WUNRN
Starving Afghans Sell Girls of Eight as Brides
Villagers whose crops have failed after a second devastating drought are
giving their young daughters in marriage to raise money for food
Peter
Beaumont, Foreign Affairs Editor
The Observer, January 7, 2007
Azizgul is 10 years old, from the
village of Houscha in western Afghanistan. This year the wheat crop failed again
following a devastating drought. Her family was hungry. So, a little before
Christmas, Azizgul's mother 'sold' her to be married to a 13-year-old
boy.
'I need to sell my daughters because of the drought,' said her
mother Sahatgul, 30. 'We don't have enough food and the bride price will enable
us to buy food. Three months ago my 15-year-old daughter married.
'We
were not so desperate before. Now I have to marry them younger. And all five of
them will have to get married if the drought becomes worse. The bride price is
200,000 afghanis [£2,000]. His father came to our house to arrange it. The boy
pays in instalments. First he paid us 5,000 afghanis, which I used to buy
food.'
Some 2.5 million drought-stricken Afghans across much of the country
have lost their crops and are facing acute food shortages, international aid
group Christian Aid warned in Kabul.Another 6.5 million people are likely to
suffer chronic food insecurity due to the lack of rainfall this year, Christian
Aid said.
IRIN, Oct. 18, 2006
Azizgul is not unique. Hers is
one of a number of interviews and case studies collected by the charity
Christian Aid - all of them young girls sold by their families to cope with the
second ruinous drought to hit Afghanistan within three years.
While the
world has focused on the war against the Taliban, the suffering of the
drought-stricken villagers, almost 2.5 million of them, has largely gone
unnoticed. And where once droughts would afflict Afganistan once every couple of
decades, this drought has come hard on the heels of the last one, from which the
villagers were barely able to recover.
While prohibited by both Afghan
civil and Islamic law, arranged marriages have long been a feature of Afghan
life, particularly in rural areas. What is unusual is the age of some of the
girls. And the reason: to buy food to survive.
'Many families are doing
this because of the drought,' Sahatgul said. 'Our daughters are our only
economic asset. We will have the marriage ceremony at puberty. The groom, Rahim,
has gone to Iran with his brothers to earn the money. He is working on a
building site. He will come back with the rest of the money that he has earned
or borrowed. He calls us every month to make sure that Azizgul is still
his.'
Najibullah, 39, is a farmer. He sold his eight-year-old daughter
Somaya for $3,000 (£1,560). She is engaged to a 22-year-old man from the
village, Mohammed, who has also gone to Iran to earn the money to pay the bride
price.
'He has already paid a deposit of $600, which we used to buy warm
clothes and food,' said Najibullah. For her part, Somaya knows she is getting
married but does not know what that means.
The consequences of the first
drought last year - which saw the wheat crop, on which more than 80 per cent of
Afghans depend, cut by half - have gone beyond child brides. In some areas,
according to the charity's survey, farmers lost between 80 and 100 per cent of
their crops. According to Christian Aid, the children of the affected areas have
been hit in other ways: by malnutrition, increased infant mortality, and by
being sent on three-hour journeys to collect water and firewood to
survive.
Now many of those villagers worst affected are caught in a
double bind. Without their own food to survive, aid supplies have been hampered
by the winter snows, which have cut off many of the villages, while the World
Food Programme's aid pipeline to areas like the Herat pro! vince (where Houscha
lies) has been hampered by attacks on food convoys coming from Quetta in
Pakistan by the Taliban.
'We have advisers in Afghanistan monitoring the
situation,' said a spokesman for Britain's Department for International
Development, 'and we have already given £1m in aid. Our view is that it is not
quite a humanitarian crisis yet, but it is very, very difficult. The biggest
problem facing the aid effort is not security in the country but the fact that
large areas have been cut off by snow and that food aid can only be delivered to
regional centres.'
The grim picture is echoed by the UN and other
international organisations working in Afghanistan. According to the World Food
Programme's most recent food security monitoring bulletin, food consumption in
the worst affected areas has markedly deteriorated as wheat prices, where wheat
is available, have increased by up to 37 per cent. But the picture is most
graphicall! y painted by the suffering of the people on the ground, in
particular the children.
Zarigul is 40 and also from Houscha. 'Our
children are very weak from lack of food and we are worried that they will die.
We feed them boiled water and sugar. We have no vegetables for them, just
potatoes. Last year we had vegetables. We need help - food for ourselves and our
animals.'
Children are already dying. In a graveyard on a hill
overlooking the village of Sya Kamarak in western Afghanistan, villagers
gathered for the funerals of three young children who died on the same day, from
malnutrition caused by the drought in western, northern and southern
Afghanistan. There were no doctors' reports to confirm the cause of death - the
parents were too poor to take them to the clinic, one day's walk
away.
Jan Bibi, 40, said she had been feeding her three-month-old
daughter Nazia with just boiled water and sugar because she had nothing el! se.
'My baby died because of inadequate food. I wanted to breastfeed her, but I was
not producing enough milk.'
Back in Houscha, Abdul Zahir, 58, head of the
men's council, summed up the desperate situation confronting families. 'There is
widespread poverty. We have to sell off our children to survive. We are not
proud of it, but we have to do
it.'
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