On a stony hillside overlooking the ancient city of Herat stands the graveyard
of its most illustrious citizens, where every Friday local people gather for
picnics. But there is one tombstone at which many women stop and genuflect.
It is that of a 25-year-old woman called Nadia Anjuman, and the flowery
Persian engraving describes her as a poet who risked her life to keep
writing under the Taliban. What it doesn’t say is that she was killed by her
own husband.
Nadia’s death is seen by her friends and women across Afghanistan as
symbolising the betrayal by the international community of all their
promises to free Afghan women — given as one of the main reasons for ousting
the Taliban regime 7Å years ago. “What happened to Nadia should make the
world bow its head in shame,” says her friend and fellow writer Leila
Razeqi. “Your prime ministers and presidents promised freedom to us Afghan
women. That someone like Nadia is under the soil and her husband walks free
should make you ask what is really going on here.”
I first came across Nadia Anjuman on a bitterly cold morning in November 2001,
in the exuberant first few days after the fall of the Taliban, when everyone
was shaving off beards, casting off burqas and flattening Coke cans with
hammers to fashion satellite dishes to watch TV — for so long banned. I was
walking along Cinema Street in Herat when a sign caught my eye. It said
Herat Literary Society, and beyond was a path leading to a small white
bungalow.
I stared at it, intrigued. Since it was first settled 5,000 years ago, Herat
has been regarded as Afghanistan’s cultural capital, so renowned for
its arts that it was said you couldn’t stretch a leg without kicking a
poet. In the city’s heyday in the 15th century, its queen, Gawhar
Shad, packed her court with the most talented Persian miniaturists, poets,
calligraphers and architects.
Since then Herat had been desecrated many times, most recently by the Taliban
in the 1990s, who burnt its books, smashed its sculptures and kept its women
prisoners in their homes. Amid the crumbling mud houses and bombed-out
minarets, it was hard to imagine any artistic spirit had survived. And yet I
could see the door of the literary society swinging open, so I walked in.
I noticed a pair of scuffed sandals by a door. Beyond, sitting at a desk, was
a man with a short dark beard and glowering dark eyes.
This was Ahmed Said Haqiqi, the society’s president. He invited me to sit down
and began telling me how hard life had been for the city’s authors under the
Taliban, risking torture and death to keep on writing. I asked if the
society had any female members and he beckoned me to follow. We walked along
the muddy road, past the jangling horse carts and traffic policeman to
Flower Crossroads, where he told me he had one day counted 18 bodies
hanging, victims of Taliban brutality. He turned down an alley between
mud-walled compounds and stopped outside one. On the door was a notice
reading “Golden Needle, Ladies Sewing Classes”.
Under the Taliban, women had been banned from working, studying, wearing
lipstick, white shoes or even laughing out loud. Herat’s female writers had
racked their brains and realised the only thing they were still allowed to
do was sew.
So it was that three times a week, six young women in blue shuttlecock burqas
would arrive at this doorway. In their handbags, beneath materials, scissors
and threads, were notebooks and pens. Had the authorities investigated, they
would have discovered that the sewing students never made any clothes. Once
inside the school, a courageous literature professor from Herat University
would take out his bust of Pushkin and talk to them about Shakespeare,
Dostoevsky, James Joyce and other banned writers. Had they been caught, they
might have been hanged. I was astonished by the bravery of these women.
I met two of them that day — Leila Razeqi and Maria Tanha. It was Leila who
first came up with the idea, and she paid the professor with food and money
raised by selling the family’s carpets. “It was a big risk but I was
determined to be educated,” she told me, adding that she used to stay up
till the early hours doing calculus because she so feared her brain would
atrophy. “Life for women under the Taliban was no more than being cows in
sheds,” she complained.
A few days later I was invited to a hotel for the first mixed meeting of Herat
Literary Society in 20 years. There Leila introduced me to two more of the
group — Homeira Naderi and a raven-haired young poetess called Nadia
Anjuman, who all agreed was the most talented.
She was then not even 20, but she was secretly turning out wonderful poems
about love, the situation of women and attempts to silence their voice. She
had written a poem entitled Don’t Greet the Night with the defiant lines
“Laugh at the morning/Shut the door on the night.”
Now it seemed the long years of darkness for Afghanistan’s women were over.
Leila, Nadia and their friends bubbled with excitement. Girls’ schools were
reopening, Herat University would once again allow female students, and all
of them imagined careers as professors, doctors and writers. After all,
world leaders and their wives were falling over themselves to promise
freedom to Afghan women. In Washington, Laura Bush became the first first
lady to take her husband’s place in the weekly presidential radio address to
the nation to talk about “Taliban Oppression of Women and Children in
Afghanistan”. In London, Cherie Blair hosted a gathering to call for moves
to “give back a voice” to Afghan women.
Kabul was soon full of feminist groups setting up gender-rights projects, even
though in one of the world’s poorest countries all that most Afghan women
really wanted was security and food on the table. Instead they got
beauticians sponsored by American cosmetics companies, outraged that under
the Taliban women had been locked up for wearing nail varnish. Like other
journalists, I wrote enthusiastic stories on beauty schools, the first
female driving school and girls’ football teams, though I did notice they
were practising at dawn in secret.
President Bush triumphantly declared in his 2002 State of the Union address:
“The mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes…
Today women are free.”
The new constitution guaranteed equal rights for women and reserved them 25%
of the seats in parliament, though they have little real influence.
Representatives of the international community repeated like a mantra that
2m girls were now at school. But the government appointed only one woman —
the minister of women’s affairs. President Hamid Karzai’s own wife, Zeenat,
an obstetrician, not only stopped working once her husband became president,
but never appears in public. When I asked Karzai about women, he claimed he
had “lots” working in his office, yet was unable to produce one.
In the past three years, going back and forth to Afghanistan, I have watched
the situation for women deteriorate. Many of the new girls’ schools have
been burnt down. According to the education ministry, 122 school buildings
were blown up or burnt down in the past year and another 651 schools forced
to close owing to lack of security. Last November acid was thrown in the
faces of 15 girls and teachers going to school in Kandahar. Two months
earlier, the city’s top policewoman, Malalai Kakar, was gunned down with her
son. One of the country’s best-known actresses fled to Pakistan after her
husband was shot dead, and two weeks ago a female-rights activist was
murdered in broad daylight outside her house.
Malalai Joya, a young woman MP who criticised warlords, was suspended from
parliament and now lives in hiding, protected by five gunmen. Last November
she shocked a London audience by declaring that the situation for women in
Afghanistan is now worse than it was under the Taliban. Earlier this month,
Karzai even signed a law legalising marital rape. The legislation, which
applies to the 15% of the population that is Shi’ite, gives men sweeping
control of their spouses, forbidding women from leaving their homes without
their husbands’ permission and stating: “As long as the husband is not
travelling, he has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every
fourth night.”
So I decided to go back to Herat and track down Nadia and the other brave
women writers, to see what had become of all those hopes they had back in
2001. With Afghanistan unravelling — and President Barack Obama endorsing
talks with the Taliban — are western promises to Afghan women going the same
way?
The obvious place to start is the literary society, where I’ve arranged to
meet up with Nadia’s elder brother Mohammad Shafi. At first I think it’s
gone, and walk past twice before I realise it’s been spruced up and extended
with book shops either side.
Waiting for me is Shafi, a thin, intense man who looks too young to be
professor of fine art at the university. He shakes with emotion as he tells
me he still cannot believe he has lost his sister: “There was only two
years’ difference between us and we were like best friends.”
Inside, he points out a shrine to Nadia on a wall, and introduces me to the
society’s president, Mohammad Mehsud Rajazi. He was Nadia’s professor for
four years and says her death dealt them a huge blow. “Nadia was a pioneer.
She was the best living female poet in Herat and was expected to have a very
successful career.”
From the shelf he takes her first book, Dark Flower, published the year before
she was killed. He says it has been reprinted three times and sold 3,000
copies — impressive for poetry anywhere, but incredible in a country where
only a quarter of the population is literate. “Her poetry was full of
feelings and emotions, especially about women,” he says. “You couldn’t read
it and not know it was a woman. But she wasn’t a feminist — she respected
traditions.” However, one person who didn’t like it was her husband,
according to Shafi. “He was jealous. He used to say, ‘Why do people know you
and not me? I’m the man. Why do invitations come in your name and not
mine?’”
But Nadia had lived for poetry since she was 10. Shafi recalls vividly the
incident that first inspired her. “She had come home from school in tears.
When my mother asked what was wrong, she said, ‘It’s not fair! My history
teacher lowered my grade because I’m younger than the rest of the students,
even though I answered all the questions correctly! And then he raised the
grade of one of the lazy boys in the class — the one who is his nephew.’
“I’d never seen Nadia so serious. My mother tried to cheer her up and promised
to go to the school, but instead Nadia used it as the subject of her first
poem. At school the next day she read it aloud in front of the headmaster.
He immediately recognised her talent, and also confronted her teacher about
the grading incident. From then on she read her poetry at all school
ceremonies.”
She was 15 when the Taliban took over Herat and closed the girls’ schools. But
Nadia did not stop writing. “I remember her in the kitchen cooking, always
with an open book in front of her,” says Shafi. “My father bought her a
radio. During the dark times of the Taliban, while the rest of us secretly
watched Indian films, Nadia would be listening to the BBC. She especially
liked the midday and cultural programmes. And at midnight, when we were all
sleeping, she would perform a private ceremony with paper and pen: composing
her thoughts.”
Nadia’s life changed when she met Leila Razeqi and heard about the Golden
Needle Sewing School. Despite the huge risk, she began going a few times a
week to the secret classes at the house of Professor Rahiyab, head of the
literature faculty at Herat University. Under his mentoring, her poetry
gained colour and strength.
Finally, in 2001, when Nadia was 21 and Shafi in his final year at university,
the Taliban were driven out by American B-52s. She took the entrance exam
for the university and was admitted as a gifted student to the literature
department. “I remember that time as being the happiest of Nadia’s life,”
says Shafi. “It was as though she’d been handed the whole world.”
Apart from her talent, Nadia was a sweet-natured girl and was soon attracting
wedding proposals. In her first year of university, she caught the eye of
Farid Ahmad Majid Neia, one of the department administrators. He sent her
mother a bunch of flowers to announce his intentions. But Nadia insisted
that marriage would be a barrier to her development as a writer.
Just as she had been in school, Nadia was top of her class. “I was very proud
of her,” says Shafi, who by then had become a professor.
“She accumulated successes like university scholarships and fellowships and
got to travel to Iran, where she met many poets and writers.”
But Farid Neia had not given up. During Nadia’s third year, he began a second
round of proposals, and this time would not be deterred. “Nadia tried to
avoid an obligation to him, but when he sent her the Holy Koran, she could
not refuse,” says Shafi. “I will never forget the day we gave them their
answer: Yes. Tears never left her eyes and Nadia kept repeating, ‘It’s a
pity. I will waste away for his sake. I do not deserve this.’”
They were married in a simple wedding ceremony. Nadia often appeared happy,
but Shafi and her friends later realised it was only a pretence. One of her
poems from that time is entitled False Smile. Like most Afghan brides, she
had to live with her mother-in-law, who told her, two days after the
wedding: “I will never love you.” According to Shafi, Nadia could do no
right in her mother-in-law’s eyes. She complained about Nadia’s cooking and
cleaning and would beat her if she caught her writing poetry. Once again,
Nadia found herself writing in secret.
“Her mother-in-law was a selfish old woman,” says Shafi. “She would tell
Nadia, ‘This house is my property.’ But Farid refused to intercede.”
To start with, Nadia suffered in silence. Her father was old and frail and she
didn’t want to distress him. But her friends saw how she had been stopped
from attending literary-society meetings by her husband, and she confided in
her mother about the name-calling and ill treatment she received from her
mother-in-law. Her mother advised Nadia to be patient.
Then, in her last year of studies, Nadia gave birth to a son. Bahram Saeed was
a boisterous boy who was very much loved by his mother. But instead of
improving things with her mother-in-law, Bahram Saeed’s birth seemed to
inflame the situation. Furious that Nadia continued to attend university,
his grandmother refused to look after the boy, nor would she allow his
father to play with him. Nadia had to take her son to her own mother’s house
when she went to classes.
The last time her brother saw her was November 5, 2005, the last day of the
annual Eid festival. “I went to her house and she was very happy to see me,”
he says. “We talked for an hour about many things, including my own marriage
— I was single and she had various friends in mind. She showed me their
pictures. Then we watched the film of her own wedding so she could point
them out.”
At that time Bahram Saeed was five months old and had just learnt to sit up,
and he reached for Shafi as he was leaving. Shafi drove off on his motorbike
back to his parents’ house and passed Farid heading home.
At five past midnight, when everyone was asleep, the phone rang. It was
someone from the hospital’s emergency room: “Do you know Nadia? She has
died.”
“My brother, father and I rushed to the hospital,” says Shafi. “We were
crying. We saw Nadia lying dead on a bed. On the right side of her face a
big black bruise — the doctors told us she had been hit by something with
great force.” Farid was crying and shouting. “When we asked him how Nadia
had died, he said, ‘We argued and, finally, I slapped her.’”
By the next day, it seemed everyone in Herat had heard the terrible news.
“People came to our house in tears, offering their condolences,” says Shafi.
“There were students, university professors, prominent people in the arts,
authors, journalists, relatives and friends.”
Farid was arrested, but insisted that Nadia had killed herself, claiming she
had drunk poison. However, the medical report stated she had been killed by
a heavy blow. Although the fight had taken place at 7.30pm, Farid had only
taken her to hospital after 11pm. The rickshaw driver said that when he
loaded Nadia on the back to take her to hospital, she was already dead.
Afghanistan’s legal system is notoriously slow and corrupt, but the
publicity of the case forced the courts to take action, and Farid was
convicted of murder. However, according to Shafi, his father was put under
great pressure. “Tribal elders kept coming to our house, asking for
forgiveness and threatening him.”
Finally, after five months, he relented. “We consulted with prosecutors as to
what would happen, and they said if you forgive him he will get five years
in jail, so we thought that’s okay. Unfortunately, because of the corruption
of our legal system, he was released after one month. My father was so angry
he died.”
Farid has returned to his old job at the university and retained custody of
his son. He refuses to speak about what happened.
Nadia’s fellow writers from the Golden Needle have no doubt their friend was
murdered because of her poems. “I think he killed her on purpose,” says
Leila Razeqi. “He didn’t like her writing poetry. He never let her attend
meetings. When you look at her poems and writing after her wedding, you can
see the sorrow and grief.
“We were very excited at the time of the end of the Taliban,” she continues.
“I dreamt of being a professor, of our group becoming a cultural association
for the city’s women. But everything went wrong. Nadia was killed… She had
great spirit, but we could see she was facing problems. She was trapped.”
Nadia’s few poems from that time talk of her as “a bird without
wings”.
“I remain, but remain a broken pen”, ends one.
“If I was to say the situation of women is better, that would be untrue,” says
Leila. “Women are not given proper rights. Only if she has relatives in
power can she get to a higher position, otherwise she’ll just be like me.
I’m only a teacher. I didn’t want to be an ordinary teacher.
“Nadia was the most talented of us all. Since then everything is broken. We’re
no longer a collective. If the Taliban were here they would have punished
her husband, and maybe that would be better.” Leila’s own mother-in-law is
due back and it’s clearly time to go. In my bag I have notebooks and
pens, but now I feel it would be a mistake to give them to her.
Nadia’s death wasn’t the only reason the group broke up. Another of the six,
Homeira Naderi, got married and moved to Iran. But there was a further
tragedy. From Leila I learn the shocking news that Maria Tanha, who I had
met with her on that very first day, was also dead. She told me that Maria
was in a car accident with her boyfriend but did not seem to want to say
more.
I discover why when I visit Khaleda Khorsand, now 27, the youngest of the
Golden Needle women. I remembered her as a great fan of Virginia Woolf,
smuggling her books in from Iran at great risk. One of the most prolific
members, she wrote 60 stories. “It was very dangerous, but I wanted to feel
alive,” she says. Now married to a doctor, she lives in an immaculate
apartment and has twin five-year-old daughters. She pours me tea, then sits
down and tells me about Maria.
“Maria was not married and had gone secretly for a picnic with a boyfriend,”
she says. “People say she was driving, so they attacked the car and
turned it over. Nobody took her to hospital because of the shame it would
bring on the family. So they kept her at home and she died.
“You know the Taliban didn’t come from nowhere,” she explains. “They have
roots among traditional people. Now they have gone, but their culture
hasn’t. Mullahs are still dominating everything. Commanders, warlords,
mullahs — they are all the same.”
Khaleda is now in her third year at the literature faculty, and working
part-time for a human-rights network, but she says it has been a long
struggle getting her husband to allow her to work. “I think all the changes
for women in Afghanistan are just on the surface,” she says. “We might have
a great number of women in parliament and constitutional rights, but this is
useless when most people think women should only be allowed out to the
bazaar to buy food.” She cries when I mention Nadia. “I can never forget
her. Her death was not that of an ordinary woman; she was exceptional, and
should have been a role model for Afghan women.”
What becomes of Afghan women when they are desperate to escape an abusive
marriage, yet have no words to express their despair, is horrifically on
display round the corner from the literary society. Newly built by a French
aid agency, the Herat burns unit is modern and sterile, and visitors must
wear plastic shoes to enter. Sunshine streams through the wards, but there’s
no hiding the smell of charred flesh. The first room I enter has four young
women wrapped in bandages. When they lift the sheets I see scars bubbling up
from their pelvises to their necks like raw meat. I can hardly bear to look.
All are young wives who have set themselves alight to try to kill
themselves. One says hers was an accident, but the nurse tells me: “They all
say that.” Among them is 20-year-old Anar Gul, whose beautiful face no
longer seems to belong to the badly disfigured body.
Anar tells me that her family is very poor and she never went to school. When
her brother wanted to marry, there was no money to buy a bride. Anar’s
beauty had attracted some attention, and when she was 15 her brother made a
deal to secure a bride by handing Anar over to the girl’s brother. “From the
beginning he would beat me and hit me on the face with his big ring,” she
says. “He was very bad-tempered, criticising everything, my cooking, my
clothes.”
He was angry, too, that after three years she had given birth to two daughters
but not a son. Anar became increasingly desperate. “I’d been married for
four years, and one day I just couldn’t stand it any more,” she says. “He’d
been beating me for a week. In our tradition, when a girl is married she
should only leave as a dead body. So I poured fuel on my clothes and lit the
match.”
Anar will be disfigured for life. The hospital administrator, Dr Mohammed Aref
Jalali, tells me: “She will survive, but what then?” Her husband says he
will not beat her again, but Dr Jalali looks sceptical. Anar says she has no
alternative but to go back to him.
Self-immolation occurs across Afghanistan, yet its incidence is highest in
Herat. According to Dr Jalali, the hospital has had 81 cases over the past
year, almost all women aged 13 to 25. Fifty-nine of them died. Last month
there were three cases in just two weeks, including a woman who burnt
herself to death on International Women’s Day.
It would be wrong to say that the situation for women in Afghanistan is all
bleak, but the statistics do not look good. According to Dr Soraya Sobhrang,
director of women’s rights for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights
Commission, 60% of marriages are forced, and while 40% of children in the
first year of school are girls, by secondary school this drops to only 11%.
By the age of 15, less than 4% are girls. “The situation was fine till 2004,
but since then we’ve gone very slow, even backwards,” she says. “Honour
killing and violence are increasing and the international community is doing
nothing.”
Those few women who have tried to break through face tremendous challenges.
One of the women I meet in Herat literally risks her life to make jam.
Mariam Jami tells me she began jam-making five years ago in her village in
Gozara district, 15 miles from Herat, using local fruit and vegetables. It
was so successful she soon had 20 women working for her. She then saw
adverts for entrepreneurs to compete in an Afghan version of Dragons’ Den.
“I thought, why not?” she laughs. So as not to be recognised, she wore a
hijab and dark glasses. She came second, winning $14,000 — a vast amount in
a country where police are paid less than $100 a month.
By the time Mrs Jami got back to her village, men had attacked her home and
beaten up her brother and husband. They had been sent by Commander Ghulam
Akbari, who had been working as minister of public works in the Herat
government, but had left the previous year and allied himself with the
Taliban. “They threatened me not to go on TV and demanded part of the prize
money,” she says. So she fled to the city, where she has rented a house,
using one of the rooms for jam-making. Mrs Jami still buys her fruit and
vegetables from her home village, even though she has not been able to go
back since the programme a year ago.
If Herati men object to a woman running a jam company, imagine the risk being
taken by the city’s chief prosecutor — the first female prosecutor in
Afghanistan.
Appointed two years ago, Maria Bashir, 38, travels everywhere with six armed
bodyguards, funded by the US justice department. Even so, last year a bomb
went off in front of her house, killing one bodyguard, and her three
children are considered such targets they can no longer go to school.
“Security for women is really, really bad and has worsened in the last
21/2 years, and some, like me, have to risk their lives.”
Barely a day goes by for her without death threats. She shows me a letter that
arrived that morning saying “Suicide bombers have come to Herat and you are
the target”. She reels off her list of enemies. “They might be insurgents,
or people who we’ve prosecuted — killers, thieves, kidnappers… The problem
is we have good written laws, but they are not implemented. I’m trying to
change that. If a man beats his wife and she has a hospital report, I will
sentence that man to jail. People don’t like that.”
What really infuriates all these courageous women is the lack of example being
set by the government of President Karzai, who claims to support women’s
rights.
Back in Kabul, I visit perhaps Afghanistan’s bravest woman of all, 29-year-old
MP Malalai Joya. She has had so many death threats that she moves house
every few days. At an assigned meeting place, a man in a cloak appears and
gives directions to another spot on a muddy lane, where he reappears and
leads me to an iron door. Inside, there are five guards with AK-47s guarding
a narrow staircase. At the top I pass three more guards to enter a room
where Joya sits with the women of the house — she has not been paid since
being expelled from parliament two years ago and relies on the kindness of
supporters.
“Most of those MPs are warlords, drug lords and criminals,” she says. Comments
like those led to her being labelled a “prostitute” and “infidel” by other
MPs, some of whom physically attacked her. Joya’s words come in an almost
nonstop torrent of outrage, and she shows me a densely written notebook in
which she has catalogued one shocking case after another, including that of
Nadia Anjuman. There’s the case of two children who were killed by drowning
after stones were put in their pockets; a 12-year-old girl who was
gang-raped by five men in Sarpul province; another girl, 14, gang-raped by
three men in the same province, one with political connections; a
14-year-old, whose parents cut her baby out of her stomach after she was
gang-raped… On and on she goes.
None of these cases ever came to court, either because the families were
ashamed or because they were threatened by local authorities. But there was
one that did, a woman known as Sara, gang-raped in 2005. After two years of
struggle, she and her family succeeded in getting three of the men
convicted. But to Sara’s horror, last year the men reappeared in the
village. “Look!” says Joya. She produces a photocopy of a presidential
pardon signed by Karzai.
By contrast she cites the case of Pervez Kambaksh, the 24-year-old student
journalist sentenced to death a year ago for “blasphemy” — he downloaded and
circulated an article on women’s rights. A worldwide campaign and
international pressure on Karzai have failed to persuade him to sign a
pardon. Last month, Kambaksh was told he will spend 20 years in jail after
the country’s highest court ruled against him without even hearing his
defence.
After all the talk of freeing the women of Afghanistan, many of those women
feel their rights have slipped to the bottom of the agenda. More concerned
with getting their troops out of a worsening mess, Barack Obama and Gordon
Brown now openly advocate talking to the very Taliban who turned these women
into prisoners in their own homes.
At Nadia Anjuman’s grave, a chill wind blows. The brave Golden Needle women
have given up penning their defiant words, and I wonder about the future of
women like Malalai Joya, Mariam the jam-lady, and Maria Bashir.
