A Tale of Love and Death in Afghanistan
By BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY - Op Ed - NYT
Bernard-Henri Lévy is the author of the forthcoming "War, Evil and the End of History."
PARIS — Homa Safi was 21, a journalist-in-training at a French-Afghan monthly magazine in Kabul, Nouvelles de Kaboul, that I started two years ago. She was one of the innumerable women whom the fall of the Taliban seemed to have returned to life. But like so many of her Afghan sisters, she decided last month that the gap between what her world offered her and what she wanted was too great.
Homa was beautiful. Very beautiful. She was tall, draping herself in long tunics and scarves of pearl-gray or green over her hair. Though her eyes were often lowered out of shyness, Eric de Lavarène, her editor, tells me that all it took was a kind word, a bit of encouragement, a request for an article that interested her, for her face to light up.
Homa was also in love. She had met a young man — a Muslim — who worked for a Western nongovernmental organization and with whom she wished to share her life.
Toward the end of March, after the Afghan New Year, the two families met. The young man's family came to Homa's little house in a miserable neighborhood on the outskirts of Kabul to ask her father for her hand. The father refused on the grounds that the young man was a Shiite, not a Sunni, and that anyway she was promised to the son of his friends, a man Homa had never met.
Homa didn't rebel. She just asked for an advance on her salary. She bought medicine in a pharmacy near the magazine. She telephoned a few of her friends one last time, without revealing her intentions. And then she left a world in which a woman's liberty is a thing unknown or incongruous.
I'm told that Homa's father was close to her and probably didn't think, as he issued his edict, how much he was hurting his daughter. He was a loving father. Attached to tradition but at the same time proud of his daughter and her new career. He didn't even take too much umbrage at her work on our special edition about the women of Kabul, their conditions, their rights, their hopes. He was like so many Afghan fathers — men who aren't monsters but who simply think that it's in keeping with divine law to marry their daughters to strangers.
I am told that now, mad with despair, he swears to whomever will listen that if he had it to do over again, if God returned his beloved child, he would give her to the young man she loved. Homa, in other words, is dead not because of cruelty but because of the infinite folly that fundamentalism brings.
Nouvelles de Kaboul has reported that last year in the warlord-controlled city of Herat more than 100 women immolated themselves, deciding that suicide was the only way to escape their fate as slaves to their husbands and in-laws. Like them, Homa died of this ageless fanaticism, which hasn't disappeared with the military rout of the mullahs. The Afghan Constitution calls for equal rights for men and women, but that has little force in a country without a strong central government.
No need to explain that we are all, in Kabul and Paris, stunned by the news of Homa's death. No need either to linger over the 1,001 questions that inevitably arise: How? Why? But there is another question here: what is the responsibility of us, the Westerners and nongovernmental organizations with our talk of freedom and equality? Are we promising more than we have or can ever deliver?
For those of us who love Afghanistan and continue to believe in its democratic future, for those who cannot be resigned to the idea of a world where only half of humankind has basic rights and, above all, for women, Homa's suicide is a call not to do less — it is a call to do more.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
