A Death Threat : Afghan Women Fear for Rights in the Future

For nine years, Tajwar Kakar has been fighting Afghanistan’s “holy war” in her own way.

Kakar, a 40-year-old schoolteacher, was imprisoned and tortured for more than a year in Kabul, the Afghan capital, for opposing the Soviet invasion in 1979. Five years ago, she fled with her husband and seven children and started schools for Afghan refugee girls in this Pakistani border town.

She teaches them that, even in Islam, women have rights--all the more so because of the role Afghan women have played in the guerrilla war against the Soviets.

Last week, as the rebels were on the verge of victory after forcing the withdrawal of Soviet troops, Kakar got her reward--a death threat.

Half a Dozen Warnings

It came from one of the fundamentalist parties in the moujahedeen rebel alliance, and it was one of half a dozen letters she has received warning her to stop teaching the refugee girls that Islam does not require them to wear the burkha , the customary head-to-foot dress.

“This is the last warning we are going to give you,” the letter said. “If you do not accept this custom, we are going to kill you.”

The incident not only underscores the deep ideological divisions among the rebels, it also points up the dilemma facing the millions of Afghan refugee women who have been changed by the war and face the prospect of going home to a country where the change will not be welcome. Indeed, the fundamentalist Islamic regime that is expected to take over in Afghanistan will offer women less freedom than the one that drove them out.

“We women have fought hard for the freedom of our people and our nation,” Kakar said angrily, folding the warning letter. “We have been imprisoned and tortured. Some of us have been killed. And we have been the shield for the men who carried on this holy war.

Push for Rights

“Now that Afghanistan is returning to the people, why don’t they think about women’s rights? The women helped fight the holy war, and now they don’t care about us.”

“They” are two fervently fundamentalist political parties in the seven-party rebel alliance that Pakistan and the United States helped organize as a conduit for billions of dollars in arms and other supplies.

More than half of the weapons are known to have gone to the most fundamentalist of the seven party leaders, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, in part because the late Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq wanted to form a fundamentalist Islamic belt from Iran to India.

As a consequence, Hekmatyar has become a powerful force in the rebel alliance--a force that has met with increasing criticism from many of the 3 million Afghan refugees in camps in Pakistan.

Opposition to Hekmatyar was largely responsible for the collapse Friday of a rebel leaders’ conference here to form a government to replace the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul. Kakar opposed the conference, for example, because the fundamentalist-dominated alliance refused to allocate a single seat to the women.

Devout Muslims

She said that she and most other Afghans are devout Muslims but that the religion practiced for centuries in the villages of Afghanistan has few of the trappings of the modern fundamentalism that Hekmatyar advocates.

Another party leader, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, is backed by Saudi Arabia and is identified with the Wahabbi sect of Islam. Many refugees view his prominent position in the rebel alliance as evidence of foreign ideology encroaching on traditional Afghan culture.

Asked who had sent her the threatening letter, Kakar replied: “It is signed ‘students,’ but they are Gulbuddin and Sayyaf people. It is very clear. They believe that women have no role in the future society in Afghanistan.”

Years of Imprisonment

She pointed toward a woman sitting nearby, Mina Azizi, who is 23 but looks a decade older. Azizi has spent the last seven years in prisons in Kabul. At 15, she was imprisoned for a year at the headquarters of the Afghan secret police, known as Khad, after she was caught with rebel documents while acting as a courier.

Removing her sunglasses, Azizi showed that she was barely able to open her left eye, which looks in a different direction from her swollen right eye.

“They used electric shocks and forced her eyelids open in bright light for days at a time,” Kakar said. “She needs many eye operations. But the (rebel political) parties will not let her into their hospitals here. None of these parties will help her, and it is only because she is a woman.”

Aid workers from the United Nations and independent foreign agencies working with the refugees confirmed that women are largely ignored by the rebel alliance. They have been given less freedom in the refugee camps here than they had in their villages, and they receive much less food and care than the men.

100,000 War Widows

One aid worker said that more than 100,000 of the refugees are war widows and that the women’s sacrifices in the war have been greater than the men’s.

“They have lost husbands, children, entire families,” the aid worker said. “And still, when they arrive here, they say their role in this war is to have more children, more sons, more holy warriors to carry on this crusade.

“But after many years in the camps, these women have changed. It’s true that some of the parties have ignored them, but through the international agencies working here, they have been exposed to education, many of them for the first time. They have been told they have rights, and for them to go back to a fundamentalist society now just will not work.”

Kakar makes the same argument.

“What we have been teaching these women is that the holy war is like a bird,” she said. “A bird when it flies needs two wings. A holy war also needs two wings. One is the man, one is the woman. And a bird, like this holy war, cannot fly very well with only one wing.”

Clearly Dangerous

Such ideas, and the fact that Kakar does not hesitate to make them public, are clearly dangerous.

Other refugee leaders and intellectuals have also been threatened. One of the most outspoken was killed in Peshawar a year ago.

But when a reporter volunteered to withhold Kakar’s name to protect her, she would have none of it.

“No, I am not afraid of these things,” she said, half-smiling. “I am a good Muslim, and my faith teaches me that the only one who can save us is God. The only one who can kill us is God.

“When I was in prison, the Russians always said, ‘We will kill you if you do not cooperate.’ I said to them then, ‘Only God can kill me,’ and I say the same to these people now. Only God can take away my life.”