Taliban’s Shadow Falls Across Women Jailed for Crimes of Love and Defiance

Wrapped in blankets and bright scarves, the six inmates were scattered like wallflowers on the side of a cell inside the women’s prison here.

There was Marzia, 28, whose 55-year-old husband won’t give her a divorce. She claimed that he chained her feet and locked her in a small damp room in his house for a month.

There was Nilofar, 16, and Fariba, 19, who fell in love with boys next door, and tried to elope. When Fariba refused to marry a cousin, she said, her father threatened to “chop me up and give me to my cousin in pieces”--while the cousin sent her a message in jail that he would kill her as soon as she was freed.

On Nov. 13, when the Taliban left Kabul, the women’s jail emptied. But in the last six months, women and teenage girls have started trickling back in, arrested for many of the same crimes that got them jailed during the Taliban era.

Of 29 current prisoners, 60% were jailed for eloping or leaving their homes, and 20% were accused of adultery. There was one charged with murder, one with theft and a third charged with selling her married daughter.

Despite Western pressure for greater attention to the rights of women in Afghanistan, the legal system remains a great question mark. Many laws pertaining to women have not changed in Afghanistan, and there is confusion in legal circles and among investigators as to what the law actually is.

Afghanistan now runs under a dual legal system, with both Sharia, or Islamic law, and some parts of the civil code that existed before the Taliban took control in 1996 and did away with all the contemporary laws, legal records and books.

But Martin Lau, an Islamic law specialist at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, said some offenses, such as the “honor crimes” in which male relatives kill females for dishonoring the family, are more a matter of tradition than law. “It’s custom here. It’s not Islamic law,” he said in a recent interview in Kabul, the capital. “There is nothing in Islam that says a betrayed husband has the right to take the law into his own hands.”

Sherin Aqa Manawee, deputy of Afghanistan’s Supreme Court, said that under Sharia law, a man or woman is entitled to choose a spouse, provided neither is engaged--and the woman’s father has no legal right to interfere.

But it rarely works out that way. The law clashes with the long-held Afghan tradition that families select the spouse. Women and girls who run away from the homes of their fathers, husbands or other male relatives are arrested and taken to jail, where they stay unless claimed by a male relative.

Lau was in Kabul recently on a project for the International Commission of Jurists, a Geneva-based human rights group of legal experts, to examine the compatibility between Afghanistan’s law and international human rights standards. But he said there were contradictions between judges and legal experts about what laws are in force.

“Just trying to find out what the substantive law is, is impossible,” he said. “There seems to be a huge amount of legal uncertainty.”

Lives Ruled by Relatives

The detention of women for running away from home is part of a culture that treats them as though they were minors, their lives ruled by their male relatives. Under the law applied by the Taliban and still widely in force, a woman has to be represented by her male guardian or husband in all legal proceedings. In a country where clan connections are all-important, a woman must rely on her male relatives to push her cause with police and court officials. For Afghan women, the legal system is opaque and terrifying.

In the corridor of the nearby Kabul Police Department one evening last month, a girl of perhaps 16 or 17 waited, her blue burka hitched up to reveal a round face with frightened eyes.

In a tremulous, birdlike voice she revealed that she had no parents. She had fled her step-uncle’s home in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif to avoid being married off to a shoe repairman, and surrendered to the police who moved her to the women’s jail in Kabul.

Now she was being freed, handed over to a man who claimed to be her uncle. The girl said he was her late father’s god-brother.

In a few confused minutes, she was hustled away by the man, who refused to speak. They disappeared into the dense Kabul night.

Under Sharia law, a man’s word is worth twice that of a woman’s. Convincing a court that she has been beaten by her husband or raped or needs a divorce is difficult.

Under Sharia law, a woman or girl who reports a rape but fails to prove that she did not consent may risk a charge of fornication. Rana, 40, Kabul’s senior female police investigator, who also held the position under the Taliban, argued that rape is physically impossible and that the crime therefore cannot exist. Rana is responsible for investigating all crimes involving females. Peering through thick, black-rimmed spectacles, she drew a strange analogy, comparing rape with a needle and thread.

“Can you force the thread through the needle if the needle is jerking around?” she argued, suggesting that no man could force sex upon any female who really struggled.

Marzia spent eight months in prison because she wants a divorce. A month ago she was released pending the divorce trial, but she may be sent back to her husband, if the court refuses a divorce. Now she lives with her one male relative, a 95-year-old uncle.

She’s been twice married. Her first husband married a younger woman, divorced Marzia, and he and his new wife took her 2-month-old girl. She never saw the child again.

When she was 18, a shopkeeper 27 years her senior took her as his second wife, but she claims that he never consummated the marriage.

“He said he’d not married me to have children. He’d married me to work for his first wife,” she said.

Several years later, in pre-Taliban times when the government of Burhanuddin Rabbani ruled Kabul, bringing in fundamentalist Islam, she tried to get a divorce. Her husband refused and had her jailed for 18 months. Eight months ago, Marzia said, she again sought a divorce after her husband, who she said was often angry and violent, chained her in a dark, wet room.

“I was hungry and thirsty. The other wife brought me something secretly,” she explained. “I respect her very much, like a mother.”

When her husband objected again to divorce, she ran away. He went to authorities and had her jailed a second time. The investigator, Rana, corroborated Marzia’s version, explaining that her husband, the shopkeeper, was a powerful figure with good connections.

After returning to her husband’s house the first time, Marzia said, he beat her frequently, “almost every day.”

“If I’d have argued with him, that would be one thing,” she said. “But I never spoke out against him. I never screamed, because I was frightened. I felt guilty. I felt ashamed. I was very afraid that he would kill me.”

Three years ago, she said, he broke her ribs with a full Coca-Cola bottle because she put fresh yogurt into a bowl instead of leaving it in a bag in a cool place. Another time he hit her with the handle of a shovel.

Manawee, the Supreme Court deputy, said “even a woman” is entitled to a divorce under Afghan law if her reasons are logical.

Rana, however, said that obtaining a divorce is difficult if the husband objects. She predicted that the court will simply advise the husband not to be cruel to his wife, and will send Marzia back to him.

Rana said a woman typically needs males in the family to testify to violence against her, or neighbors who have heard her screams.

“Unfortunately,” she said with a sigh, “in our country [divorce] is all left up to the men.”

Manawee, 35, appointed to the Supreme Court after the fall of the Taliban, believes that getting a divorce should be difficult.

“Have you noticed the problem in the West, that there’s more divorce cases in foreign countries than in Afghanistan? We don’t want these unfavorable changes or the experiences that Westerners face,” he said.

Although widows can choose whom to marry, single women traditionally have no say. Many young men have no choice either. The match is arranged by their parents.

The girls and young women jailed in Kabul for eloping have all the defiant love and bravery of Jane Austen heroines, but come across as very shy. Nilofar, from provincial Ghorband, hung her head and retreated under a long pale blue shawl, as she told the story of her love for Anjamuddin, 20, a driver who lived next door. She said she was determined not to marry the cousin her father chose: “When my mother married a relative, she did not have a good life. My sister also married my father’s relative, and she is not happy either.”

The couple saw one another over an adjoining wall and whispered for two hours each night. Finally, they ran away but spent only nine hours together before they were arrested at a relative’s home.

“If no one caught them, they’d keep on talking,” said the male prison chief, Diwane Amneyat Ama, who, along with Rana, insisted on being present during interviews with the prisoners and often answered for the women.

“I wasn’t afraid,” said Nilofar, who did not expect to be jailed for running away for love.

The prison chief scoffed: “She thought she’d get married easily!”

At times paralyzed into silence by her shyness, Nilofar nonetheless insisted that she was not bowed by what had happened.

“I know it’s a scandal for the family, but I do not regret it for any reason. I still want to marry him,” she said in her cell in April. But Rana said the family would never agree to the marriage, and added that there was a risk the male relatives would kill the girl.

Asked whether she wanted to be a good wife and mother, or if she wanted other things as well, Nilofar did not have a chance to answer. “What can she be?” said Rana, amazed at the question. “She’s not educated. What can she be except a homemaker?”

In the end, the older woman was proved right. Nilofar’s will broke while she was in prison, and she bent to her father’s demand to give up the boy she loved and marry the cousin she does not. As soon as she agreed, one month ago, she was freed.

A Five-Year Sentence

Fariba was sentenced under the Taliban to five years in jail for eloping with a neighbor when promised by her father to her cousin, Allah Mohammad.

The man she loves is poor. Sayed Agha, 22, visited her house as a relative of her mother. He would bring gifts, they would talk alone for an hour or two, and sometimes steal away outside. They secretly pledged their love and eloped.

“I love him so much I was willing to go to jail for him,” Fariba said.

The couple spent two years in separate jails. Released when the Taliban fell, they went to the new authorities in Kabul, expecting to get permission to be married.

“I was thinking that this government would be better, but it was the same or even worse than the Taliban,” she said. The earlier sentence was confirmed, and the pair were returned to jail.

Fariba’s father, Allahdad, 56, never criticized her behavior until she refused to marry her cousin.

But after that, she said, he beat her with a power cord and threatened to kill her.

She is terrified that her father or one of her five brothers will kill her when she is freed.

Despite all this, she is firm. “I will never agree to marry my cousin.”

Rana said that even if Fariba and Agha receive court permission to marry after they serve out their terms, their lives will be at risk.

“All my relatives are waiting at my back,” Fariba said. “I hope the day I am released, none of them will be here.”

Dixon was recently on assignment in Afghanistan.