliban than normal.”

What Afghanistan’s rural women may not realize is

that their suffering will ease only with the help of
urban women like Dr. Satar who are making the most
of the small window of opportunity that has opened
for women in their country. “I thought maybe we’d
lost our country during the [Taliban] time,” says Dr.
Satar. “People are poor and they can’t support their
families, but the women are happy. They feel they are
human beings again.” Author overlooking Kabul (Photo: Don Rutledge)