Dear Zari: Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan (2 page)

But the Soviet support wasn’t just military, as the USSR also provided social, economic and educational aid, and since the Soviet-backed Afghan coalition believed in sexual equality, many Afghan women and girls also travelled to the Soviet bloc for educational purposes. Meanwhile factories were built in Afghanistan that women could work in, and those who had lost their husbands in the recent war were given priority when it came to securing jobs. It appeared then that both the law and prevailing social attitudes saw women as equal to men, free to walk by themselves in the street, go to the cinema, enjoy mixed-sex education, appear on television singing and dancing and even wear mini-skirts. But despite the liberal social climate in the cities, many families in rural areas continued to practise more traditional customs that they expected their women and girls to follow. For example, while the Afghan constitution decreed the legal age of marriage to be sixteen for both boys and girls, many families in rural areas were still marrying off their children as young as eleven or twelve.

Of course, my personal experience was predominantly a Kabul-based one – a developed city with more open-minded social attitudes, where
the law was enforced by the police and security forces, a public bus service operated, and men and women worked side by side in schools, hospitals and factories. I even remember going to weddings where men and women danced together to live bands. All around me, Afghanistan’s cities were gradually modernising. Women were no longer forced to wear a headscarf or
burqa
– although some women chose to. Women from different regions of Afghanistan continued to wear traditional clothes: I remember seeing Hazara women in their long, baggy dresses and colourful scarves, Tajik women in their column dresses and loose-fitting white
shalwar
trousers, and Pashtun women with their brightly coloured
shalwar
and loose dresses.

Just as Afghan women were becoming active in politics and working as doctors, lawyers, journalists, pilots, senior army officers and government officials, so too were they appearing in films and being encouraged to perform on national television. Alongside these developments in opportunities for women, the Afghan state media was busy broadcasting western films and music, Bollywood movies and Russian programmes, all of which contributed to the sense of Afghanistan opening up to the outside world. Kabul itself was a great ethnic melting pot of people from all over Afghanistan: Hazaras, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Sikh minorities and Kuchi nomads were all given the same access to education, training and jobs, as the government was committed to ensuring equal opportunities for everyone. I remember my father telling me at the time that Afghanistan was beginning to move closer towards democracy.

Yet in many ways life in Afghanistan was the same as it had always been, particularly in rural areas. People with strong religious beliefs tended to continue to follow traditional practices, marrying off their children young in defiance of the national law and allowing women to be given away as a means of settling family disputes, and also denying them any share of family inheritance. There may have been a stable government in place capable of creating new legislation and dispensing justice, but the future of young Afghan girls was still seen by many as a family affair and not one in which the government should
interfere. The more traditional communities within Afghanistan generally did not embrace the communist values of the Soviet-backed government, and as a result the Mujahedeen’s propaganda enjoyed greater success in the country’s more remote areas. This split between urban and rural values resulted in a number of rural girls’ schools being burnt down, and in some cases their teachers, or women who dared to appear on television, were even murdered. Fortunately, these attacks were rare.

The government of the time was accused by many of adhering only to communist values and neglecting Afghanistan’s own laws. But in practice many Afghans – including my father, who was for four years the Minister of National Radio, and later the Minister for Printing and the State Committee – believed deeply in traditional Afghan cultural values. In those days being seen to be active in party politics was a prerequisite for a successful career in politics; my father was in a high-ranking cadre of the ruling People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Like many of his peers, he believed in Islam and traditional Afghan cultural ideals but was careful not to do anything that could be seen as defiant of the country’s Soviet-backed rule. Yet interestingly, even though the school my sisters and I attended (one of the best and most modern in Kabul) was built by the Russians, staffed by Russian teachers and had Russian language as part of the curriculum, we were also taught the Quran and learnt about Islamic history and studies.

Everyday life for the ordinary Afghan was full of hardship. It was compulsory for every young Afghan man to spend two years in the army during the tumultuous period between 1978 and 1992. These men were conscripted and trained to fight against the Jihadi groups. Many Afghan families lost a son, husband or father in this war against the Mujahedeen; and many young men returned from the fighting severely disabled. While the government made special provisions for war widows by giving them a monthly income, job opportunities and special benefits for their children (sufficient to keep them off the streets), girls and women still suffered through the decades of war in Afghanistan.
Regardless of which political faction was in power, women were always affected badly.

Finally, in 1989 – after ten long years in Afghanistan – the occupying Soviet forces left and President Najeebullah’s government’s grip on power became ever more precarious. He tried to make peace deals with different Mujahedeen factions but without much success; some of its leaders weren’t interested in brokering partnerships – they were too busy building up their armies as warlords of lawless provinces.

The final death knell for the government came with the break-up of the Soviet Union; the USSR could no longer prop itself up, let alone support Afghanistan. The dissolution of the Soviet Union resulted in the end of all financial aid to the Afghan government. Overnight Afghan factories closed, shops were empty, and the Afghan people were starving. Afghanistan became a forgotten zone no longer of strategic or political importance to the superpowers. President Najeebullah’s government collapsed and the Mujahedeen took control.

We were still living in Kabul when the Mujahedeen took control. Everything changed very quickly: my dad lost his job, his government car, and his status. I remember he used to say: I didn’t harm anyone while I was in the government, so no rebel group can have anything against me. But unfortunately it wasn’t that simple; my father was branded a communist, and forbidden any sort of governmental position. Soon after the Mujahedeen entered Kabul, different factions within the party started fighting over power, and war broke out in the now divided capital. Every group was armed and there was no appearance of law and order – anyone could use a gun, after all.

In the heat of war in 1994 my family decided to leave Afghanistan. My parents were scared for our safety and we worried about my father every time he left the house. Like millions of Afghans we fled to Pakistan, the nearest safe country. Life was very different there. My sisters and I went to school and my dad managed to get a job. Days, months, years passed and hopes of going back to our homeland were fading fast when in 1996 the Taliban took over Afghanistan.

The Taliban were strongly dependent on the rules of Sharia law, especially in their beliefs about the treatment of women. They were supported by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and, unofficially, by the United States; the terrorist organisation Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden also supported the Taliban. The new government introduced strict rules – for example, women had to stay at home, girls were not allowed an education – with harsh punishment for those who dared to disobey. These were dark days – Afghanistan was isolated and poor.

When the Taliban came to power we gave up all hope of returning home. For a family with many daughters, Pakistan seemed the best place to be at that time – there my sisters and I had access to education, university, jobs. I went to university and studied journalism and started working as a freelance reporter for the BBC. Yet even then my parents were not totally settled in Pakistan, and they decided that for a better and more secure life it was best move to the West. My uncle and his family lived in the UK already, so we applied for a visa to move to London. In August 2001 my father was granted a permanent visa to come to the UK. After only a few weeks of living in London, the World Trade Center in New York was attacked; the lives of many Afghans were irrevocably changed, and not just those living in Afghanistan – the attacks even changed my life as an Afghan living here in the UK.

After the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001 and the collapse of the Taliban, the BBC’s Afghan section realised it needed more staff. By this time I was working in London and since I had relevant experience, I was offered a short-term contract and began work on the various different news and entertainment programmes. During these early years at the BBC I gained more broadcasting experience and my skills were continually improving by working with senior journalists.

Then in 2004 when the Taliban finally lost power, I started work on a new programme for Afghan women called Afghan Woman’s Hour (developed by the BBC World Service Trust with financial assistance
from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office). The remit of this weekly magazine programme was simple: to inform, entertain and celebrate Afghan women through the power of radio. My knowledge of my homeland was key to my being asked to produce and present this programme, and reminded me what my father had always said, namely that if I could understand and speak both the main languages of Afghanistan – Dari and Pashtu – I’d be able to connect with the people and understand the culture of my homeland. The idea was that I’d work with an editor who had experience producing BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.

Afghan Woman’s Hour was launched in January 2005 with the aim of providing women in Afghanistan with a radio show which would cut across all tribal, social and economic boundaries. The programme reached women in both rural and urban areas of Afghanistan and was broadcast in both Dari and Pashtu, which most women in Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces can understand. We chose each slot of the programme according to what we believed our target listeners wanted to hear and learn about. Before the programme had been set up, Afghan women and girls both in the country itself and in refugee camps in Pakistan had been asked by the BBC World Service Trust what they would expect to hear if they had their own special radio show. Surprisingly enough, the level of interest for such a radio programme was similar to what we have here in the UK for Woman’s Hour.

With the help of senior BBC producers, I learnt how to put together different kinds of material relating to Afghan women’s lives. The programme had a variety of different slots – for example, a discussion section where an important topic like domestic violence or early marriage would be considered – and both experts and ordinary women would be invited to share their knowledge and experience. We also broadcast educational reports on issues like child mortality and contraception, and shone a spotlight on such female high achievers as Habiba Sarabi, who became the first female governor in Afghanistan in 2005. She was invited on to the programme as a guest interviewee, as were a variety of female
poets, writers and musicians. Meanwhile the cultural diversity to be found amongst Afghanistan’s different regions was celebrated through songs and recipes. Some days we tackled such taboo subjects as rape, divorce and virginity, on others we exchanged recipes. Each week we featured women from all over Afghanistan cooking healthy meals good to feed a hungry family. The aim of this slot was to draw on and share the vast repository of recipes from the country’s different ethnic groups and tribes. The programme also covered any newsworthy achievements of Afghan women. The objective was quite simply to cover the wide range of issues that matter to women – our listeners often told us precisely what subjects they wanted the programme to cover.

It was this intervention from our listeners that led to the development of our most popular slot: the life stories. Every woman who told us her life story effectively represented hundreds of others from any number of different ethnic backgrounds. Both Afghan women in Afghanistan and those in refugee camps in Pakistan wanted to hear about other women. They wanted to share their life stories, and they wanted to tell others about the hardships they had endured. Some were ready to share the problems they’d experienced in their marriages; others wanted to seek medical advice from doctors or family planning experts here in the UK. Some were keen to know about their legal rights, and others to share their skills and experiences with us. We organised the programme as a series of different slots; the first consisted of an interview or discussion with experts mainly on taboo topics relating to gender, the rights of women in a family and society, and the practicalities of dealing with domestic violence. The second slot was all about jobs, and this was where women shared with the audience their skills, the story of how they acquired them and their experiences of working in Afghanistan.

It wasn’t possible to do all this with just a producer and an editor in London. I returned to Afghanistan regularly to do interviews and also communicated with reporters there. It was Afghan Woman’s Hour’s aim to train Afghan women to make a radio programme for themselves, and to this end we’d begun to hire and train women from the country’s
different provinces, often those who loved the show and were full of new ideas for developing it. The programme first started with two reporters in Kabul but after a couple of months we managed to find young women in provinces across Afghanistan who could send audio material to us via the internet. Discussions and interviews with guests and experts were mainly conducted by me from London over the phone, or down the line to the Kabul studio.