[But to
many rights advocates, Sahar Gul’s case, which drew attention from President
Hamid Karzai and the international news media, is the exception that proves the
rule: a small victory that masks a still-depressing picture of widespread
instances of abuse of women that never come to light.]
By Graham Bowley
 |
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
Sahar Gul, 14, lives in a
who beat her, tied her up and
trapped her in their cellar.
|
In July, an appeals court upheld prison sentences of 10 years each for three of her
in-laws, a decision heralded as a legal triumph underscoring the advances for
women’s rights in the past decade. She is recovering from her wounds, physical
and emotional, in a women’s shelter in Kabul .
But to many rights advocates, Sahar Gul’s case, which drew
attention from President Hamid Karzai and the international news media, is the
exception that proves the rule: a small victory that masks a still-depressing
picture of widespread instances of abuse of women that never come to light.
Further, advocacy groups fear that even the tentative
progress that has been achieved in protecting some women could be undone if the
West’s focus on Afghanistan now begins to shift away as NATO troops withdraw
and the international money pumped into the economy diminishes.
“If you take away that funding and pressure, it is not
sustainable,” said Heather Barr,
Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch.
As more details of Sahar Gul’s case have come to light —
including the fact that the abuse continued even as, time and again, neighbors,
police officers and her family members voiced suspicions that something was
wrong — it has only reinforced how vulnerable women and girls still are in
Afghanistan, particularly in rural areas where under-age marriages are common
and forced ones are typical.
Sahar Gul, who is now about 14, grew up in Badakhshan, a
poor, mountainous province in the north. As a young child she was shuffled
around after her father died, ending up with her stepbrother, Mohammad, when
she was about 9. She helped with the hard work — tending cows, sheep and an
orchard of walnut and apricot trees, and making dung bricks for the fire — but
her stepbrother’s wife resented her presence. The woman pressured Mohammad to
give Sahar Gul up for marriage after he was contacted by a man, about 30, named
Ghulam Sakhi — even though she had not yet reached the legal marriage age of
16, or 15 with a father’s consent.
In effect, Ghulam Sakhi bought her: he paid at least
$5,000, according to government officials and prosecutors, an illegal exchange.
He drove off with Sahar Gul to his parents’ home in Baghlan, another northern province hundreds of miles away.
Ghulam Sakhi’s first wife had fled after he and his mother
beat her for not bearing children, according to Rahima Zarifi, the chairwoman
of Baghlan’s women’s affairs department, and the mullah in the mosque in the
town in Baghlan. In his search for a new wife, there may have been a reason
Ghulam Sakhi’s family looked so far afield: they intended to force her into
prostitution, according to Ms. Zarifi, who followed the case closely, and
officials at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in Kabul .
In Baghlan, the girl was immediately put to work cooking
and cleaning, but she was able to resist consummating the marriage for weeks.
She ran away to the house of a neighbor, who alerted both
the police and her husband’s family. Ghulam Sakhi’s neighbors and the police
forced him to sign a letter promising not to mistreat Sahar Gul, though they
let him take her back.
The warning had little effect. One day, when she complained
of a headache, her mother-in-law, Siyamoi, tricked her into taking a sedative
that she thought was medicine, said Mushtari Daqiq, a lawyer for the aid group Women for Afghan Women and also Sahar Gul’s lawyer.
“When she woke up in the morning, she realized she had been
used by her husband,” Ms. Daqiq said.
A neighbor named Ehsanullah said that one evening last
summer, as his family ate dinner, they heard screaming coming from the house.
The following morning his mother called at the house. He recounted what she
saw: “Sahar Gul had lost a lot of weight, her hands were covered with bruises
and wounds, one of her hands was broken, but her mother-in-law was forcing her
to do the laundry.” He added, “She kept her head down the whole time my mother
was there.”
After a group of elders confronted Ghulam Sakhi, the
screaming stopped.
Frustrated that the girl could not perform the housework
they expected, the family put her in the cellar, where she slept on the floor
without a mattress, her hands and feet tied with rope. She was given only bread
and water to eat. She was also beaten regularly. According to Sahar Gul and Ms.
Daqiq, most of the beatings were at the hand of Amanullah, Ghulam Sakhi’s elderly
father.
They described grotesque crimes, accusing Amanullah of
hitting Sahar Gul with sticks, biting her chest, inserting hot irons in her
ears and vagina, and pulling out two fingernails.
“She was helpless,” Ms. Daqiq said. “She had no hope for
her life.”
Sahar Gul’s uncle Khwaja, who lived nearby in the same
province, and her stepbrother, Mohammad, tried to visit her a few times, but
the family told them the girl was not home. The family then threatened
Mohammad, warning that he had illegally given his sister to be married. “He had
to accept and run back to Badakhshan without meeting his sister,” Khwaja said.
Then, last December, about six months after the marriage,
they finally got to see her when they called at the house with two police
officers and heard a voice coming from the cellar.
“In the light of our flashlight, we found Sahar Gul lying
on a pile of hay,” said Shirullah, one of the police officers.
Her dress was in rags, she was barely conscious and she
could not stand after weeks in the dark.
“She was constantly moaning,” Shirullah said. “She was in a
horrible situation. She couldn’t move her body parts, and we carried her to the
hospital in our arms.”
Ms. Zarifi and three nurses washed her and gave her soup
and dates. “When she saw the food, she became very excited,” Ms. Zarifi said.
The police arrested the mother-in-law, Siyamoi, her
daughter Mahkhurd and finally Amanullah, the father-in-law — who was discovered
hiding in a burqa and a blanket.
The family told the police that Ghulam Sakhi was in the
Afghan Army in Helmand . That was later found to be untrue, according to local
residents and Afghan officials, but the claim bought enough time for him to
slip away from the authorities along with his brother, Darmak. They remain at
large.
With her mistreatment a big story in the Afghan news media,
Mr. Karzai called for swift justice. In a district court in Kabul on May 1, the judge, speaking in front of a bank of
microphones on national television, declared Sahar Gul’s three in-laws guilty.
According to neighbors and to officials who heard the
in-laws’ arguments in court, they acted the way they did mostly because they
felt they had paid good money for a girl who they said was not pretty, who
misbehaved and who would neither work as they demanded nor bear them children.
Lawyers for the family members say that they deny beating
or drugging Sahar Gul, and that her wounds were self-inflicted. They deny
confining her in the cellar, and say they had no plans to send her into
prostitution. The prostitution accusation was not addressed in court.
The lawyers, who were provided by the legal group Da Qanoon Ghushtonky, or Demanders of Law, which is financed
by international aid, argue that the political outcry caused the trial to be
rushed through without due process.
Rather than showing the lack of legal protections for
women, they argued, Sahar Gul’s case underscores the weakness of Afghanistan ’s still-developing legal system, one that can easily be
swayed by politicians like Mr. Karzai.
Siyamoi and Mahkhurd are now 2 of 171 prisoners in a
women’s prison in Kabul . On a recent morning there, the two women insisted they
were innocent and railed ferociously at their accusers.
“We are being cheated by the court,” Siyamoi said. “If you
think I am a criminal, why don’t you pull out my fingernails?”
A few miles away across Kabul , Sahar Gul lives in a shelter provided by Women for Afghan
Women, one of seven shelters the organization has established nationally for
abuse victims.
Sahar Gul played in the sun in the garden in a golden dress
and purple shawl and pink bracelets, a round-cheeked, gangly girl. She had made
a new friend at the shelter, a 14-year-old girl whose face was scarred by acid
by a sister’s thwarted suitor.
Sahar Gul still bears the scars and bruises of her ordeal,
but her caregivers said she was recovering and becoming gradually more
independent. She said she had ambitions.
“I want to become a politician and stop other women
suffering the same,” she said.
Now, however, rights groups fear that schools and clinics
for girls may close as international money dries up and the political climate
in Afghanistan becomes more religiously conservative, undermining the fragile
lattice of pro-women support groups, government ministries and nongovernmental
organizations as well as laws specifically created in the past few years to
protect women.
A new 2009 law to eliminate violence against women was
cited in the sentencing of Sahar Gul’s abusers, but the law is still barely
applied, according to a United Nations report published in November, and it has
not been formally adopted.
Women’s shelters are under threat, with a conservative
justice minister describing them as “brothels,” while a new family law that
could make it easier for abused women to divorce is being held up.
In such a climate, the fear is that Sahar Gul’s successful
rescue may turn out to be an aberration rather than a new norm, and that it
will not help those women whose suffering is not discovered.
“We have many cases perhaps graver than this where women
are murdered,” Ms. Zarifi said. “No one hears anything about them.”
Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from
Kabul, and an employee of The New York Times from Baghlan Province, Afghanistan