Posted by
InchDeep on Saturday, October 04, 2008 5:23:10 PM
Women who took on the Taliban – and lost
AFP
Safia Amajan, who fought for education for women. Murdered in Kandahar
www.independent.co.uk
Three years ago, Kim
Sengupta interviewed five women who wanted to build a new Afghanistan.
Today, three are dead and a fourth has fled
It was another murder among so many in the bloody conflict in
Afghanistan – a senior police officer gunned down by the Taliban. But
the death of Malalai Kakar this week has removed a brave and dedicated
champion of oppressed women; it has raised the fears of other women in
public life that they too have, in effect, been sentenced to death.
Of five prominent women interviewed three years ago by The Independent
for an article on post-Taliban female emancipation, three, including Ms
Kakar, are dead and a fourth has had to flee after narrowly escaping
assassination in an ambush in which her husband was killed.
Religious
fundamentalists are waging a ruthless campaign to eliminate women who
have taken up high-profile jobs. Parliamentarians, schoolteachers,
civil servants, security officials and women journalists have been
selected for attacks by the jihadists. Countless others have been
maimed and murdered in villages where the vengeful Taliban have
returned to impose the old order.
In the case of Malalai Kakar,
the most prominent policewoman in Afghanistan, an additional "crime"
which sealed her fate was that she was a determined and effective
campaigner for women's rights. Commander Kakar, 40, knew her work made
her a Taliban target. She led a unit of 10 policewomen specialising in
domestic violence cases. She was uncompromising with suspected abusers,
men who in the past had relied on male police officers to turn a blind
eye.
"I've been accused of being rough with husbands who beat
up their wives" she said. "But I'm angry, we try to apply the law in
the right way and the constitution is supposed to protect women's
rights."
Kakar liked to cook breakfast for her husband and six
children before going to work, she told me. She would spend a long time
saying her farewell because, she said, she could never be sure what
would happen. Her 15-year-old son was with her when she was killed last
weekend. She carried a pistol under the burqa she wore to work, so as
not to be recognised, before changing into uniform. But she had no
chance to defend herself, or him, against the two motorcycle assassins.
Like Kakar, Shaima Rezayee was one of those who believed in a
brave new world for Afghan women. After five years of burqa-wearing
under Taliban rule, the bubbly 24-year-old presented a popular music
show called Hop on the independent channel Tolo TV and helped run
schemes to promote women in the media. When I asked for her help in
preparing the article, however, she was already pessimistic. "Things
are not getting better," she cautioned. "We made some gains, but there
are a lot of people who want to take it all back. They are not even the
Taliban, they are here in Kabul."
She was having her own
problems, the station was being condemned for allowing her, a female in
Western clothes and make-up to talk freely to men on the programme.
Eventually she was dismissed after pressure from conservative clerics
of the National Ulema Council who accused Tolo of "broadcasting music,
naked dance and foreign films". In particular, they picked out Shaima's
programme for criticism. There was no support from the police who
declared that they may not be able to protect her.
Shaima was
angry. "The bad days are coming back, we'll have to go into exile
again", she said. Soon afterwards rumours began to appear that she had
been killed. Tolo offered to broadcast an interview. "But they wanted
to do it on radio, not TV," she laughed. "The religious people might
get offended even if they saw me for five minutes."
Shaima was
gunned down at her home near Kabul's diplomatic quarters. Her killers,
said the police, appeared to have been people she had known as they did
not have to force their way into the house.
Kandahar, the
birthplace of the Taliban, is the scene of particular brutality towards
women. "It is much worse down there than it is for us here [in Kabul],
you must go down there," Shaima had said previously. One woman who
worked tirelessly for women in Kandahar was Safia Amajan, 65, who
stayed behind during the dark days of Taliban rule to teach girls in
lessons held in secret. After the US-led invasion of 2001, she
volunteered to work for the new government with great success, opening
schools and workshops where at least 1,000 women learned to make and
sell their goods at the market.
Amajan, or "dear aunt" as the
girls she taught called her, survived the Taliban by learning the Koran
by heart. But she was always independent, refusing a marriage arranged
by her father and then eventually choosing her own husband, an educated
and wholly supportive colonel in the army.
The couple lived on
the outskirts of Kandahar, where she described, without any drama, the
struggle of life for women under the Taliban. "Those of us who are
around now are very lucky," she said. "There were others, very brave,
who also tried to make things better for young girls through education
and teaching them skills. They were caught and they suffered."
Amajan
was killed in September 2006. Her husband had walked her to the main
road where she was to be picked up by a taxi to be taken to work. Two
young men approached on a motorcycle and one of them opened fire with a
Kalashnikov. A Taliban commander, Mullah Hayat Khan, announced that she
had been "executed" for defying orders to stop working.
I met
the two men arrested for her murder last year at the Sarposa prison in
Kandahar. They were in their early 20s, dishevelled and craven,
repeatedly claiming that they were in danger from their own side as
well as the authorities. They had killed Safia, they said, in return
for $5,000 offered by a mullah in Pakistan. The men were caught when
the mullah wanted proof that they had carried out their task and they
attempted, by night, to dig up the body for a lock of hair.
Kakar
had long been a friend of Amajan and threw herself into the hunt for
her killers. "They would not have been caught if they had not tried to
disturb Safia's body," she said at her office in the central police
station. "I do not trust myself to be in the same cell as those men.
They murdered someone who was old enough to be their grandmother. They
murdered someone who has done so much for Kandaharis... so much for
Afghanistan."
"She was this wonderful person we heard about
growing up in Kandahar," she said. "I made a point of meeting her and I
took guidance from her."
Amajan and Kakar used to work closely
with a woman MP in Kandahar, Zarghuna Kakar (no relation). Ms Kakar,
36, has now fled her home after she and her family were attacked in a
market. Her husband, Mohammed Nasir, was killed in the attack.
Before
the shooting, Ms Kakar had repeatedly pleaded for security. At one
point she turned in desperation to Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of
the Afghan President and a prominent figure in Kandahar. "He told me
there was nothing he could do," she recalled. "He also said that I
should have thought about what may happen before I stood for election.
But it was his brother, the Americans and the British who told us that
we women should get involved in political life. Of course, now I wish I
hadn't. If only I knew what would happen."
Ms Kakar fled to Kabul
with her family. We met in a cold, dark hotel room. She worries
constantly about the dangers. "I eventually managed to meet President
Karzai. He told me to go back to Kandahar and he would make sure the
governor provided us with bodyguards. But the governor has no men to
spare." The lack of official protection for women from either the
Afghan government or Western forces is a source of bitter complaint
among those who now find themselves under threat from Islamist zealots.
Now, with the Taliban mounting audacious attacks just on the
outskirts of Kabul and President Karzai's government engaged in
negotiations with the Taliban and other Islamist groups, women who have
the means to get away are planning possible escape routes. Foreign
embassies report an increase in visa applications from educated,
professional women.
Captain Jamilla Mujahid Barzai is staying
on with Kandahar police to continue her murdered boss's work. She left
the police force after witnessing an infamous Taliban execution of a
woman at Kabul's football stadium, a judicial killing which was filmed
and shown later around the world as an example of the savagery of the
time. "I knew the prisoner, I shall never forget the way she died...
There was nothing I could do, so I left the police. It is most
important that now women try to get to positions of power to stop
things like that happening again. It is dangerous. But we cannot go
back to those days again."