[Today, hundreds of Afghan women, mostly poor and uneducated, are serving sentences for crimes such as prostitution or drug smuggling, but rarely for acts of serious violence. Often, experts and legal advocates say, they did not act alone, but at the behest of a man — a father, husband or lover who wielded emotional, sexual or economic power over them.]
By Pamela Constable
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Brishna, 24, who uses only
one name, is serving an 18-year prison sentence for
murder and adultery. She was
found guilty of killing her 5-year-old son
but claimed a man she was
living with had beaten the boy to death
and threatened to kill her
if she told anyone. (Pamela Constable/
The Washington Post)
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KABUL
— The women’s prison
compound here has a busy, near-normal air. Infants wail, children recite lessons
and inmates wearing dresses and headscarves vacuum their dorms in yellow
prefabricated huts. Many are mothers, and children from newborns to 5-year-olds
are allowed to live with them.
One prisoner sits alone on a bench, staring
glumly at the scene. She is serving an 18-year sentence for beating her
5-year-old son to death and committing adultery. Her two older children have
been taken away from her, and her family has shunned her for bringing shame on
them.
Brishna, 24, a house cleaner and laundress who
uses one name, says she is innocent and that the boy was killed by an abusive
male cousin who beat him, forced her to have sex and threatened to kill her if
she told anyone. So, she says, she stayed silent and told the police her son
had fallen from a roof. The cousin fled and was never prosecuted.
Today, hundreds of Afghan women, mostly poor
and uneducated, are serving sentences for crimes such as prostitution or drug
smuggling, but rarely for acts of serious violence. Often, experts and legal
advocates say, they did not act alone, but at the behest of a man — a father,
husband or lover who wielded emotional, sexual or economic power over them.
“How could I kill my own child, whom I gave
my own milk?” Brishna said in a recent interview at the prison, weeping into a
pink headscarf. Her lawyer interpreted for a reporter. When she tried to
explain her situation in court, Brishna said, “nobody believed me. They said I
was a bad mother and a murderer. But that man was cruel to me and the children.
I was afraid of him.”
She stood abruptly, pulling up her flowered
tunic to reveal faint strap and bite marks on her back. “Now you see,” she
said.
In many countries, male intimidation is
accepted as a legitimate mitigating defense argument by women who commit
crimes. But Afghanistan is a deeply traditional, male-dominated Islamic society
where most women are allowed little independence, often married as teenagers to
older men and expected to submit to husbands and in-laws.
Court decisions here reflect cultural norms
as well as the law, and most judges and prosecutors are men. Women who flee
abusive husbands are often sent home or put in jail-like shelters. Those who
may be forced to participate in men’s crimes are often treated as accomplices
with low morals rather than as victims.
But in recent years, several foreign
organizations, particularly the New York-based International Legal Foundation,
have trained scores of Afghan college graduates as defense lawyers and have
provided free legal representation for defendants, like Brishna, who they
believe have been treated unfairly by the judicial system.
Jennifer Smith, the foundation’s executive
director, said that with few women in the Afghan justice system, “male police,
prosecutors and judges do not have the life experiences to properly assess and
judge these cases.”
Brishna’s lawyer is Samira Ishaqzai, 27, a
polite but determined woman on the ILF staff here who has gone to great lengths
to prove that Brishna was wrongly convicted. Brishna claims that she took her
gravely injured son to a hospital for treatment but that the medical staff sent
her away and he died on the way home. When Ishaqzai went to the hospital to
investigate, she said, nobody recalled such a visit and security camera footage
from that week had been erased.
“I think the doctors lied because they were
afraid of being blamed as negligent,” she said this month. Ishaqzai filed two
appeals, but Brishna’s conviction was upheld both times, most recently in March
by the Supreme Court. She has remained in prison since her arrest one year ago.
Brishna’s history is fraught with risky
choices and worse consequences. At 17, she eloped with a married man who later
left to work in Turkey, where, she was told last year, he was jailed for drug
smuggling. Alone with three small children, she moved in with relatives
including the cousin, who prosecutors said became her lover.
The lower court, in a brief handwritten
ruling, found her guilty of committing illicit sex, known as “zina” in Islamic
law, and of being an “accomplice” to the boy’s fatal beating. The Supreme Court
issued a lengthy, thorough ruling that took numerous conflicting statements and
versions into account but concluded that Brishna had willingly “conspired” with
her alleged lover to kill the boy and “paved the way” for him to escape arrest.
“Even now she does not want to reveal the
truth,” the ruling said.
Ishaqzai and ILF officials, though, suggest
that the moral taint of alleged adultery, compounded by horror at the idea of a
mother killing her own child, inclined the courts to discount Brishna’s claims
of innocence. Ishaqzai said that no sympathetic witnesses or testimony were
presented on her behalf and that her mother-in-law told prosecutors she
deserved to be hanged.
The judges who convicted her in both lower
courts were all men, although the high court panel included one woman. There
was also one female prosecutor, Jamila Khairkhwa, who expressed some sympathy
for women facing criminal charges but said she was “shocked” at the unusually
brutal nature of Brishna’s alleged crime and was convinced that she had
“chosen” to have illegal sex and then lied to protect her lover and herself.
“I feel sadder for women defendants than for
men. But if she was innocent, if she or her children were being beaten, why did
she stay silent?” Khairkhwa said in a recent interview. “Why did she not go to
her neighbors, to the police, to anyone? Adultery is a small crime and murder
is a big one, but it was adultery that made her keep silent, and that put her
hand in the murder.”
Ishaqzai was in the room as Khairkhwa spoke.
She had agreed to introduce a reporter to her adversary in the case. The
meeting in a district prosecutor’s office was awkward for a moment, but the two
women soon began chatting cordially and agreed about the extra difficulties
faced by Afghan women who find themselves in serious legal trouble.
They also agreed that both of their own
public roles as professional women in the Afghan legal system are uneasy and
fraught with danger.
Khairkhwa’s office in Kabul is heavily
barricaded against suicide attacks by the Taliban, which often targets
government facilities and threatens women working in official posts. Ishaqzai’s
longtime boss at ILF, Shabir Kamawal, was shot dead in Kabul two weeks ago by
unknown gunmen who followed his car on motorcycles and fled. He bled to death
as his driver sped to the hospital, and the office car is riddled with bullet
holes.
“We are all still scared,” Ishaqzai said
recently when her office reopened after a period of mourning. “People threaten
defense lawyers, and they threaten prosecutors, too. We are trying to create
justice, but many people want revenge. We are educated women, but there are
still very few of us in the system.”
Brishna, she said, is an “illiterate woman
who has been rejected by her family and society. Without us, she would have no
one.”
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