WUNRN
AFGHANISTAN - ILLEGAL BUYING &
SELLING OF WOMEN
The illegal buying and
selling of women persists in
by Abdul
Rahim Mohmand , Jalalabad , 21.3.2012
Women
in Nangarhar being carted over the border to
Hajji Rais Khan, a white
bearded resident of Nangarhar’s Dur Baba district, needed only to remove his
false teeth and hand over 3,000 dollars to conclude the swift purchase of a
young woman for his bride.
Two other local families had
quarrelled over the terms of an already implemented swap of daughters for
brides. One of the fathers then learned that instead of the girls being
returned home by mutual arrangement, his counterpart had simply sold on his
20-year-old daughter to an old man for 4,000 dollars. He vowed in retaliation
to sell the girl in his care to “a man with no teeth”.
“I went there and removed my
plastic teeth and told the man that my wife passed away two months ago and that
this girl was my destiny,” said Khan. “He gave her to me for 150,000 afghanis
(3,000 dollars).”
A disturbing aberration perhaps, were it not for numerous and corroborated accounts of such sales of women like livestock. These are distinct from the entrenched Afghan custom of arranged marriages for fixed dowries, and often result in the victim being sold into a life of drudgery or passed on to further buyers.
Some
areas are notorious for trading women
A widespread practice in
bygone times, the purchase and sale of women is today not uncommon in six of
Nangarhar's districts inhabited by members of the large Shinwari tribe, say
officials and rights advocates.
“Women are sold in different
districts of Shinwari (areas) of Nangarhar and we have taken up cases on
various occasions,” said Sabrina Hamidi, the director of the women’s rights
advocacy department at the Independent Human Rights Commission in the eastern
region.
The practice continued as a
result of “illiteracy, poverty and abhorrent traditions,” said Hamidi.
And after women are sold,
contact is usually severed with their own family, often for the rest of their
lives, which makes the women extremely vulnerable . Once sold, the woman
effectively belongs to her buyer, his to work, abuse or resell as he sees fit.
In late 2011, “an elderly
women came to us from Shinwari, saying that she and her sister were sold by her
own family forty years ago,” Hamidi recalled. “After a long quest she finally
managed to find her family once again, but there is still no trace of her
sister.”
Former member of parliament
and current women's rights activist Malalai Shinwari has tried to expose the
practice at her own peril. In 2003 the then-journalist made a documentary that
resulted in threats against her, but also cast valuable light on how the trade
in women endures.
"If there is one change [today], then it is the way these deals are made. In the past the women were sold in open ways and in markets, but now both sides try to make these deals in secret ways," Shinwari said.
Opportunistic
business in impoverished communities
A resident of the Ghani Khel
district, Qari Gul Mohammad, said such transactions were still common there,
and not so secretive. “When someone visits, everyone knows and can provide them
with the name and address of a girl for sale.”
One hundred and sixty of these can buy a woman, say people in
the Ghani Khel district of Nangarhar. (Photo: Allen)
According to him, the price
depends on the beauty of a girl, and can range from around 80,000 to one
million afghanis, or from 1,600 to 20,000 US dollars.
In some cases it happens due
to poverty, but it can also be because the men are tired of their wives or the
families want to get rid of daughters or widows, said Gholam Habib, another man
in his sixties.
Strict local customs
generally preclude that women are simply sold into prostitution, however. And
they must usually be married off through Nekah (Islamic marriage), which also
means they are not sold directly into slavery, he said. But this is a fine
distinction, so low is the bought woman’s status in the new home, where she
will be given the worst tasks like collecting firewood.
“They are treated almost like slaves, but they are married to a member of the family, which is a difference between them and a slave,” said Habib.
A
hard problem to quantify
It is hard to estimate the
exact scale of this trade, since accounts in rural areas are often distorted by
exaggeration and embellishment.
Yes, illiteracy, ignorance
and poverty are widespread in the Shinwari territories, prompting some people
to sell their daughters, said Malik Khudaidad, a tribal elder of Achin
district. “But now the practice has decreased considerably and we are trying to
put an end to it.”
In Ghani Khel district,
Zubair, the head of the district trial court, confirmed several accounts of
such sales. The official said that in many cases a woman is sold on further,
and can easily end up in bazaars in neighbouring
Government
and advocacy efforts are bearing fruit
But some culprits are brought
to justice, the official said: “Two months ago a man sold his wife in the
Terrah area of
"We have begun a
campaign [against this], we reviewed cases of transgressions, shared them with
the Independent Human Rights Commission and alerted police and law enforcement
authorities to abusers."
But he said that since the
buying and selling of women is done secretly, it will require ordinary citizens
to assist efforts to stamp it out entirely.
The head of Nangarhar’s
Department for Women’s Affairs, Anisah Omrani, confirmed that the problem
continues, but that public awareness campaigns are starting to bear fruit and
that people are now supporting the cause.
“Previously these issues were
more likely to remain unnoticed, but now to a large degree they are revealed,”
she said.
Sabrina Hamidi of the
Independent Human Rights Commission said the practice should be viewed in the
wider context of the abuse of women in the eastern provinces. As well as
involving extreme violence against them, this can mean denial of inheritance,
refusal of accommodation and sustenance, and forced marriages at a very early
age.
“It is imperative and necessary for the government, foreign donor institutions, civil society, the general public, the imams and family members to teach people and family members to respect women and avoid committing violence against women,” she said.
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http://iwpr.net/report-news/women-bought-and-sold-eastern-afghanistan
Women Bought &
Sold in Eastern Afghanistan
By
Wrekhmin Tasal - Afghanistan - 15 August 2012
Human rights
defenders in the Nangarhar province of eastern Afghanistan have raised concerns
about a practice where husbands or other male relatives put women up for sale,
even when they are already married.
Bebi Zawar
comes from the village of Shinwari in the Naziano district, and describes the
shame of being sold on by her second husband.
When her
husband died, leaving her with three children, she was married off to his brother,
as is commonly the custom. But he then sold her on to a man across the border
in Pakistan.
Then aged
40, she was sold for 120,000 rupees – the Pakistani currency commonly used in
this part of Afghanistan. The sum is equivalent to 1,300 US dollars at the
current exchange rate.
“The person
who bought me lived in the Siaw area of Pakistan, which is very far away so
that I didn’t know the way back,” Bebi Zawar, now aged 60, said. “I spent
around 17 years there, but once I grew old I was abandoned. Now I cannot face
my relatives for the shame of having been sold.”
Anissa
Omrani, who heads the Nangarhar provincial department for women’s affairs, says
that in the first three months of the current Afghan year, her office dealt
with five similar cases, out of a total of 40 complaints of violence within the
family.
“A few days
ago, we received a case concerning a young married woman who was out collecting
firewood on a hillside when her brothers arrived and told her they had sold
her. The woman demanded to be allowed to carry the firewood home so she could
breastfeed her child here. Her brothers told her there wasn’t time for that,
and they sold her along with the firewood.”
The head of
the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission’s Nangarhar office, Rafiullah
Bidar says such cases are a catastrophe for the children left behind in their
father’s family.
As in Bebi
Zawar’s case, the “buyer” is often selected because he lives a long way away,
so that it will be virtually impossible for the woman to be found, or to get
back on her own. The prices negotiated typically range between 50,000 to
300,000 rupees, or 530 to 3,200 dollars.
Malik Usman,
an elder in the Shinwari district, denies that such sales ever take place, and
says such allegations are made to blacken the name of particular tribes.
“When young
women’s husbands are killed in war, we marry them to other men, in order to
preserve the family honour,” he said. “We do this by holding a meeting between
the families concerned. They aren’t sold like animals at market.”