[Since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001, the United States Afghanistan
 |
Gul Momina says she was held
in a dark room with a muddy floor. Sayed Hussain
says he did not kidnap her but
instead responded to a text message from a girl he
did not know who identified
herself as Gul Momina. (Photo illustration/ iStock
photos/Photo illustration/ iStock
photos)
|
When she woke, the teenager
says, she found herself locked in a dark room with a muddy dirt floor. For the
next 3 1/2 months,
by her account, the man beat and raped her while insisting that she was now his
third wife.
Sayed Hussain, who is accused of attacking Gul Momina, tells a
far different story. He never kidnapped her, he says. Rather, he received a
text message in the fall of 2014 from a girl he had never met who identified
herself as Gul Momina and said she loved him. She claimed to be an orphan and
vowed to kill herself in front of his house if he did not marry her, he says.
Now, efforts to determine who is telling the truth have escalated into another
test for a fragile Afghan justice system struggling to balance modern legal
principles with laws shaped by local custom, endemic corruption and various
interpretations of Islamic doctrine.
In a recent interview at the
home of one of her relatives, Gul Momina, now 16, said that after weeks of
captivity in which she was repeatedly whipped with a water pipe and cable wire,
she escaped and returned to her family. Sayed Hussain, his wife and his father
were arrested.
Sayed Hussain, however, said in
an interview at his home that he had legally married Gul Momina. And in
October, judges cited the purported marriage in freeing him, even though Afghan
law states that girls under 16 cannot marry.
Like many Afghans, neither Gul
Momina nor Sayed Hussain has a last name.
Ali Farhang, a lawyer for Gul
Momina’s family who wants the Afghan Supreme Court to intervene, scoffed at the
decision.
“In this case, even a person
who doesn’t understand law could understand the truth,” he said.
Since the fall of the Taliban
government in 2001, the United States Afghanistan
But Afghan lawyers and
advocates of legal reform say the justice system remains stacked against women
and undermined by bribery and the erratic application of laws. The situation is
so bad, they say, that many qualified judges and lawyers are leaving the
profession.
“Everyone in the justice system
has lost morale,” said Abdul Subhan Misbah, the vice president of Afghanistan
Gul Momina’s case provides an
unusually revealing window onto the sorts of issues with which judges here must
wrestle.
Before her alleged abduction,
the teen said, she worked for Sayed Hussain’s wife as an embroiderer. In late
2014, she said, she got a call to pick up fabric.
“They were drinking a soda, and
they offered me a beverage, which was uncapped,” she said.
The next thing she remembers is
being locked in the muddy room. Sayed Hussain’s elderly father, who also lived
at the house, was standing over her.
“When I started crying and
shouting, ‘I want to go home,’ the father hit me with something on the back of
my head,” she said.
Gul Momina said Sayed Hussain
began referring to her as his “third wife.” Another woman in the house, who
told her she also had been abducted, was the supposed second wife. Under Afghan
law, men are allowed up to four wives.
Meanwhile, Gul Momina’s father
was searching for his daughter.
“I went to the 17 police
districts of Kabul
After his daughter escaped, he
said, she came home covered in bruises and unable to stand. But when they went
to a police station, an officer “slapped my daughter in front of my eyes
telling her, ‘Your condition is not that bad,’ ”
he said.
Other police officials
investigated her claims, and Sayed Hussain, his wife and his father, Sayed
Ishaq, were arrested in January 2015 and charged with abduction and assault.
Sayed Hussain also was charged with rape.
But Sayed Hussain, a truck
driver, says he and his family are the victims. He said that after he received
the text message “from an unknown number” asking him to call, he had several
phone conversations and meetings with Gul Momina and that she eventually
proposed to him.
He denied that she ever did embroidery work for the family, saying he thinks
she got his phone number from an ad for his trucking business.
When she proposed, he said, he
insisted that she get permission from her father and brothers, as is customary
in Islamic culture, but he said that Gul Momina told him she had no living
relatives. Sayed Hussain said she claimed to be 19.
“I told her I already have four
wives,” he said, adding that at the time he had only one. “She said, I don’t
care if you have 10. I will be the eleventh.”
Then, Sayed Hussain said, Gul
Momina threatened that if he did not marry her, “she would grab a knife and
kill herself in front of my gate.”
Twelve days after they first
met, he said, they were married by a Shiite cleric. Both Sayed Hussain and his
father denied they ever struck Gul Momina when she was in their home.
Asked why she had fled, Sayed
Hussain said his family may have been too rigid for her. “We are a strict
family,” he said, adding that about 20 people live in the same house. “We don’t
let the women go out. . . . The women inside our house don’t
use cellphones.”
Sayed Hussain spent nine months
in prison. But in court, he produced a copy of a marriage certificate and a
statement from the cleric who he said officiated the wedding.
Gul Momina denies that a
wedding took place, but the judge dropped all charges against Sayed Hussain’s
wife and father. Sayed Hussain was convicted of domestic abuse but was cleared
of rape and kidnapping. After an appellate court upheld the verdict, he was
released from prison in October.
Mohammad Anwar, outraged, is
appealing the ruling to the Supreme Court. “I will fight with every last drop
of blood until I get justice,” he said.
He and his attorney say they
suspect that political pressure was brought to bear on the lower courts.
According to Mohammad Anwar, a prominent member of Afghanistan
Sayed Hussain and Sayed Ishaq said that while they were in prison, their
relatives did try to negotiate with Gul Momina’s family about what it would
take for them to return her to him. But they deny having political connections.
“Now I don’t even want her
back,” Sayed Hussain said.
In a brief interview, one of
the appellate court judges, Matiullah Amarkheli, defended the ruling, noting
the marriage certificate and the testimony of the cleric. He referred further
questions to the chief appellate judge, Shir Mohammad.
Mohammad also declined to comment
but said that “there is a difference between sharia law and Afghan law”
concerning the legal age for a girl to marry.
“There are thousands of cases,”
he said. “Why are you focusing on this one?”
In Afghanistan Afghanistan
In this case, said Misbah, the
lawyers union official, it appears that the lower courts decided to free Sayed
Hussain on the basis of their interpretation of Islamic law — which generally
sets puberty as the threshold age for marriage — instead of what the Afghan
code specifies.
And, noted Misbah, whatever
flaws exist in the justice system in Kabul
Mohammad Sharif contributed to
this report.
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