[Such
“honor killings” of women exist in a number of cultures, but in Afghanistan
they are firmly anchored by Pashtunwali, an age-old tribal code prevalent in
the ethnic Pashtun areas of the country that the government and rights
advocates have fought for years to override with a national civil legal system.
This year, six such killings have been reported in Afghanistan’s far east alone,
more than in each of the past two years, and for every one that comes to light,
human rights advocates believe a dozen or more remain hidden. ]
By
Alissa J. Rubin
 |
|
Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
Gul Meena, who was reportedly attacked by her
brother for dishonoring their
family, recovering at a hospital in Jalalabad.
|
JALALABAD,
Afghanistan — It is doubly miraculous that the young woman named Gul Meena is
alive. After she was struck by an ax 15 times, slashing her head and face so
deeply that it exposed her brain, she held on long enough to reach medical care
and then, despite the limitations of what the doctors could do, clung to life.
“We
had no hope she would survive,” said Dr. Zamiruddin, a neurosurgeon at the
Nangarhar Regional Medical Center in the eastern city of Jalalabad who, like
many Afghans, uses only one name. After she was brought in, he worked for more
than six hours in the hospital’s rudimentary operating theater, gently
reinserting her brain and stitching her many wounds.
For
weeks afterward, she was often unconscious, always uncommunicative and, but for
the hospital staff, utterly alone, with no family members to care for her. That
is because, if the accounts from her home province are true, she is an
adulterer: though already married, she ran away with another man, moving south
until her family caught up with them.
Locals
say that the man who wielded the ax against her, and also killed the man with
her, was most likely her brother.
That
she reached a hospital and received care at all is the second part of the
miracle: the villagers, doctors and nurses who helped her were bucking a deeply
ingrained tradition that often demands death for women who dishonor their
families.
Such
“honor killings” of women exist in a number of cultures, but in Afghanistan
they are firmly anchored by Pashtunwali, an age-old tribal code prevalent in
the ethnic Pashtun areas of the country that the government and rights
advocates have fought for years to override with a national civil legal system.
This year, six such killings have been reported in Afghanistan’s far east alone,
more than in each of the past two years, and for every one that comes to light,
human rights advocates believe a dozen or more remain hidden.
Gul
Meena’s story, as best it can be pieced together from relatives, tribal elders
and others, gives insight into that deeply entrenched tribal culture. But it is
also a story about a society struggling to come to terms with a different way
of thinking about women.
The
Americans and Europeans have put a special emphasis on programs to help Afghan
women and raise awareness of their rights. Now, as the Western money and
presence are dwindling, women’s advocates fear that even the limited gains will
erode and a more tribal and Taliban culture will prevail, especially in the
south and east of the country, where Pashtun tribal attitudes toward women are
strongly held.
It
is a credit to many people — villagers, doctors, the police, rights advocates —
that they chose to help Gul Meena, overcoming centuries of distaste for dealing
with so-called moral crimes. The doctors at the Nangarhar Regional Medical
Center who first treated her and cared for her for weeks were aware of her
likely transgressions and chose to ignore them. However, the doctors, who say
Gul Meena is about 18, were also bewildered about what to do with her.
“She
has no one; no mother has come, no father, no one from her tribe has come,”
said Dr. Abdul Shakoor Azimi, the hospital’s medical director, as he stood at
the foot of her bed looking at her. “What is the solution? Even the government,
the police, even the Women’s Affairs Ministry, they are not coming here to
follow up and visit the patient.”
A
patient in an Afghan hospital without a family member is a neglected soul. Most
hospitals are so impoverished that they offer only the bed itself and limited
medical care. Gul Meena lay in her own urine when a reporter first visited her
because no relative was there to change her sheets. Hospital staff members were
able to tend to her sporadically, but they are overstretched. Without a
relative, the patient has no one to pay for drugs, drips, needles or food, no
one to bring fresh clothes.
Dr.
Azimi manages the hospital’s Zakat fund, a charitable collection that all the
physicians contribute to, and for the first three weeks of Gul Meena’s care,
the fund and individual doctors paid for everything.
Many
women are not so fortunate and lie in unmarked graves in Afghanistan’s
mountains and deserts, but as the culture urbanizes and women begin to consider
marrying for love, families and tribal codes are being tested.
“As
the numbers of these moral cases increase, the severity of punishment
decreases,” said Ahmad Gul Wasiq, a professor of theology at Jalalabad
University, who also counsels families when there are marriage problems and who
had heard about Gul Meena’s case.
Gul
Meena first arrived in the area, in a village called Kandi Bagh in a rural
stretch of Nangarhar, about two months ago, traveling with a man named Qari
Zakir. The villagers asked few questions, although the two had traveled south
from Kunar Province with just a single bag. That is hardly the profile of a
married couple hoping to set up housekeeping in a new place.
“Everybody
avoids such cases, and doesn’t want to get involved in others’ troubles,” said
Hikmat Azimi, 27, who lives in Kandi Bagh and works as a teacher at a nearby
agricultural institute.
The
last time anyone saw Mr. Zakir was about a week after their arrival, on the
night before he was killed. He was seen buying a large bag of fruit, it seemed
in honor of Gul Meena’s brother. He had turned up a few days earlier, according
to villagers’ accounts related by Col. Nasir Sulaimanzai, the head of the
Nangarhar police investigative division. Her father had also come but then
left, said Mr. Azimi, the villager.
The
next morning, a distant relative of Mr. Zakir’s who lived in the area knocked
on the couple’s door. When no one answered, he climbed over the wall that
surrounds most Afghan homes and was met by a scene of carnage: Mr. Zakir lay on
a bed, blood clotted black around his neck, his head all but severed. Gul Meena
lay on a separate bed bleeding profusely. Her brother had vanished.
“I
shivered when I saw it,” said Mr. Azimi, who was one of the villagers called in
to help. He and others borrowed a car and drove her to the hospital in Jalalabad.
For
days as Gul Meena lay in the hospital, government entities in Jalalabad held
meetings and discussed what to do with her.
Her
situation was not helped as people learned more specifics. According to
villagers and tribal elders as well as her relatives in Kunar Province and just
over the border in Chitral State in Pakistan, Gul Meena was married, as was
Qari Zakir. So the couple had broken fundamental moral codes as well as Afghan
law.
According
to Gul Meena’s relatives, her family moved to kill her in part because of
pressure from her husband’s family.
“Her
husband’s family came to them and said, ‘If you don’t do this thing, we will
come after you,’ ” said a close relative of Gul Meena who asked not to be named
because the issue is so delicate. “Her mother agreed to let them kill her in
order to protect her sons.”
The
provincial council, with its overwhelmingly male membership and many people
from traditional backgrounds, seemed paralyzed. “We have some tribal customs
and provisions that are tough for females,” said Mufti Moin Muin Shah, the
chairman of the Nangarhar provincial council, saying he favored following
Shariah law, which would have required a trial. He said that maybe only 1 in 20
of his constituents would agree with him — and that the rest would embrace the
swift, brutal Pashtun tribal law.
Colonel
Sulaimanzai, the provincial police official, was recently assigned here from
Kabul, and he sees the tribal code as the root of the problem in a case where
Afghan civil law should prevail.
“What
is destroying us is this useless, unofficial justice, these tribal jirgas. The
tribal elders, the jirgas, always violate the provisions of the law,” he said.
“Many things in this case need investigation: why did she run away from her
husband’s house? Maybe he was old, maybe he was impotent, maybe he didn’t feed
her,” he added. “They should bring her to the court. We have laws in this
country.”
One
of the few female members of the provincial council that weighed in on Gul
Meena’s fate, Angaza Shinwari, insisted that the woman had also been failed by
the government and other agencies: “We have lots of NGOs operating in this
country and spending a lot of money; how can they not have someone to take care
of her?” she said, referring to nongovernmental organizations. “Our Women’s
Affairs Ministry office has a lot of employees. Why can’t they send someone to
stay with her in the hospital?”
For
their part, officials with the Afghan Ministry of Women’s Affairs said they
were unwilling to move Gul Meena to a shelter, in part because of her
continuing medical needs but also because of security concerns. Her attacker is
still at large, and the police say they believe he had slipped over the nearby
border into Pakistan to avoid arrest.
“What
if something bad had happened to her, who would have been held responsible for
that?” said Anisa Umrani, the provincial head of the women’s ministry office,
referring to the common situation in which vengeful relatives try to drag girls
from shelters and kill them. “We do have problems dealing with moral crimes. We
are scared of dealing with such issues. We are facing threats and danger while
dealing with these cases.”
Ultimately
it was an Afghan-American human rights organization, Women for Afghan Women,
that arranged to move Gul Meena from Jalalabad to a safer, better supplied
hospital in Kabul, and the organization has paid for 24-hour care, underscoring
the crucial importance of the West in supporting women here. She is now
physically far better, able to speak, but not to remember what happened to her.
“Things
are changing, but they are changing slowly,” said Manizha Naderi, who runs the
organization that is now caring for Gul Meena. “We’re trying to change the
culture, and that takes a long time.”
Sangar
Rahimi contributed reporting from Jalalabad, and an employee of The New York
Times from Kunar Province.