One Afghan Woman’s Determination Can’t Be Veiled

QALAI NAJARAN, Afghanistan — Hidden beneath her long blue burka, which billows in the wind as she follows her father at a respectful distance, Lawangina Rahman is an unlikely leader of a revolution.

It is only when she lifts the veil and begins to talk about the risks she is willing to take for freedom that you are struck by the full strength of her courage.

Rahman, 28, is on a journey from the village of Surai Zaidek in remote southeastern Afghanistan, where remnants of the radical Islamic Taliban regime and its Al Qaeda allies, and centuries-old customs, are still firmly entrenched.

With her father, Ahmad Khan, 53, as escort, she is making her way to Kabul to join the emergency loya jirga, or grand council, which will convene Monday to choose Afghanistan’s new leaders. In a huge air-conditioned tent last used as a beer hall in Munich, Germany, an ethnic Pushtun woman from a village of 350 people will stand to address about 1,500 other delegates, and the watching world.

And she will say it is time that Afghan women are heard.

Rahman’s father persuaded her to become a delegate.

He also deflected the flak when villagers got upset that a woman would have the cheek to leave her husband’s home and stick her nose in men’s business at the loya jirga.

She admits that it is frightening, especially because she is defying dangerous people, Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters who still move through the mountains above her two-room house.

At first, Rahman’s husband, Saheb Khan, a farmer, supported her. His family did too. Then the neighbors came calling.

“They told my in-laws, ‘To enroll a woman in the loya jirga is a scandal,’ ” Rahman said through an interpreter. “They had a lot of complaints, so my in-laws told me to forget this job.

“Then my father told them that they had already agreed to let me go, that he had given my name to the loya jirga people and it was not appropriate to change it.”

The village relented, and at 3 a.m. one recent day, Rahman embarked on the most daring passage of her life without waking her three children--daughter Mina, 7, and sons Sahebullah, 5, and Wahebullah, 2--to say goodbye.

“I decided to serve my village women and also serve my country,” said Rahman, a 10th-grade graduate who works in her village’s simple Swedish-funded health clinic.

“Our country has been in critical condition during 23 years of war, and we have suffered a lot,” she said. “And now we must join with men, so that we can rebuild our country sooner.”

Rahman’s father was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet-backed Afghan army that fought the moujahedeen rebels in the 1980s, and then served two years under the moujahedeen government that followed the Soviets’ withdrawal.

He knows that in the badlands of Paktia province, to which his daughter must return when the grandeur of the loya jirga ends, principles won’t keep you alive.

“I educated my daughter. I enrolled her in school so that she would serve her country, her people,” Khan said, and he paused a moment under the weight of a burden they now shoulder together.

“Paktia is a mountainous area, and in such a [dangerous] place, no one can take the step we’ve taken,” he continued. “But we took this step because we were determined to take part in the loya jirga, even if we are killed.”

To make sure that women could join in the loya jirga, the council’s organizing commission appointed 160 female delegates, rather than hoping that local leaders would elect them. (As expected, no women were directly elected.)

Rahman was selected after reading her nine-minute speech to 19 commissioners, all of them men. Her sister-in-law Momena, 40, was the only other woman in the room, a government customs office.

In an indirect election across the country, groups of electors picked by local leaders in 390 electoral districts chose 1,050 loya jirga delegates. They will be joined by appointed academics, religious scholars and professionals.

The run-up to the grand council’s weeklong meeting has been marred by boycott threats, intimidation, killings and allegations of vote-buying, none of which is unusual in South Asian politics.

Pushtuns, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and main base of the Taliban’s support, are especially unhappy because they think that they’re not getting their fair share of the seats.

Minority Tajiks and Uzbeks in the former Northern Alliance won the largest stake of national power when, with the help of U.S. bombing, they seized the capital from the Taliban last year. Some Pushtun leaders are warning of a revolt if the loya jirga doesn’t shift power back in their favor.

“All of the arguing is just about their share, nothing else,” Haji Aslam Khan, a loya jirga commission official, said after a delegate-selection meeting outside the city of Gardez ended in a fistfight. It was quickly stopped by the sound of Afghan soldiers slipping the bolts on their AK-47s.

The dispute turned on whether minority Tajiks in Gardez were getting too many of the overwhelmingly Pushtun district’s seats on the loya jirga. Order was restored, but the argument wasn’t resolved.

The United Nations said late last month that eight people involved in the loya jirga selection process had been killed, half of them district electors or “potential candidates.” There was no evidence to suggest that any of the killings were politically motivated, U.N. spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva stressed.

In the western district of Herat, two people chosen to select delegates to the loya jirga were arrested and a third detained before being released.

Compared with what goes on in more stable neighboring states, such as India and Pakistan, Afghanistan’s transition from 23 years of war has been surprisingly smooth. The real trouble might come after the loya jirga chooses the next government and the losers decide whether they can live with it. U.S. officials have reported that their intelligence has warned of a possible terrorist attack during the loya jirga.

Haji Aslam Khan is the loya jirga commission’s deputy chief in southeastern Afghanistan. It includes some of the most dangerous parts of the country, such as the region around Khowst, where U.S. Special Forces are on the hunt for Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters.

Khan is also a moujahedeen hero of the war against the Soviets, and although he has grown a little large and soft around the middle, he still commands the respect essential to making the loya jirga acceptable in the countryside, where suspicions run deep.

About 150 Pushtun leaders gathered at his feet, sitting among stones and prickly weeds, at a delegate selection meeting late last month in the village of Tera Kotel, just outside Gardez.

With a U.N. observer listening to his every translated word for any hint of scheming, Khan read out the names from a handwritten list of the men’s chosen delegates.

“Is he the right person?” Khan asked through a white megaphone. “Do you agree with him?”

“Yes! We accept!” the men replied in chorus.

One of the chosen delegates was too old and frail to stand and accept his honor.

“Then how will you go to Kabul?” Khan boomed, and the electors laughed.

When a man stood to object to one of the selections, the U.N. observer stopped Khan to make sure that he was really waiting for dissenters to speak. Khan read out the next name and paused deliberately for effect.

“Are you sure this is the right one?” he asked. “Will you not feel regretful?” And the electors laughed again.

The last loya jirga convened in 1964, when monarch Mohammad Zaher Shah wanted to reform the constitution, make the country more democratic and enshrine the legal equality of women.

He was overthrown nine years later and lived in exile in Italy as Afghanistan slowly disintegrated. He has returned to lead this week’s loya jirga, which some predict will elect him head of state.

There were only 452 delegates in 1964, four of them women appointed by the king. Two more women were members of the constitutional advisory commission. But one was only a part-time delegate because she gave birth while the loya jirga was meeting.

That “led to official comments by several religious leaders on the superiority of men in legislative matters, though they granted the biological superiority of women,” wrote Louis Dupree, a U.S. expert on Afghan history and archeology.

Then, as now, there were rumored plots to subvert the grand council’s deliberations, and extra troops were deployed to prevent attacks. But the delegates completed their work in peace, with much more spirited debate than many had expected.

Observers were surprised at the strong defense of individual rights that came from some rural delegates, Dupree wrote.

Rahman also defied the stereotypes of rural Afghanistan as she spoke in the half-light at one end of a small room in a local general’s house, watched by half a dozen of his men who had gathered to supervise her interview with a foreign male reporter. They seemed fascinated that a woman could have such strong opinions.

Her burka was nowhere to be seen. Instead, she was draped in a black head scarf that revealed only her face. Before long, a hand poked out to stress a point, and then another, and her silver bracelet glinted in the afternoon light.

Rahman has no argument against wearing her burka whenever she goes outside because that is what obedience to custom, Islam and men demands, she said.

“As long as they respect us, it doesn’t matter if we’re covered,” she added.

When she left the general’s house, about 30 miles southeast of Kabul, she walked along a dusty village road several steps behind her father. They passed a meeting of local electors choosing delegates for the loya jirga.

A visitor from Kabul recognized one of them as Mohammed Usman, widely hated as a ruthless Taliban commander before he fled the capital.

He is just the sort of man who might not wish a woman like Rahman well. But, for now, she was just one more anonymous woman, safely under cover of her long blue burka.