Tag: Afghanistan

  • While the law sits on a shelf

    A dispatch from Heather Barr at Human Rights Watch:

    The photo is shocking. A young woman – 20 years old – lies in a hospital bed, cradling her infant. Where her nose should be is instead a ragged bandage. Her eyes gaze out from over the bandage, looking far away and numb.

    Afghan woman Raiza Gul, 20, and whose nose was sliced off by her husband in an attack, lies on a bed with her baby as she receives treatment at a hospital in the northern province of Faryab on January 19, 2016.
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    © HASAN SIRDASH/AFP/Getty Images

    This is Raiza Gul. She married at age 15, in Afghanistan’s north, to a man named Muhammad Khan, the same man who Raiza Gul said tied her hands and cut off her nose with a pocket knife.

    This horrific act, only the latest in a series of abuses throughout the couple’s marriage, was reportedly prompted by arguments over Khan’s recent engagement to a six or seven-year-old girl he planned to take as a second wife.

    Anyone seeing this photo might imagine that Afghanistan is a completely lawless place where men abuse their wives and marry children at will with no fear of consequences.

    But actually there are laws that should have protected Raiza Gul and should protect girls like her.

    In 2009, then-President Hamid Karzai signed legislation that dramatically expanded the list of abuses against women that constitute criminal offenses, and set tough new punishments. This law, the Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW), made assaulting a woman punishable by three to five years in prison. It made child marriage a crime for the first time, making those responsible for such marriages subject to two to five years’ imprisonment.

    Under EVAW, Muhammad Khan, who is 25, should have been prosecuted when he married Raiza Gul, then a child under Afghan law. He should have faced the courts and a prison sentence every time he assaulted Raiza Gul. If police in Faryab had taken action just once, Raiza Gul wouldn’t be looking out from her hospital bed with those devastated eyes.

    The problem is that neither Hamid Karzai nor current President Ashraf Ghani have taken meaningful steps to enforce the EVAW Law. An estimated 87 percent of Afghan women experience abuse in their lifetimes, and this continues today, while the law sits, largely unused, on a shelf.

    Oh well, it’s only women.

  • Huddled on the ground before a man in a turban

    Heather Barr at Human Rights Watch reports:

    It’s a scene we associate with the Taliban. A woman covered head to toe in a flowing veil, huddled on the ground before a man in a turban. His right arm is raised, in motion, holding a lash, a second away from bringing it down on her. An audience of men – only men – sit in a circle around them. They have chairs – a nod to their comfort while they watch what may be intended as a cautionary lesson, or spectacle.

    This is not the Taliban. This photo emerged on September 1, and reportedly shows the lashing of a woman named Zarmina, 22, who was arrested with a man named Ahmad, 21, several weeks ago in Afghanistan’s Ghor province. The two were accused of zina, or sex outside of marriage, which under Afghan law is a crime carrying a sentence of 5 to 15 years in prison. The two were sentenced to 100 lashes each by a court – not a Taliban tribunal, not a convening of elders, but a formal court of law…

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    The men watching do look very relaxed and comfortable, as if at a pleasant afternoon concert.

    Sex between two consenting adults should never be a crime. But even more horrifyingly, a conviction for zina in Afghanistan is often based on the shakiest of evidence. When I interviewed dozens of women and girls imprisoned for zina and reviewed their cases, I learned that judges hand down harsh sentences based on women having left the home without permission, having been alone in the presence of a man who is not a relative, on malicious statements from angry and abusive husbands and fathers, and on abusive “virginity exams” – vaginal examinations that are medically meaningless.

    Well, maybe, but where there’s smoke there’s fire, you know.

  • No joy

    Life should be dull and empty and joyless, because god. No music, no dance, no play, no laughter, no frivolity, no flirting, no getting jiggy. No faces, no conversation, no friendship, no mingling, no color. No joy – because that’s the devil’s work.

    AFP reports:

    Taliban insurgents beheaded 17 civilians, including two women, who were holding a party with music in a southern Afghanistan village, officials said Monday.

    Party. Music. Women. Mingling. Too much fun. No fun for you! No fun, no pleasure, no heads.

    “I can confirm that this is the work of the Taliban,” the Helmand provincial governor’s spokesman Daud Ahmadi told AFP, referring to Islamists notorious during their rule for public executions and the suppression of music and parties.

    “Two women and 15 men were beheaded. They were partying with music in an area under the control of the Taliban,” he said.

    Nematullah Khan, the Musa Qala district chief confirmed that the villagers had organised a party with music, and one local official said he suspected that the two women had been dancing.

    Secret parties with dancing women from a gypsy-type tribe are common across southern Afghanistan.

    During their 1996-2001 rule in Afghanistan the Taliban, now waging a fierce insurgency against the NATO-backed government of President Hamid Karzai, also tried to stop the mixing of men and women who were not related.

    I like to watch dancing. I like music. That party sounds like a very good time. It sounds like the epitome of humans at their best – doing beatiful things with music and bodies in motion to express celebration. It’s so deeply pathetic that there are people who think that’s the epitome of evil and that they worship a god who hates that.

  • She was scolded and told she was next

    No freedom for you. No work for you. No acting career for you. No safety for you. No right to decide how to live your life for you. Only death threats for you, if you have the nerve to be an actress in Afghanistan.

    Afghan female artist and actress Sahar Parniyan has shifted her home from western Kabul city to an unknown location after she received death threats from unknown individuals.

    Sahar Parniyan used to perform in Afghan drama serials and TV shows with Benafsha who was murdered by unknown men during the Eid days in capital Kabul.

    She says she has been threatened by unknown individuals not to appear in TV channels before her colleague Benafsha was assassinated.

    In an exclusive interview with DW Sahar Parniyan said she received warnings from unknown individuals following the death of Benafsha and she was scolded and was told that she was next target to be assassinated.

    So that’s her scolded and silenced and forced into hiding.

  • The crime of Moska

    So that’s how it’s possible to treat rape victims as perps.

    Just 21, Gulnaz had been released that week from prison, where she had given birth to her daughter Moska. Gulnaz seemed younger than her years, but she held my gaze almost defiantly as she told her story.

    She had been imprisoned in a Kabul women’s jail after her cousin’s husband raped her.

    The crime came to light when the unmarried Gulnaz became pregnant.

    The police came and arrested both Gulnaz and her attacker. Under Afghan law she too was found guilty of a crime known as “adultery by force”, with her sentence increased on appeal to 12 years.

    Oh, I see! Afghan law doesn’t have a crime of rape, apparently, it has “adultery by force” and both parties are the perps as opposed to one party being the perp and the other being the victim.

    That’s interesting. Usually we* think of serious crime as being a crime because there are victims; that’s why laws against actions that can be considered “victimless” are contested.

    Imagine everything rearranged in a way comparable to “adultery by force.” You would get…”Suicide by force.” “Redistribution of wealth by force.” “Cosmetic surgery by force.” “Home visits by force.” “Account transfer by force.”

    In what we would call murder, it’s not one person doing a bad thing to another person, it’s two people teaming up to do a bad thing to…….to whom? The owner of one of them? The owner of both of them, “god”? “The community”?

    Never mind. I’m just playing silly buggers. I know that’s not how it works with other crimes. It’s just rape that works that way, because rape involves a woman (except when it doesn’t – there are those dancing boys in Afghanistan), and women always belong to men, so whatever is done to a woman is actually done not to the woman but to the man she belongs to. It’s not an assault on the woman, it’s adultery which is a bad thing done to the woman’s husband (certainly not to the rapist’s wife – don’t go getting that idea).

    I suppose Gulnaz’s daughter – the one conceived as a result of the “adultery by force” – is guilty of “birth by force” and will be sentenced to 12 years in prison as soon as she’s old enough to use the potty by herself.

    *By “we” I mean people who try to think about things, not “we in the West” or the like.

  • After she was raped, she was charged with adultery

    The EU commissioned a documentary film on women in Afghanistan who get shoved into prison for doing outrageous things like leaving abusive “husbands” they never wanted to marry in the first place. The documentary was duly made, at which point the EU got cold feet and said on second thought let’s put this documentary in a locked drawer and never think about it again.

    The documentary told the story of a 19-year-old prisoner called Gulnaz.

    After she was raped, she was charged with adultery. Her baby girl, born
    following the rape, is serving her sentence with her.

    “At first my sentence was two years,” Gulnaz said, as her baby coughed in her
    arms. “When I appealed it became 12 years. I didn’t do anything. Why should I be sentenced for so long?”

    Or, for that matter, at all? Why not, rather, sentence the rapist? Now there’s a novel idea!

    But don’t worry: there’s a happy ending for Gulnaz.

    Gulnaz’s pardon may be in the works because she has agreed – after 18 months
    of resisting – to marry her rapist.

    “I need my daughter to have a father,” she said.

    Nothing to add.