Maria Bashir has a large office with an enormous green carpet, a very long desk made of dark wood and a small living room where she welcomes her guests. Having joined Herat’s Public Prosecutors Office’s criminal investigative team in the early Nineties, after finishing Law School, she is still today the only female chief prosecutor in the whole country. Seeing her at work is reassuring, at least as far as appearances are concerned, regards to progress made by women in Afghanistan since the days in which the Taliban were in power and they were forbidden from leaving their homes, and when she too had to stop working. At the time, instead of surrendering she opened a secret school for girls.
Professional success, however, came at a very high price. She has often been threatened and her family now lives abroad, a necessary condition in order for her to do her job better, with impartiality and dedication, with no fear of retaliation. “The international community, and the Italians here in Herat have done a great deal, and do not believe there is the risk of a return of the Taliban,” she says. “But I do worry that the Afghan people may not be ready to manage alone. Terrorism has not been overcome and although good results have been achieved, we need to improve.”
The chief prosecutor is the first to acknowledge that something has changed for women.” Years ago no one even addressed women’s rights,” she says, “now they can leave their homes, study, work, and even be elected to parliament.
It is also true that there are still many obstacles. Men have lost their power over us and this causes additional problems in relationships, also because women are beginning to gain self-awareness. Working as a prosecutor is difficult because one is the judicial system’s intermediary with society but one also has great power, that of being able to sentence anyone who has committed a crime, whether that person is a man or a woman.” Other women have now started to hold institutional appointments and at a provincial level there is now a Department for Women’s Affairs and a Department for Social Affairs that is responsible for minors, the elderly and the disabled.
Mahbooba Jamshidi has been the head of Women’s Affairs in Herat for two months and is working on increasing female employment, which at a national level is only 15%. She too speaks of the profound changes taking place in society and objectives that have not yet been achieved. “Women have their place even in our constitution,” she said, “and now there is more talk of domestic violence. Our department often files reports on such cases when we are informed about them.” Afghanistan’s constitution envisages forms of aid for the needy, such as orphans and the relatives of war victims, but there is a lack of funds and a very high number of requests that cannot always be dealt with. In spite of many problems, the prison system is based on the principle of rehabilitation and the detainees’ reintegration in society.
The women’s prison in Herat is an example. Built with funds provided by the Italian Defence Ministry and the European Union, it was completed in 2009 thanks to the Italian PRT, Provincial Reconstruction Team, and now hosts 137 detainees. Ground floor areas are shared and in every room, all rigorously open, there are a variety of activities ranging from dressmaking to weaving, from English classes to IT. On the first floor there are the inmates’ rooms, all tidy and clean, each with four or six beds. Mothers are permitted to keep their children with them until they are eight years old and they have a special room with a teacher. Most of the women detained here have committed minor crimes, like running away from home or having premarital relations with a man. So, one should not be surprised that some of them are afraid of returning to “freedom” once they have served their sentences. This year, Human Rights Watch ascertained that most women arrested are charged with crimes against morality, even if a decade has passed since the end of the Taliban’s regime. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs, the law on eliminating violence and the acknowledgement of equal rights in the constitution all came after the 2001 Bonn Agreement for a “new Afghanistan”, signed by the countries four main ethnic groups, the Pashtuns, the Tajiks, the Uzbeks and the Hazaras. According to data published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), between 70 and 80% of marriages celebrated since 2008 were organised by families and not freely entered by the couples.
In small and isolate villages far from large urban centres, women are still living in a context of subsistence in which it will take generations before there is talk of rights, institutions, or a centralised state.
In the province of Farah one comes across small settlements of just a few houses in the desert mountains where people live on agriculture and sheep-farming, with no electricity or roads. If one asks how many people live there, the number provided does not include women, only the men. In some rural areas, especially in the province of Kunaar, families use women as compensation to remedy offence and avoid violence and feuds; this is known as baad, a tacit agreement that is never officially recorded. Often those who refuse to submit to certain customs pay with their lives. It is what happened to Mah Gul, a 20-year-old girl killed ten days ago by her in-laws, with her husband’s complicity, because she refused to be “lent” to another man.
And yet even in places more in contact with contemporariness there are cultural barriers that are hard to overcome. At Herat University, where nowadays there are students of both genders, the girls all wear the khimar, a black or coloured cloak that covers the head and the rest of the body, and in the classrooms they are rigorously separated from the boys. Larisha, a 22-year-old student who was born in Mazar’e Sharif but lives in Herat, says that marriages are arranged by families even among the wealthier classes, even if their daughters are attending universities or have jobs. It is the man’s family who visits the woman’s parents and makes arrangements for the future of the young couple who do not meet before the wedding.
The stories and secrets of women who have not yet embarked upon the path to emancipation are now starting to have voices that speak out for them. One of these is Radio Sharzat, from the name of the Sherazade in A Thousand and One Nights. It is a radio station set up by 15 female journalists and inaugurated early in October thanks to funding provided by a local entrepreneur. On the air between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m. the young journalists receive the messages of women who call in to speak of their experiences, and, in the meantime, they are preparing to broadcast political debates, “Now and again I have been tempted to abandon all this,” said the radio’s director Somia Ramish , “but then I always decided to keep going because we are creating something important that until recently was considered unthinkable.” As Samia confirms, a career as a journalist is one of those most aspired to by young Afghan women, until now obliged to remain silent but now ready to make their voices heard.
Translated by Francesca Simmons
Image: Afghan women, creative commons