About Face - II
The rules were enforced capriciously, sometimes ferociously, by religious police from the Orwellian-named Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Ministry thugs wielding lengths of steel cable would beat women in the street for infractions like wearing white socks. "If women are going outside with fashionable, ornamental, tight and charming clothes," an early decree from the ministry warned, they "should never expect to go to heaven."
It is hard to find a woman in Kabul now who does not remember a beating at the hands of the Taliban. As it consolidated power, its orders became increasingly bizarre and sadistic, based on its extreme interpretations of Koranic instructions. One of these demanded punishment for women who allowed their shoes to make noise when they walked down the street. But this surreal pettiness masked real misery. The ban on work for most women had a disastrous effect on schooling for both sexes, since as many as 70% of all Afghan teachers were women. Excluding them from the classroom meant that boys had few teachers to instruct them.
The work ban extended to widows, who were left no recourse but to beg. In a nation with as many as a million widows--out of a population of just 20 million--that decree alone produced a silent disaster. Sabza Gul, 32, now begs at the Kabul bus station and makes about 50[cents] on a good day. Some years ago, when she was still living in a village north of the city, her husband went blind. The family became dependent on whatever money their son Humayoun, 17, could earn as a field worker. The fields were close to the occasional fighting between Taliban and Northern Alliance forces. Eight months ago he was killed by a stray rocket. "There is no work for women," Sabza says. "We had nobody to look after the family, so I came to Kabul." Now that the Taliban is gone, she will try to find work cleaning offices or homes.
All schooling was forbidden to girls over the age of eight. A recent U.N. report estimated that at most 7% of Afghan girls were enrolled in school, compared with roughly half the boys. In Peshawar, the Pakistani city near the border to which many Afghan refugees have escaped, Masooda is a shy second-grade girl--but she is 16. She left school five years ago, on the day the Taliban entered her central Afghan town of Kota Sangi and beat her with a cane for not wearing a burka. When her family fled to Pakistan two weeks ago to escape U.S. bombing, she finally resumed lessons. "I once knew how to read, but I've forgotten everything," she says. "I'm ashamed to be so much older than everyone else."
For those who stayed home, determined mothers have found ways to get schooling for their daughters. Rawshan and Nasima, both 30, are married to the same man, Abdul Qadir, 55, a porter in a Kabul market who makes about $1 a day. Rawshan has one son and three daughters by Abdul. Nasima has one son and two daughters. Desperately poor, they live in a house peppered with bullet holes. For the past two years, Rawshan's eldest daughter Wahida, 10, has been going to a secret school in an abandoned building. She has only one hour of lessons a day, given by local women who volunteer their services, but she is slowly picking up the rudiments of math and learning how to read. "I would like my daughter to work outside the home," says Rawshan. "I stayed in the home, and I have had a terrible life."
Next to education, women's health suffered the worst consequences of religious rule. The life expectancy of Afghan women now is just 44 years. There are 17 maternal deaths per 1,000 live births, the second worst rate in the world, just behind war-ravaged Sierra Leone. The statistics only hint at what medical care for women is like in a nation where a male doctor is not allowed to give a thorough physical examination to a female patient. Women had to be examined wearing the full burka. Male doctors sometimes had to stand in a hallway shouting instructions to a female assistant. A doctor could be imprisoned for talking to a female patient who was not fully covered.
Dr. Sima Samar left Afghanistan in 1984 but runs two hospitals in Afghanistan as well as 10 clinics from her base in Quetta, Pakistan. "There was a lot of harassment from the Taliban," she says. "They would enter the hospital at 1 in the morning saying they had received a report that our female staff was not dressed properly or was talking with the male staff."
What Next?
Even with the final defeat of the Taliban, when and if that occurs, Afghan women will remain in a vexed position. The forces vying to take the Taliban's place are not always friendly to women. Within the Northern Alliance, there is a fundamental split between Western-minded technocrats and conservative religious figures. Abdullah Abdullah, the Alliance's media-savvy Foreign Minister, is a technocrat. In his speeches he makes sure to point out that in Alliance-held areas women go to school. He goes so far as to support women's joining the government.
Not so Alliance President Burhanuddin Rabbani, once a foremost proponent of expanding the burka's reach across Afghanistan. More recently, Rabbani allowed to an interviewer that "wearing a head scarf is enough in the cities." But in the Northern Alliance stronghold of Faizabad, his acolytes make sure that all women are completely covered. "Rabbani is better than the Taliban," says Farahnaz Nazir, a women's rights activist in the Northern Alliance town of Khoja Bahauddin. "But he is still very conservative. He does not believe that women are equal."
That attitude extends into the rank and file. Zulmai is a Northern Alliance soldier lounging on a tank in the town of Farkhar. Ask him how many brothers he has, and he proudly tells you four, all soldiers. Ask how many sisters, and he says none. Press him repeatedly, and he finally admits to three. Why did he deny them? "Because girls are not important." He shrugs. "They do not count."
This helps explain why the signals being sent to women by Alliance forces in Kabul are so mixed. Though they re-opened a movie theater there last week for the first time since the Taliban took power, women were not admitted. A brief street demonstration last week by women who wanted to march to the U.N. headquarters in Kabul to demand equal rights was blocked by the police, who claimed they could not guarantee the security of the protesters.
In recent weeks the Bush Administration, in cooperation with the British government of Prime Minister Tony Blair, has opened a public relations assault to point up the oppression of women under Taliban rule. Two weeks ago, Laura Bush delivered what is ordinarily the President's Saturday radio address to speak about the problem. "What this initiative has done is send a signal," says Jim Wilkinson, director of the Coalition Information Center, the White House office that coordinates the Administration's worldwide anti-Taliban message. "By talking about the problem, we're hopefully able to affect the solution as they set up the new Afghan government," he notes.
In Washington two weeks ago, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and the President's Special Counselor, Karen Hughes, met with Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, and Mavis Leno, who has long worked to bring attention to the problems of Afghan women. "We asked the Administration to make returning women to equal status under the law a nonnegotiable issue in forming any new government," says Leno, wife of Tonight Show host Jay Leno. "That's pretty much the language Colin Powell used when he spoke at the State Department [last week], so it appears the government is going to do exactly that."
Or try to do. Afghanistan is famously resistant to outside interference. Ask the Russians. "When the Soviets came, they wanted to change the country overnight, abandoning tribal codes that existed for centuries," says Nelofer Pazira, an exiled Afghan journalist and dedicated foe of the Taliban who stars in the film Kandahar (see box). "People were appalled. They went completely in the opposite direction. Even more liberal families became very conservative."
No matter what other nations may think, in the end it will be up to the Afghans to find a new balance of genders in their society. Progress is likely to be slow, particularly outside the educated elites of Kabul. Even there it will be subject to the complex forces of coercion, family pressure and tradition. Mohammad Halim, who runs one of Kabul's best-known burka shops, says he has no plans to offer a wider variety of clothing. "It will only be in Kabul where women will take off their burkas. Elsewhere women will continue wearing them. This is a very old custom in Afghanistan." That very day, says Halim, more than a week after the Taliban fled the city, he sold 20..
Maybe Halim has not counted on the number of girls who think like Mashal. At 18, she wants to be a doctor. "I want to be freed from Allah," she says. "I don't want to wear a veil at all. I want to wear miniskirts." And he may not be counting on the determination of women like Fakhria, 35, a mother of four in Kabul. After the Taliban forced her from her job at a teacher-training college, she opened a secret beauty salon in her house in Kabul. A high wall shields her customers from prying eyes. Inside are pictures of female models torn from Pakistani magazines. On shelves beside a large mirror, she has a selection of lipsticks, eyeliners and hair sprays. In the West they would be commonplace. In a society that forbids them, they seem weirdly precious.
With the Taliban gone, Fakhria hopes to open a storefront salon. No blackened windows anymore to hide the forbidden faces. She also wants to go back to her teaching job. "I can make more money in a salon," she says. "But I want to pass on knowledge."
There is one kind of knowledge that all Afghan women can pass on now--what it was like to be trapped in a society that, however briefly, perfected their imprisonment.
— Reported by Hannah Beech/Dasht-i-Qaleh; Hannah Bloch and Matthew Forney/Islamabad; Terry McCarthy/Kabul; Jeff Chu/London; Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles; Alex Perry/Mazar-i-Sharif; Tim McGirk/Spin Boldak; and John F. Dickerson/Washington
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