Watchful, but Still Shrouded

Beneath the sky-blue burka obscuring her budding womanhood, 16-year-old Parwana Yusufi sorts through her hopes and worries.

The veiled garment is hated by virtually every woman forced to wear it. First, it is hazardous to movement, vision and breathing. Then there is the dehumanizing effect for the women of recognizing one another only by their worn-out shoes.

But for those most damaged by five years of fanatic Taliban rule, the burka remains a safe refuge from which to wait and see whether the outside world is truly changing.

“I’ll take it off when everyone else does,” Parwana says. “No one has told us yet that it’s permitted to go without it.”

Throughout Afghanistan, women are still waiting for word from male-dominated authority about what they can wear, what they can do, even what they can aspire to.

How much better women will fare in newly pacified Afghanistan remains an open question. There are two outspoken and self-assured women in the new 30-member Cabinet, and interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai has voiced his intention to see women accorded more rights. But Afghanistan has long been a patriarchal society where women have the status of men’s belongings. Socially segregated even at weddings and funerals, they remain unwelcome wherever men gather, be that at sports events, political gatherings or the newly reopened cinemas.

Before the Taliban took over Kabul, the capital, in 1996, women were legally allowed to hold jobs, drive cars, own property, divorce and take their husbands to court for physical abuse. But those rights existed only on paper.

A legacy of subservience has endured despite the 1979-89 Soviet occupation, which many women now look back on with guilty nostalgia, for while their country was subordinate to Moscow, they were encouraged to work and see themselves as men’s equals. Today, despite the Taliban’s departure, most women still don their despised burkas whenever they are in public and automatically settle themselves in the trunks of cars to leave the seats for the men.

The young women now emerging from years of domestic isolation will probably have brighter prospects only if their men want that.

“I’d like my daughters to become doctors. I believe we will once again be a country where educated people are respected,” says Ahmad Yusufi, father of Parwana and a rare Afghan male in his insistence that having seven daughters is a blessing, not a burden.

Yusufi’s wife, Qotsia Moshref, was wed at 15 by parental arrangement. She had to leave school when she bore her first child 10 months later but went back between each of her pregnancies. She was 35 when she finished high school.

“I won’t let [Parwana] be married until she’s finished her education,” says Moshref. “There have already been families who have asked for her, but we now have the right to say no.”

For Some, Independence Is Only a Fantasy

Across this city of shattered homes and cratered roads, the young women of another family also yearn for knowledge but remain at home to do their father’s bidding. Valued less than livestock because of the drain they place on family resources, the four unmarried daughters of bathhouse owner Nashid, who goes by one name, fantasize about careers and independence.

“I would like to be a pharmacist,” 24-year-old Florence dreams aloud. She managed to finish high school before the Taliban halted girls’ education, but now she is betrothed to a cousin she hasn’t seen since childhood and must go to his household whenever he deems it time to marry.

As the oldest of Nashid’s daughters still left at home, Florence spends her days in the family’s squalid outdoor kitchen, plucking poultry and stewing vegetables for her father’s dinner. In no hurry to marry, she bides her time embroidering borders on silk trousers. She spends her modest earnings on sweets for herself and her favorite sister.

“She takes care of me,” Farial, 20, says with a laugh. “I hope she never gets married, so we can live like this forever.”

But the sisters accept their fate with resignation.

“We must do what our father wants. It’s our custom,” says Farial, shrugging off her lack of a say in her future.

Choice is a concept slow in coming to Afghan women. Though some now in middle age caught a whiff of independence during the Soviet occupation, the very notion of deciding one’s destiny has been drummed out of female consciousness by successively severe regimes and their narrow interpretations of Islam.

Muslim fundamentalists toppled the Soviet puppet regime in 1992. The moujahedeen warriors who fought the Soviets imposed a harsh version of Sharia, the Islamic code, in effect relegating women to being chattel even before the Taliban issued formal edicts proscribing women’s public roles four years later.

Sima Samar, the new deputy prime minister responsible for women’s affairs, says the women of Afghanistan are still too frightened to seize the chance for change.

“Women have lost five years of their lives. They are too traumatized by what has happened to do anything yet,” says Samar, who hopes she is signaling to other women their right to liberation by carrying out her public duties without a burka. In deference to Muslim tradition, she wears only a sheer scarf loosely arrayed around her short gray hair.

“I don’t know how much I can accomplish in six months,” she says, referring to the term of the interim government. “But I have promised my strong sisters to do my best. We need security first, then basic education. I don’t want to see women begging on the streets. We need to help these victims become equal members of society again.”

Getting out from under the shroud-like veil is only a symbolic challenge, says Samar. “The damage they suffered to their confidence and self-esteem will not be overcome so easily.”

Johida, an unmarried 24-year-old supported by her younger brother, evinces the confusion felt by many Afghan women.

“When jobs are available, I will get one. I’d like to work in an office where people are coming and going all day. It would be so exciting after these long days at home,” she says with enthusiasm that wanes as she contemplates the unknown. “I don’t know how to go about it, though. And after so many years out of society, I don’t know how to behave.”

Johida once earned a secret living with grueling piecework in Afghanistan’s carpet trade. For a month’s labor knotting silk and wool threads 10 hours a day, she made the equivalent of $13. Her eyes are ruined and her hands are cracked and gnarled from the rough fibers, but she insists she could still handle the reading and writing required of an office worker.

Women who once worked for government offices have an edge over the rest. The newly inaugurated Cabinet has invited those fired by the Taliban to reapply for their positions and has promised priority to those who lost their state jobs for no other reason than their sex.

Among the most impatient applicants are female teachers, most of whom continued to tutor girls in clandestine home schools, enduring beatings and destruction of their property when the Taliban found them.

Teacher Who Withstood Taliban Wants Action

Malia Sahak, a rotund dynamo in charge of first-graders at the Naswan Abulkhasim Ferdosi school, crowded 25 girls into her tiny home during each of three shifts, teaching from memory after Taliban enforcers tore up her textbooks.

“I want my salary for the past five years,” she says, adding that President Bush ought to direct U.S. aid to female Afghan teachers who reopened girls schools as soon as the Taliban retreated. “We didn’t walk away from our responsibilities to educate girls just because these fanatic men were running the country.”

English teacher Nadima Malwan knows recovery will be neither swift nor easy. Her husband agrees with the Taliban edict against women’s employment and has allowed her to resume teaching only because he has lost his own job and they need the income.

“Our men weren’t so upset with the old system,” she says. “If there weren’t foreign eyes on our new leaders, I doubt anything would change.”

Whether Western vigilance will endure is a deep concern of many Afghan women. Those who are old enough remember the lawlessness after the Soviet troop withdrawal in 1989. With no outside pressure for democracy, civilians were left at the mercy of rival warlords who imposed ever more brutal regimes on the population. In Kabul alone, 50,000 civilians died amid the bloody infighting before the Taliban came to power.

“That women can come back to work is cause for joy and a sign of respect,” says Karima Salek, head of the Society of Afghan Women, which is trying to reconstitute its welfare activities after a five-year hiatus. Offices in one damaged government building are packed with women eager for employment with the day-care centers, orphanages and job-training programs to be run by the ministry Samar is heading.

Salek’s society also offers legal counseling for women.

“Women have many of the same rights as men, but it has never been our custom to assert them,” says Salek, noting by way of example that women are entitled to own property but in practice hand over everything but their clothing to their husbands upon marriage.

Despite a functioning legal system, men literally get away with murder. When Nabila Ayubi married last month, she went through the daylong wedding rituals with the countenance of the condemned.

“She’s missing her mother,” explained Farial, a guest at the nuptials. Three years ago, Ayubi’s father stabbed his wife to death with a pair of scissors because she couldn’t quiet their screaming baby. He was neither prosecuted nor jailed.

Men Can Use Child Custody Against Wives

Child custody is another lever men can use to subjugate women. Children legally belong to their fathers, who retain them after a divorce. Children are also passed down the male line of a family in the event of the father’s death, meaning a widow cannot take her children from her husband’s extended family if she remarries.

For now, the only work available for most Afghan women is that which men won’t do. Tending kitchen gardens, baking bread and midwifery are about the only pursuits that allow Afghanistan’s many widows to feed their children.

Gulbakht, who also goes by one name, doesn’t know how old she is but thinks she was 14 when she got married. After giving her four children in five years, her husband died, leaving her with nothing except an instinct for survival. For the past eight years, she has rented a crude fire pit in a walled courtyard where she could bake leavened loaves of naan brought to her surreptitiously by local housewives.

For 500 afghanis--about 10 cents--she continues to bake loaves as the women who brought them grumble and gossip. At the end of her 10-hour day, she has baked 150 loaves and earned about $15, most of which must go toward wood and other expenses.

Does she expect new opportunity now that Afghanistan is free of war and intrusions? Do the women wonder what fate awaits them now that the world is watching? Do they see an easier life for their own daughters than the injustice and indignity they’ve been forced to endure?

Gulbakht grimaces at the frivolous questions and returns her attention to the baking that is the only life she knows.