"Just roll on your rifle and blow out your brains"
Sunday Herald - 26 June 2005
sundayherald.com
The No.1 Lady Detective
Malalai Kakar was the first policewoman in Kandahar – home of the Taliban – blazing a trail in a dangerously male society and mentor to only two female officers following in her footsteps. Nick Meo spends a day on the streets with the mother of six, who still wears the burkha, shielding a gun as she chases wife-beaters and thieves across Afghanistan’s second city
NOT long after dawn in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar and a steely-eyed, handsome woman in a grey police uniform is going through a daily ritual of checks at her modest home. The checks are not mere routine; if she is to survive until dusk they could be of crucial importance. First her six children are breakfasted, their faces washed and hairbrushed and they are made ready for school.
Next comes the firearms check. Malalai Kakar counts bullets into a curved AK-47 metal clip, rams it home into her assault rifle, and makes sure the safety catch is on. She is never first through the steel door into the dangerous street outside; her bodyguard, younger brother Toryalai, also clutching a Kalashnikov, cautiously peers out at the neighbourhood left and right, to ensure no assassins are waiting. Police headquarters are called on the radio to see whether there has been any violence during the night. Prayers are said.
When these morning rituals are completed and the kids are off to school, Kandahar’s most fearsome woman hoists a blue burkha over her head, climbs into a pick-up truck and heads off to the office; another busy day with murderers, sexual abusers and wife batterers is about to begin.
It takes courage to be a cop in Afghanistan’s toughest city, the southern capital of the ethnic Pushtun and former stronghold of the Taliban. Now Kandahar is a centre for drug smuggling, terrorism, and terrifying inter-tribal violence. To be a woman cop here takes real inner steel. Malalai Kakar – known by everybody simply as Malalai – became a policewoman because it was the wish of her police chief father.
But she has become a legend on her own merits. She was named after a famous Kandahari heroine, a young Pushtun woman who in 1880 rallied wavering Afghan troops before a battle which gave British invaders a bloody nose. The original Malalai, a bride married that day, had mocked the soldiers’ manliness until they found their courage. They attacked the better armed British with such ferocity that they inflicted the worst defeat ever suffered by a Victorian army in Asia – the sort of heroine that Afghans like.
“Truly she is another Malalai,” grins chief- of-police Khan Mohammed over a cup of green tea in his shabby office in downtown Kandahar’s police station, guarded by young men with rocket launchers, bandoliers of ammunition slung across their chests. This is a macho society. There are no women police officers on the police station gate. Khan Mohammed is a modern minded policeman and fiercely loyal to Kakar.
“We need more lady detectives like her,” he adds.
A compliment like that from a male police officer is not lightly given in Kandahar, and the city’s chief policewoman has to earn her respect from men. Whether they like her or not, she is essential to her male colleagues. In this society where the genders are segregated, the policework she does could not possibly be done by a man. Kakar arrests female criminals and deals with wife batterers, runs the women’s prison and accompanies her colleagues on raids so she can search female quarters. In Pushtun culture it is deeply offensive for a man to enter the women’s living area.
“I don’t feel like a woman at work,” she says, sitting in her rooms off a filthy police station corridor idly cradling an AK-47. “I feel like a man: brave, honest, and strong.”
Shuffling around her office is one of the victims she rescued, 45-year-old Anar Gul, who was chained in a basement by her husband until Kakar discovered her and burst in with a truncheon in one hand and a pistol in the other. The woman’s first husband had died, so according to tribal custom Anar Gul was forcibly married to his brother, an abusive heroin addict.
“I beat the husband,” Kakar says, “first in the house, then in the police station: punch, kick, slap, I was so angry. If I’d used my stick, he would have died.”
Anar Gul is effusively grateful: “I was dead but now I am alive, thanks to Malalai.” Her five children are still with her abusive husband, however, and she cannot return home. Instead she hangs around the police station working as a cleaner.
Few of the male criminals who hate Kakar are brave enough to attack her. They have all heard the story of how during the Eighties she shot dead three would-be assassins who came on a mission to kill her. Given the convoluted and dangerous politics of Afghanistan, it is not an episode she likes talking about; old feuds are better left in the past. But it is the stuff of local legend.
Every day, still, she risks her life. Threats come from an exotic cast of villains, warlords, terrorists and drug dealers, as well as the wife-batterers of Kandahar whose misdeeds take up 90 per cent of her time. Kakar pulls a great sheaf of photos from a desk drawer. They flow over the top of her desk, many of them horrifying and graphic; Polaroid shots of women who have been beaten, raped and murdered by men. The cases she comes across are just a fraction of the abused women of Kandahar.
“We don’t hear about most of them,” she says. “People don’t talk about abuse of women. Sometimes I feel there are no human rights in Afghanistan.” In this deeply traditional culture, traumatised by years of war and ground down by terrible poverty, women pay for the stress of their men. Domestic disputes are often terribly violent and Kakar is often called in to arbitrate.
“Sometimes the husband accuses the wife, sometimes the wife accuses the husband. I try to decide who is right by talking to the neighbours and by investigating. I try to bring peace between them. Very rarely it ends in divorce, but I always seek a guarantee from the husband that he won’t harm his wife again.”
She believes as many as one in four of Kandahar’s wives are beaten by their husbands and blames the custom of arranged marriage for many of the unhappy matches that turn violent. “It is unfair,” she says. “Our religion authorises love first, then marriage.” Her own arranged marriage – her husband works for the United Nations – is a happy one. Many are not. In reality, in Afghanistan, many marriages are forced.
British filmmaker Polly Hyman, who is making a film about Kakar’s life as the only policewoman in Kandahar, spent weeks in her office as a stream of troubled Afghan women came through looking for help. By winning the confidence of Kakar and the women who sought her help, Hyman recorded some extraordinary footage of young wives complaining about their husbands, some of whom were too drug-addled or too impotent to have sex.
Heroin is a fairly new problem, and although Afghans have been growing opium for years, they generally don’t abuse it themselves. However, a lot of men started using it in refugee camps through boredom, fear or anxiety and returned home with a habit. Now, numbers of addicts are growing fast, although the number of actual users is still fairly small.
Women who commit crimes are not spared by Kakar. Those accused of sexual misdemeanours receive not her sympathy, but a beating at her hands. “It is our culture,” she says dismissively.
Kakar is welcomed as a saviour by the victims of spousal abuse, but there is nothing politically correct about her. She is enforcing tribal morality in a deeply traumatised culture. The battered city – buildings are still scarred with shrapnel damage from years of fighting – is still a war zone. US troops in convoys of Humvees drive along its pot-holed roads, machine guns swivelling at the crowds of men in turbans, overladen donkeys and rusting wrecks of cars held together with bits of wire.
Taliban bomb and rocket attacks against the Americans are still everyday occurrences, especially on the dangerous road from the city to Kandahar airfield where rows of black helicopter gunships sit on the runways laid by the former Soviet occupiers. The city is nicer than it was; the new administration has tidied up the piles of rotting rubbish that for years lay mouldering in the streets, they have planted bright flower beds and disarmed most of the loitering militia men who made it look like an Afghan version of the Wild West until a couple of years ago.
The most obvious sign of the progress made since the Taliban made its last bloody stand here at the end of 2001 is the mushrooming mansions, extraordinary constructions of mirrored glass and showy marble paid for with heroin money. Twenty-five years of war and political turmoil have left this city deeply traumatised and driven its people into an introverted, conservative world in which women suffer greatly at the hands of men.
Women, confined to the burkha in public and traded like chattels in marriage, have always played a subordinate role. A Pushtun man will not mention the name of his wife to a stranger. His wife will not venture out of their house unless enclosed in a blue burkha. Her face will not be seen by strangers after about the age of 13, which is usually shortly before her marriage.
Women are not the slaves that westerners imagine, however. At home they are the boss with their own separate quarters even in the meanest, mud-brick dwelling. The honour of Pushtun men resides in their women and protecting them is a sacred duty, although boy children will always be fed better than girls. Some women, inevitably because of their poverty, have to turn to crime.
Kakar brings common sense and sympathy to her dealings with female criminals, such as the 10 women pick-pockets in Kandahar’s prison who were using their burkhas to escape detection. They were caught on the city’s streets by male police. Kakar is their gaoler, and has become their confidante. “Their downfall is due to poverty,” she says. “They rely on charity.”
She does her share of arresting female criminals. Last year she arrested a wife for the attempted murder of her husband. “She called on her lover to kill him, but he was only injured.” I joked with her that she should have made sure her lover had a sharper knife,” she says grimly.
When venturing out on the mean streets of Kandahar, Kakar must travel with her younger brother Toryalai as a chaperone, which in tribal terms is seen as protecting her honour. Twenty years her junior, her brother seems as much in awe of her as anyone else although they have an easy relationship. “If she is attacked, I will die defending her,” he explains happily.
When she ventures outside, Kakar always wears the blue burkha, hiding the strong features of her face and her raven-black hair, allowing her to become just another anonymous ghost-like figure. Like other Pushtun women she has always worn it, long before the coming of the Taliban, and she has no problem with an item of clothing despised as a symbol of oppression by many Afghan women.”
It makes a good disguise when I am working in the city,” she explains practically. “My enemies do not recognise me. Anyway, it is what Pushtun women have always worn, even before the Taliban.”
Because it is social convention in Kandahar, women don’t really have a choice and all wear the burkha; indeed a woman would not think of going out without one, as fanatics might attack an Afghan woman flouting the convention. In Kabul, however, there is an element of choice and many wear neither the burkha nor the veil. But in Kabul there are beauty parlours, women have jobs and drive cars. In Kandahar, the increased freedoms are minimal. Women can work, but few choose to. Women may no longer be stoned for adultery, but the improvements in their rights are negligible. There is still a long way to go in achieving equality.
Kakar has been a policewoman for 20 years now. She says she never discusses her work with her children or husband, and she tries not to worry her family about the death threats she receives. The threats are real enough. Fundamentalists in the city, once the Taliban’s spiritual heartland, hate the idea of a female police officer.
“I am not afraid. I must pursue my duty. If Afghanistan is to be rebuilt we must stand up to these people,” she says. Two more young women are following in her footsteps as officers and she would like her daughters to be policewomen if they so wish. At the very least she has hopes that they will be able to work in jobs and be dutiful wives, as she has been.
During the Taliban era she had to give up work and was forced to flee to Pakistan (where her husband worked for the UN) after Taliban police came looking for her. She was never sure whether they were just curious to see the woman who had killed three men or if they meant to arrest her. She believes things are slowly getting better for women although there is a long, long way to go.
“Our Afghanistan is much better now, women have some rights again. There is real hope. ” she says. “But we who have seen so much misery cannot say what our futures will hold.” |
