DEMOCRACY IN THE BALANCE
Female Lawmakers - Living Symbols of Reform in Afghanistan
Female lawmakers work for, and embody, change.
By
Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
November 29, 2006
AMONG the
crowd of 800 turbaned elders who gathered in a vast tent, one person stood out:
a slender woman in a white head scarf.
She took the podium only briefly,
but when she did, most conversation came to a standstill. And though many of the
bearded, tradition-bound elders are uncomfortable talking to a woman in public,
several dozen clustered around her afterward to ask questions.
Her name
is Zahera Sharif, and she is the only woman among the four members of
Afghanistan's parliament from Khowst province. In a conservative area where it
is possible to drive through towns without seeing a single woman on the street,
she is a rarity.
As a member of parliament, she represents an institution
that Western observers and experts in Afghanistan say is the country's best shot
at building a stable democracy after years of war and religious
extremism.
Among the 248 members of parliament's lower house, there are
elders such as those Sharif met here. But there are also former exiles in
Western-style business suits. All of the country's ethnic groups have a place:
Uzbeks sit next to Tajiks; Pashtuns with Hazaras. There are onetime Taliban as
well as their former Northern Alliance enemies. A quarter of the parliament
members are women; not one wears a burka.
Some of those who gather in the
low-slung building on the western edge of Kabul use old militia ties to get
things done. Others take the floor to criticize the warlords. Or, like Sharif,
they forgo the debate and focus instead on meeting the needs of their
constituents.
"For the first time after 30 years of war, we've brought
some major figures, who in the past would only talk to each other with a gun,
under one roof," said Younis Qanooni, the speaker of parliament.
Western
diplomats find some hope in that inclusiveness, as well as in the institution's
willingness to challenge President Hamid Karzai.
The president has
considerable authority, but parliament has insisted on its right to review his
decisions. Deputies rejected five of Karzai's 25 nominations for Cabinet posts
in the spring and seven of his picks for the Supreme Court, including one
accused of selling legal decisions.
"More often than not, the reform
impulse has come from the parliament," a senior Western diplomat
said.
Not that it has been easy. The majority of Afghanistan's lawmakers
still have their roots in the country's warring past. A number served as militia
commanders and made their names and their money behind the barrel of a
gun.
Even among the 68 women in parliament, U.S. and United Nations
officials estimate that half have militia ties, and can be counted on to keep
quiet and vote as they are told.
Some lawmakers still spit during
sessions as though they were on a mountain road. Others doze off. A popular
television news program was banned briefly from broadcasting parliamentary
sessions because it showed lawmakers, heads thrown back, snoring. Many take the
floor seemingly without any idea of what they want to say.
Despite their
lack of experience in representative democracy, deputies have developed a range
of styles to pursue their different political agendas on the floor of parliament
and in visits to their districts.
Malalai Joya, a 27-year-old woman,
publicly challenges the enduring power of warlords in a Western-style media
campaign. For that, she has been pelted with water bottles in the parliament
chamber, and twice her microphone has been shut off.
Haji Almas, 45, is a
member of the old commanders network. He is angry that Karzai's government and
its Western allies refuse to allow former warlords to run the country's
military. But he also has embraced education and points with pride to schools
that have been built.
Sharif, meanwhile, is a realist. Afghanistan will
not change overnight, she believes. So she keeps quiet when commanders arrive at
parliament sessions with their bodyguards in tow.
"They know they have
done nothing for Afghanistan; they don't have answers for Afghanistan," said
Sharif, 46. "But they are still there; they have supporters."
"People in
parliament need to focus on issues one by one: electricity, jobs, education,"
she told the Khowst elders who had gathered in the tent to discuss pressing
nationwide problems. "Everybody should think of the benefit of the
society."
Getting an education
Sharif is no stranger to the
conservative religious attitudes of southern Afghanistan. Her father was an
imam, and he objected to her going to school past age 11. Miserable, she stayed
in the women's quarters of the family home and stopped eating.
Her eldest
brother finally won permission from their father to let her return to school,
and later to take all his siblings to Kabul to finish high school, because
schools there were better. Sharif went on to Kabul University, where she earned
a master's degree in education. She became a member of the elite Academy of
Sciences. At the time, Afghanistan was a Soviet satellite and many women were
attending university and becoming professionals.
At the university, she
met the man who became her husband, Mohammed Sharif Zadran, a Khowst native who
also holds an advanced degree in education. In his own way, he is no less
remarkable.
From the beginning of their courtship, he helped her to
advance. When she was required to submit two copies of her 300-page master's
thesis, he copied the second one by hand because Afghanistan had no copy
machines.
But then the Taliban took over. She and her husband were forced
to quit their jobs. Zadran had to do manual labor to help the family get by.
After two years, they fled to Pakistan, where Sharif started a magazine for
women, organized classes for Afghan refugee girls and trained female teachers
who she hoped would go back to Afghanistan after the Taliban fell.
Within
days of their return to Khowst when the rule of the mullahs was over, Sharif
took off her burka and walked down the main street.
"Everybody was
watching her as if they thought something terrible would happen — they were
leaning out of doors, staring out of windows," recalled Naquibullah, the deputy
director of Khowst's main radio station.
Despite ridicule from other men,
Zadran stood by his wife when she decided to plunge into politics, even though
it meant doing something unheard of for a woman here: going door-to-door in
remote villages and introducing herself to strangers.
"People would say
to me, 'How can you let your wife do that?' " recalled Zadran. He shrugged. "I
said, 'What do you want me to do? Lock her in the house?' "
The answer
for many Afghan men would have been 'yes.'
Sharif and Zadran have four
children; both are devoted to caring for their youngest daughter, Zala, 3, who
has Down syndrome.
And Sharif has tried to address the problems of young
people in her legislative work.
She successfully fought legislation that
would have allowed children as young as 13 to be punished as adults if they were
found guilty of crimes.
She has been less successful fighting the
corruption that permeates public and private life, or getting the central
government to respond to her district's needs.
The agriculture minister
gave Sharif barely 15 minutes of his time and flatly refused her request for
subsidized fertilizer for farmers in her district. He didn't even respond to her
complaints that most of the 40 goats that were designated for needy Khowst women
ended up going to families who had connections to Agriculture Ministry
officials.
More than once Sharif has joined with other reform-minded
legislators to urge Karzai to replace corrupt police chiefs and governors
connected with the opium trade.
"I told Karzai, 'You are just playing
chess, taking the same person and moving him from one job to another,' " she
said. "Then Karzai said, 'Give me men, give me names.' And we gave him names and
he said, 'No, he's a Communist, no, he's this, he's that.' And he took almost
none of them."
Afghan and international observers say Karzai's weak
government relies on such local strongmen.
When she does overcome
barriers to helping her constituents, Sharif finds it difficult to get
credit.
She persuaded a rich Kabul resident to donate uniforms, sneakers,
nets and balls to the Khowst volleyball and soccer teams, and she brought them
when she returned from Kabul for the summer. But when she invited team members
to her home to hand out the equipment, her husband and the coaches did most of
the talking, and her resourcefulness went largely unappreciated by her
constituents.
Where Sharif really shines is in her interaction with
women, her original inspiration for entering politics. Women cast 45% of the
votes in Khowst, and though some voted for men, analysts in Kabul believe that
the vast majority voted for Sharif.
When she entered the high-walled
compound that surrounds the Khowst women's center and the school for girls, she
had hardly stepped out of her car before the women surged around her. There were
young girls in their school uniforms clutching notebooks and pencils, older
women who worked as cleaners, some still carrying their brooms. Teachers,
middle-aged women with worn faces, reached over their students to touch her
shoulder or hand.
As she handed out books and information about Women's
Ministry programs from two huge sacks of supplies she had brought from Kabul, it
was possible to believe Sharif could achieve her dream of "taking all the women
with me" on her way forward.
There is a long way to go. A bare room
serves as the reception area in the women's center. In stark contrast to the
rooms warlords use when they hold court, this one had no rug or cushions, just
flimsy plastic chairs, three scarred desks and a few torn fliers pinned to the
walls.
There were no tea and biscuits, no plates of fruit. But the
women's voices rose and fell as if they were at a feast. They recounted their
latest trials and small victories: the difficulty of getting a job as a midwife,
recent cases of child brides abused by men, the challenge of teaching science to
students when there is not a single Bunsen burner in all of
Khowst.
Sharif listened closely, nodding, occasionally asking a question
or jotting something in a small notebook.
She believes in personal
persuasion to bring about change. She knows that without female teachers, many
families will not send their daughters to school. So she goes to the homes of
women who have a university education and asks why they are not teaching. If
they say their families will not allow it, she meets with their husbands,
uncles, fathers and brothers, until she gets their agreement.
"I do not
accept 'no,' " she said. "Usually, the men have not thought so hard about it,
they have not thought that their wife will be earning money, that the family
will be richer if the wife works. When they understand this and they understand
that she will be with women, most of them accept it."
An influential
man
Sharif's journey to her legislative district could not be more
different than such a trip by Almas, the former commander of the Northern
Alliance's 5th Corps.
Almas conveys his status with every gesture. He is
so well known in Parwan province that when he stops his car to point out the
location of a strategic battle, half a dozen vehicles pull off the road so their
drivers can greet him.
Thickset, he wears a spotless white
shalwar
kameez and, even in the hot Afghan summer, the brown wool hat favored by
Northern Alliance leaders. He moves with a determined stride.
His tone
with subordinates is often peremptory; with supplicants, impatient. With those
who consider themselves equals, he listens, then issues
orders.
Westerners and some Afghan police officials describe him
privately as a bully and a criminal who is active on the periphery of the
lucrative narcotics trade, complicit in kidnappings and enriched by corrupt
business deals. Some election officials attempted to prevent him from running,
but failed, said a senior Western diplomat.
"Almas is one of the former
commanders who has really cemented his power since he came into government," the
official said.
Nasreen Gross, a sociology lecturer at Kabul University,
said the international community must make an effort to win over men such as
Almas. These former commanders influence many Afghans, and without their
support, democracy could well fail, she said.
"They desire so much to be
accepted by the West," Gross said. "Before, they had to do things illegally. No
one helped them when they were fighting the Taliban. When you get involved in
illegal activities, it's a cycle, it's self-perpetuating and
insidious.
"We have to find an opening for those who want to gain
respectability…. They can help us."
A trip home with Almas indicates that
he is still divided between his warlord past and his emerging identity as a
member of parliament, as though he has yet to decide whether the legitimacy of
being in government is worth the payoff. So he veers wildly, dispensing tribal
justice and bullying government officials, even while espousing education and
adherence to the rule of law.
A man of limited education, Almas started
fighting in his early teens. Now he is a fanatic about schooling.
In the
early 1990s, when little education was available for girls, he built two schools
in his district, one for boys and one for girls. His daughters are in high
school, and he says he will allow them to attend university. He has two wives
and is proud that the second is a university graduate.
When he arrived in
his home village of Rabat to eat lunch at the funeral of a village elder, scores
of men gathered around him, a mirror image of Sharif's experience with
women.
A privileged few ate with him in a small room and pressed their
demands. Chief among them was jobs. They wanted the government to start a
long-promised water project. Almas listened as he gnawed on a mutton bone and
scooped up saffron rice with his fingers in the traditional Afghan
style.
A little later an elder cornered him as he walked to the mosque
for Friday prayers and asked for help. There had been trouble the night before,
a knife fight between two boys. Both were wounded.
At the mosque, Almas
spoke after the imam finished. "Don't behave in ways that make people call us
the thieves of Rabat," he admonished the villagers.
Then he lashed out at
imams for failing to preach the importance of education. "The mullahs taught us
to reach for our guns but not for our pens. That is why our country is so
behind," he said as the imam shifted uncomfortably.
After prayers, Almas
held a meeting in a vast open tent in his family's walled rose garden. As young
men served tea and candy, the two wounded boys, their heads bandaged, appeared
with their fathers and grandfathers to apologize to the community for fighting
the night before.
Almas made the fathers sign a pledge that they would go
to jail if their sons started another dispute.
The next morning, Almas
and an entourage of armed bodyguards zoomed in SUVs to the Parwan governor's
office to discuss the delayed water project.
The governor, who wears
Western clothes and comes from another province, explained the delay. He was
trying to determine who needed the water most. He often consulted a thin,
elderly engineer, who nervously flipped through a folder.
As he spoke,
the governor sipped a cup of coffee. He failed to offer any to Almas, an insult
seemingly intended to show that he stood outside Almas' influence.
Almas
looked pointedly at the cup. "We are parched, and you are drinking. Why don't
you offer us some?"
The governor didn't answer. After a few more minutes
Almas, who was less interested in who got the water than in starting the project
and distributing the jobs, slapped his knees and got up. His entourage rose
around him.
"So the project starts tomorrow," he said, less a question
than a command. The governor said nothing, but gave a slight nod, indicating
that Almas would get his way. Satisfied, Almas clapped him on the shoulder as
though they were friends. He and his men moved on.
War of
words
Joya focuses on one theme, the enduring power of men such as
Almas. She uses radio and television exposure to denounce them, and despite
Afghanistan's limited media outlets, hers is a familiar voice in the country's
larger cities.
The youngest member of parliament is already a master of
the well-turned phrase, the eloquent exaggeration, the slight simplification.
Along with parliament colleague Ramazan Bashar Dost, who works out of a simple
tent in the middle of a Kabul park, she is one of Afghanistan's most prominent
populists.
Her message is that despite the changes in Afghanistan,
corruption is still rampant and the warlords are still in power.
"How can
we have democracy when we have these warlords? The majority of seats [in the
parliament] have been taken by these black persons…. First they should be tried
by a court, but unfortunately the courts don't do that in Afghanistan," she said
in one of the many interviews she gives to foreign and domestic
reporters.
Even though she has become a well-known figure in many parts
of Afghanistan, she remains a mystery in many ways. Most people who denounce the
warlords will describe specific instances in which they, their families or
perhaps their entire villages suffered. But Joya lived in Iran during much of
the Taliban's rule.
Asked how she formed her viewpoint, she said only, "I
suffered a lot and I saw people I know suffer. They cried, and I cried with
them."
She has yet to make a concrete proposal for neutralizing the power
of former commanders. So far, that doesn't seem to matter. Many people believe
she is one of the few politicians who speak the truth.
They agree with
her that brutal warlords now serving in high government positions are unlikely
to look out for the best interests of the country.
"Malalai Joya says
what many people know to be true," said Saad Mohseni, the director of Moby
Capital Partners, which runs the popular Tolo TV channel.
Sharif's
husband, Zadran, also says he admires Joya. "Not many people are willing to say
the things she says, and to speak honestly about our situation in Afghanistan,"
he told his wife as they discussed corruption in their home
province.
Joya's candor has provoked such serious threats that she
canceled plans to visit her home province of Farah during parliament's six-week
summer break because she could not get the United Nations to provide sufficient
protection. In Kabul, she moves every few days among several houses where
friends or relatives shelter her.
She stays in the public eye through
high-profile speeches in parliament and regular interviews with journalists. One
evening last summer, she invited 20 reporters to dinner at her home in
Kabul.
"The current government is in the hands of warlords," she told the
journalists. "Peace and security cannot be established. Bribery has reached its
zenith. The current government is involved in bribery, smuggling and
bombings."
There is little difference between the Taliban and its
Northern Alliance enemies, she declared. "The Taliban and Northern Alliance are
connected to each other like a chain. In fact, the Northern Alliance is a good
brother of the Taliban."
Former militia commanders resent her deeply,
some because she reminds the country of their misdeeds and others because they
believe they deserve thanks for fighting the Taliban.
When Joya took to
the parliament floor in May with another of her denunciations, some threw water
bottles at her. Other legislators ran forward to shield her. Someone ordered her
microphone turned off so her comments would not be audible on
television.
Despite the obstacles, legislators all have their own reasons
for staying in parliament. But for many, the frustration level is high and their
commitment is tenuous. "Sometimes I wake up and I think I should just stay home
and not go out and try to change things," said Sharif.
The bigger risk is
that Afghanistan will fall back on the code of violence that has dominated its
history.
Joya said that along with the water bottles came a threat from
Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a warlord notorious for his cruelty who has become a
powerful member of parliament: "She is lucky it was water bottles and not
knives."