Dear Zari: Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan
Read Dear Zari: Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan Online
Authors: Zarghuna Kargar
The Family of Girls
The Boy Next Door
A Daughter’s Sacrifice
The Carpet Weaver
The Wedding Night
A Marriage of Convenience
The Injured Wife
A Mother’s Story
The War Widow
A Family of Kite-Makers
The Boy-Girl
A Love Story
Moving, enlightening, heart-breaking –
Dear Zari
gives voice to the secret lives of women across Afghanistan and allows them to tell their stories in their own words: from the child bride given as payment to end a family feud; to a life spent in a dark, dusty room weaving carpets; to a young girl being brought up as a boy; to life as a widow shunned by society. Intimate, emotional, often painful but at times uplifting, these thirteen stories uncover how the customs of this deeply religious and intensely traditional society can cause real suffering for many women.
Dear Zari
is Zarghuna Kargar, an Afghan woman now living in London, with an incredible story of her own; growing up in war-torn Kabul, she and her family fled to Pakistan shortly before the Taliban took power, and in 2001 Zarghuna moved to the UK to begin a new life. Presenting the BBC World Service programme
Afghan Women’s Hour
, Zarghuna was part of a profoundly influential project that gave support, education and encouragement to millions of women and men across Afghanistan. For several years Afghan Women’s Hour aired discussions, covering difficult – often taboo – subjects, and Zarghuna heard from hundreds of women eager to share their stories. It is these life stories which have inspired her to write this book. She is a brave and compassionate advocate for these women, and gives hope and reassurance to so many by bringing their experiences into the light for the first time.
Zarghuna Kargar was born in Kabul in 1982. When civil war erupted across Afghanistan, she and her family escaped to Pakistan, and it was there that Zarghuna attended a journalism course organised by the BBC. Then in 2001 her family sought asylum in the UK, and she started working for the BBC World Service Pashtu Section. She joined the team on the groundbreaking programme
Afghan Woman’s Hour
as producer and presenter in 2004, until it was discontinued in 2010. Zarghuna now works on current affairs programmes for the BBC Afghan Service. She lives in London.
Naomi Goldsmith worked on
Dear Zari
with Zarghuna. She is an award-winning journalist who has reported and presented for the BBC. She met Zarghuna in Afghanistan, where they both trained local women to make radio programmes.
To my mother and father, who are always kind, and have given me my wonderful brother and sisters
Introduction‘It’s important for women to know their rights in a country like Afghanistan,’ one female listener of Afghan Woman’s Hour wrote to us.
Another told one of our reporters in Mazar-i-Sharif, ‘I heard the interview on Afghan Woman’s Hour about how Afghan women have started working and earning money by using their skills by taking up carpet weaving. I realised that other Afghan women were doing so much while I was just doing the housework. I now weave carpets at home to earn my own money and have gained my husband’s respect because I’m able to contribute to our living costs.’
A listener from the eastern city of Jalalabad said, ‘I always listen to Afghan Woman’s Hour. I love it because it features women from all over the country and makes me feel closer to the people of Afghanistan.’ And a young man got in touch to say, ‘I’m writing on behalf of my grandmother. Every Monday night she tells us to keep quiet when it’s time for her favourite show. She’s asked me to let you know that whenever your programme comes on the radio she has to sit down quietly and listen to it, and that her favourite part is the stories, as the women featured in them sound so lovely. They make her feel as if they are telling her own life story.’
Just as it was for this older woman and for so many others who
regularly tuned in to the BBC’s Afghan Woman’s Hour – both male and female – so too was it for me. I loved the programme’s life stories, and enjoyed them so much that I would sometimes find myself listening to them again and again. By the time I came to be working on the programme I had been away from my country for so long that I’d forgotten just how arduous and cruel life in Afghanistan can be, especially for women and girls. And these women – mothers, wives, grandmothers, sisters and daughters – all have their story to tell.
When I left Afghanistan in 1994 women were still going to work and girls attending school, so while they may have been limited in what they could do in certain respects, they still enjoyed a great deal of personal freedom. At that point the Mujahedeen were in power. The Mujahedeen were a collection of opposition groups that considered themselves to be engaged in a ‘jihad’ – a holy war – against non-Muslim invaders, and were financially supported by the US, Saudi Arabia and a handful of Muslim countries. They had begun forming into rebel groups in the 1970s when Russian troops first invaded Afghanistan and made the country – not for the first time – a pawn in the battle between the two superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States of America.
When the Mujahedeen first took control of Kabul in 1992 they seized power from President Najeebullah’s government. Dr Najeebullah was to be the last president of the communist era in Afghanistan, elected at a time when the Afghan communist party was still responsible for selecting the country’s president. It was in the decade of the communist era that I was born, becoming a child of what was to become known as the ‘revolution generation’.
In the late seventies and early eighties a coalition government backed by the Soviet Union had ruled Afghanistan. There was a treaty dating back to 1978 in place with the USSR that allowed the Afghan government to call on Soviet military force, were it ever needed. On 14 April 1979 the Afghan coalition government called in this favour and asked the USSR
to send troops to help in the fight against Mujahedeen rebels. The Soviet government responded to this request by deploying a huge number of forces and heavy arms to Afghanistan on 16 June that year. And so began the Soviet-backed Afghan government’s war against the Mujahedeen.
According to what I’ve since learnt, the Afghan government at that time was very powerful. Its institutions were strong; its control extended to all the country’s many different provinces and its army was more than capable of taking on the Mujahedeen, even though the guerrilla war that had first been fought in remote villages near the border with Pakistan was gradually spreading to the rest of the country. On the whole, the Mujahedeen forces were backed by ordinary Afghan people, who saw the Russians as non-Muslim invaders, bringing with them non-Muslim values and ideas. The invading Soviet forces, meanwhile, tended to be supported by those Afghans employed by the government in public services and in the factories.