February
16, 2012 - ASADABAD, Afghanistan — Shakila, 8 at the time, was drifting off to
sleep when a group of men carrying AK-47s barged in through the door. She
recalls that they complained, as they dragged her off into the darkness, about
how their family had been dishonored and about how they had not been paid.
It turns out that Shakila, who was abducted along with
her cousin as part of a traditional Afghan form of justice known as “baad,” was
the payment.
Although baad (also known as baadi) is illegal under
Afghan and, most religious scholars say, Islamic law, the taking of girls as
payment for misdeeds committed by their elders still appears to be flourishing.
Shakila, because one of her uncles had run away with the wife of a district
strongman, was taken and held for about a year. It was the district leader,
furious at the dishonor that had been done to him, who sent his men to abduct
her.
Shakila’s case is unusual both because she managed to
escape and because she and her family agreed to share their plight with an
outsider. The reaction of the girl’s father to the abduction also illustrates
the difficulty in trying to change such a deeply rooted cultural practice: he
expressed fury that she was abducted because, he said, he had already promised
her in marriage to someone else.
“We did not know what was happening,” said Shakila, now
about 10, who spoke softly as she repeated over and over her memory of being
dragged from her family home. “They put us in a dark room with stone walls; it
was dirty and they kept beating us with sticks and saying, ‘Your uncle ran away
with our wife and dishonored us, and we will beat you in retaliation.’ ”
Despite being denounced by the United Nations as a
“harmful traditional practice,” baad is pervasive in rural southern and eastern
Afghanistan, areas that are heavily Pashtun, according to human rights workers,
women’s advocates and aid experts. Baad involves giving away a young woman,
often a child, into slavery and forced marriage. It is largely hidden because
the girls are given to compensate for “shameful” crimes like murder and
adultery and acts forbidden by custom, like elopement, say elders and women’s
rights advocates.
The strength of the traditional justice system and the
continuing use of baad is a sign both of Afghans’ lack of faith in the
government’s justice system, which they say is corrupt, and their extreme sense
of insecurity. Baad is most common in areas where it is dangerous for people to
seek out government institutions. Instead of turning to the courts, they go to
jirgas, assemblies of tribal elders, that use tribal law, which allows the
exchange of women.
“There are two reasons people refuse the courts — first,
the corrupt administration, which openly demands money for every single case,
and second, instability,” said Hajji Mohammed Nader Khan, an elder from Helmand
Province who often participates in judging cases that involve baad. “Also, in
places where there are Taliban, they won’t allow people to go to courts and
solve their problems.”
Advocates for women fear that progress made recently
against baad will fade as NATO troops pull out and money for public awareness
programs dwindles.
“Baad has decreased in Oruzgan over the last two years
due to a strong public relations campaign that we conducted throughout the
province,” said Marjana Kochai, the only woman on Oruzgan’s provincial council.
“And we have been holding meetings with elders and strictly alerting them not
to make such illegal and un-Islamic rulings.”
A Custom’s Deep Roots
The practice of trading women dates to before Islam,
when nomadic tribes traveled Afghanistan’s mountains and deserts. Even today,
outside Afghanistan’s few urban areas, many of these traditions have deep
roots, experts on tribal justice systems said.
“For the nomads, there were no police, there was no
court of law, no judge to organize the affairs of humans, so they resorted to
the only things they had, which were violence and killing,” said Nasrine Gross,
an Afghan-American sociologist who has studied the status of Afghan women.
“Then when a problem doesn’t get resolved,” Ms. Gross
said, “you offer the only things you have: livestock is more precious than a
girl because the livestock you can sell, so you give two rifles, one camel,
five sheep and then the girls they can sell this way.”
The idea is that the giving of a girl to the aggrieved
family as a de facto slave and having her marry a member of that family ties
the two warring families together, so they are less likely to continue a blood
feud. The practice also helps compensate the family for the labor of a lost
relative.
And when the girl gives birth to children, the offspring
are at least a symbolic replacement for the relative who has been lost.
However, that is little comfort for the girl, who
symbolizes the family’s enemy and is completely unprepared both for the
brutality she will encounter because of it and for the sexual relations often
demanded of her at a young age.
“The problem with baad is it doesn’t normally appease
the people,” Ms Gross said. “It appeases them to the extent that they don’t
kill someone from the other side, but not enough to treat the girl right.”
There is no official count of the number of girls given
each year in baad, but in Kunar Province, where Shakila’s case took place, the
director of the women’s office and a female member of Kunar’s provincial
council said that they were aware of one or two cases every month from the
province and that many cases never came to light. They had not heard of
Shakila’s situation.
A Heavy Toll on Women
A 2010 United Nations report on
harmful traditional practices described baad as “still pervasive” in rural
areas.
Interviews in nine Pashtun-majority provinces with
government representatives, women on provincial councils, male elders and other
prominent women produced a stream of stories of abuse, suicide and rape. They
found that virtually everyone knew about the practice, many were ashamed of it
and most people knew someone personally who had been affected by it.
Afghanistan outlawed baad in 2009 when it enacted the Elimination of Violence
Against Women Act, but enforcement has been spotty, especially in southern and
eastern Afghanistan, according to the United Nations.
Shakila’s family, like many in rural Kunar Province,
did not oppose baad, but objected that the jirga adjudicating her case had not
yet issued its ruling and that Shakila had been betrothed as an infant to a
cousin in Pakistan. Under the Pashtun code, the family said, she was not
available to be given because she was the property of another man. (Such
betrothals are illegal but common in rural Pashtun areas.)
“We did not mind giving girls,” said her father, Gul
Zareen. “But she was not mine to give.”
Views of baad differ sharply between men and women,
with more men seeing it as a way of preserving families and stopping blood
feuds, and women seeing it in terms of the suffering of the young girl asked to
pay for another’s wrongs.
“Giving baad has good and bad aspects,” said Fraidoon
Mohmand, a member of Parliament from Nangarhar Province, who has led a number
of jirgas. “The bad aspect is that you punish an innocent human for someone
else’s wrongdoings, and the good aspect is that you rescue two families, two
clans, from more bloodshed, death and misery.”
He also said he believed that a woman given in baad
suffered only briefly.
“When you give a girl in baad, they are beaten maybe,
maybe she will be in trouble for a year or two, but when she brings one or two
babies into the world, everything will be forgotten and she will live as a
normal member of the family,” he said.
Not so, said the Afghan women interviewed, especially
if she is unlucky enough to give birth to a girl.
“The woman given to a family in baad will always be the
miserable one,” said Nasima Shafiqzada, who is in charge of women’s affairs for
Kunar Province. “She has to work a lot. She will be beaten. She has to listen
to lots of bad language from the other females in the family.”
Shakila’s relatives were poor laborers who lived in the
rural Naray district in Kunar Province near a small river not far from the
border with Pakistan.
Shakila went to school and played with her brothers and
was a healthy child, her relatives said. That changed after she was taken by
Fazal Nabi’s family, part of the Gujar clan, a tribe in Kunar with a larger
presence in Naray than the tribe Shakila was from.
‘They Tortured Us’
During her de facto imprisonment, Shakila and her
cousin were allowed out of their dark room after three months and then only so
that they could haul firewood from the mountains and lug pails of water from
the river.
For the entire year or so that they were kept, neither
girl was given a fresh set of clothes. For the first six months they were not
even allowed to wash the ones they arrived in, turning the children into
dirty-looking urchins who were that much easier for the family to hate. They
were fed bread and water every other day.
“They tortured us in a way that no human being would
treat another,” Shakila said.
She spoke softly and hid her face when a reporter asked
her about the white scars on her forehead. “When they threw me against the
stone wall,” she explained.
Her cousin escaped first, resulting in even more brutal
treatment for Shakila, who was tethered inside again and beaten.
Allowed out only for her prayers, she managed to slip
through the gate one day. To avoid detection, she made her way through underbrush
to the village where her sister lived. When Shakila appeared at her sister’s
door, she was so emaciated and dirty that her sister barely recognized her.
“She was almost finished,” Gul Zareen, her father,
said. “She was so thin, she was like this,” he said, holding up an index finger
and shaking his head. “She cried all the time, and now we are trying to feed
her and she is slowly getting better.”
Within hours, the strongman and his guards began
looking for Shakila. They searched her father’s compound, accused him of
organizing her escape and threatened to kill every man in the family.
Terrified, Shakila’s father and the other relatives
said they waited until dusk and then, taking almost nothing but the clothes on
their backs, escaped over the mountains, walking by night along footpaths
because the strongman’s guards were watching the only road.
Now living in Asadabad, the provincial capital, because
they feel safer here, Shakila’s relatives said they were struggling. They left
behind their few possessions, including their only cow and two goats.
Shakila’s father and uncle work as daily laborers,
earning $4 a day when there is a job. The family’s small mud house has neither
heat nor electricity, and cooking is done in a single stew pot over coals in
the yard.
Longing to return to their village in Naray, the family
members went to the courts to see if the prosecutor or judge could protect them
from the Gujar clan if they returned. But the order they received from the
police chief instructed them to turn to the local police in Naray for help.
Gul Zareen shook his head. The police chief is a
kinsman of Fazal Nabi, the strongman who took Shakila, he said. “We cannot go
back,” he said.
Shakila looked out the window into the squalid yard. “I don’t know about my future,” she said. “Whether it will be good or bad.”