And another "opinion".... But it looks like these folks were actually there ...
Kabul's 'room of pain' unlocks torture secrets
by Philip Sherwell and Julian West in Kabul
(Filed: 25/11/2001)
THE evidence lies scattered on the filthy concrete floor. Lipstick,
bracelets, compact cases, perfume, nail polish, hair-clips, even shiny black
handbags: each one enough to condemn a woman to the "room of pain" in the
Taliban's Afghanistan.
On the wall nearby are rust-coloured stains and long, deep scratches: the
blood and fingernail gouges left behind by women tortured in this room as
punishment for their alleged crimes against Islam. Kabul's infamous women's
prison yielded its grim secrets last week after the zealots of the Taliban
fled the city.
It was here that the feared religious police incarcerated and tortured women
deemed to have breached the codes of dress and behaviour imposed by the
mullahs at the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
Accused female adulterers and criminals were also brought here before being
taken to public squares and stadiums to be stoned, flogged or have limbs
amputated.
Workers at the prison recall hearing inmates' screams seeping from behind
the locked doors of the room of pain. From the wall of the small
stone-walled torture chamber dangles a green rope used to tie up prisoners
still shrouded in their head-to-ankle burqas.
The Northern Alliance, the city's new ruler, has appointed a senior official
to investigate the abuses committed in the women's jail under its director,
the Pakistani cleric Mullah Kebale.
The full scale of the atrocities will probably never be known, however, as
the Taliban burnt the prison's files and records when they fled. More
alarmingly, the retreating Taliban forces also drove away almost 100 women
inmates as they headed south in a fleet of pick-up trucks towards Kandahar.
Relatives broke down in hysterics after they came to the unguarded jail the
next morning, only to find that their daughters, sisters and mothers had
disappeared. Left behind in spartan cells that housed up to 20 women and
their children were their lice-infested mattresses and ragged clothes. The
departure was so abrupt that their laundry still hung from washing lines
strung across a small courtyard surrounded by barbed wire.
Some of the warders' torture implements, including thick metal manacles and
the long rubber whips with which the religious police routinely beat their
victims, were abandoned in the rush.
So were many of the beauty products and jewellery secretly worn by women
under their burqas, only for the items to land them in jail when they were
discovered. Under the Taliban, even white shoes and shiny handbags were
considered too racy for a woman to wear outdoors.
Yet some women took enormous risks running underground beauty parlours. Last
week The Telegraph visited one such parlour in a bedroom on a squalid
housing estate where a woman called Mehbooba maintained an Aladdin's cave of
perming lotion, hairspray, lipstick, nail polish and hand-carved wooden
curlers.
On a shelf is a handpainted sign reading "Yamarut Beauty Parlour", which the
41-year-old Moscow-trained beautician had hidden during the Taliban's rule.
For six years, women from the neighbouring flats secretly visited her.
"We had to be fashionable," said Mehbooba. "Even though we weren't seen, it
was important to us, it helped to keep our spirits alive." Had she or her
clients been discovered they would have ended up in the room of pain.
Others were hauled into the squalid prison and beaten for offences such as
walking or talking with a man who was not a close relative, or for briefly
lifting their veils to look at an item in a shop.
Sharbano, 32, had been a prison officer at the jail before the Taliban
seized the city in 1996 and banned women from working. The next time she
returned to the compound was to visit a friend who had been arrested because
her husband was suspected of supporting the alliance.
She still shakes as she describes the "savagery" of the three Taliban who
forced the woman down on to the floor, covered her body with a blanket and
then whipped her repeatedly with a thick cable.
Shan Fahim was a policeman stationed in the main headquarters. He recalls
the screams and cries of women held there and says the torturers were
"animals". He said: "They could not hide their excitement when they
discussed what they had done. They just used the name of Islam as an excuse
to justify their actions. They were not normal people."
Wajihah Shah, a 30-year-old mother-of-three, returned to her job as prison
administrator last week. The religious police beat her twice, once for
travelling alone in a taxi with the driver, and the other time for attending
an unauthorised sewing evening with female friends.
She is now helping to investigate the abuses at the prison. On her first day
back at her desk, she removed her burqa and revealed a face made up with
mascara and lipstick - just the sort of decadent excesses that would have
landed her inside the same jail under the Taliban.
portal.telegraph.co.uk. |
