Back in February when I first arrived in Juba, I was contacted on skype by an Afghan woman I used to work with -- we will call her Shakila -- who told me she had recently fled Kabul with her husband as she feared for her life in Afghanistan. She was in Germany, she said, and asked my help. I reached out to everyone I knew and several friends, and friends of friends and friends of people I didn’t even know, made efforts to help her, providing names and numbers of lawyers, refugee agencies in Germany, and eventually in Sweden where she fled to next. I did the only thing I knew how to do; I wrote letters and I tried to get a story published, in fact the story below. But I was told by one news agency that it wasn’t “a cracking enough read”. Last week Shakila contacted me to say that she had been granted asylum in Sweden.
Thank you to all who helped. Below is the story that was never printed.
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Shakila (not her real name) was just a girl, living in Kabul with her family, when the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 1996, but her memories of that time when women were not allowed to work, go to school or leave the house without a male escort are not easily forgotten.
“I was home all the time, I couldn’t go out because women weren’t allowed to go out. I do not want that again.”
Sixteen years later, at the age of 26, Shakila exemplifies more than a decade of battles between conservative forces within Afghan society and Afghan women’s advocates and their Western allies. She is educated, liberated, married to a man she loves, and was working as a senior finance manager at an NGO in Kabul. But, with the United States and its allies winding down their support in Afghanistan and the Taliban on the verge of a comeback, Shakila’s refusal to relinquish those hard-won freedoms is now putting her life in danger.
“Right from the start, my father wanted me to marry my cousin – his brother’s son – but I refused. I married a doctor,” Shakila says by skype from Sweden, where she is seeking asylum after a months-long harrowing escape that took her through Iran, Turkey and Germany.
“But my cousin, he threatened me and my husband, and said he will kill us if I don’t marry him.”
Marriage between first cousins is not uncommon in Afghanistan, because in a country beset by decades of inter-communal conflict, marriage is seen as a way to strengthen bonds. Refusals are not taken lightly. Last December, a teenage girl was beheaded in northern Kunduz province, apparently for refusing to marry a first cousin.
Shakila and her husband ignored the threats and then, just over a year ago, Shakila became pregnant. Her father, and her cousin who lives in Logar province, began to press her to give up work, sending text messages warning her to leave her job or be punished. “My parents never liked the fact that I work and provide for myself and the family. But when my parents also began receiving threatening messages (from conservatives), they turned against me.”
Her husband’s family also tried to get her to stay at home. She says she was beaten by her in-laws, conservative Pashtuns who live in Kandahar, the spiritual home of the fundamentalist Taliban. “They would tell me that I was putting their lives in danger because I wouldn’t give up work,” she says.
The abuse was not just over her job. Shakila says her mother-in-law used to beat her to force her to do the housework when she visited Kandahar. “It is a common practice,” she says, when asked if other Afghan woman suffer the same violence from their mother-in-law. According to one recent study, more than 90 percent of Afghan women are beaten on a regular basis, by either their in-laws or their husbands. Most, like Shakila, think it’s a normal practice. “They hurt me a lot,” she says.
At first her husband tried to protect her. “My husband, he fought with his parents when he found out that they hurt me … but later, when we both realized how serious these threats were, even he got scared, and said that we don’t have any other choice but to leave.”
It took them a week to reach Iran, to the west of Afghanistan, where millions of Afghans have fled since the Soviet occupation of the country in 1979. The Iranian government estimates there are about 2.5 million Afghans legally in the country, and another million or so who are there illegally.
Life for Afghan migrants, legal or not, is not easy in Iran. Shakila and her husband stayed seven months, long enough for Shakila to give birth to their son, but they never felt they could relax. Shakila stayed at home while her husband worked as a painter’s assistant. “We thought we could build a life there. But we were afraid, what if they (their families) found us; what if they came and got us? It was too dangerous for us there, so we found a smuggler.”
They paid $25,000 for new passports and visas. The smuggler agreed to take them as far as Turkey and put them on a plane for Germany, where they had friends who would help them. But when it was time to leave, the smuggler insisted it would be safer if Shakila and her husband travelled in separate vehicles. Shakila took her baby boy, climbed into a minivan with another woman and her daughter and waved goodbye to her husband. It was the last time she saw him.
The van crossed from Iran into Turkey, where Shakila waited for her husband to show up. He never did. “The stupid smuggler said he was caught by the police, but I don’t know. If he can, he will try to find us, because he loves me and his little baby a lot … but I hope he is somewhere safe in Iran and not in Kandahar, because I am afraid they will kill him.”
Shakila and her son remained with the smuggler in Turkey for three months before it was considered safe to fly to Germany, to Munich, where she spent some weeks with friends. But they warned her that it was too difficult to get asylum in Germany, and that she would have better luck in Sweden.
“I am afraid they (immigration) will say this is a family problem and send me home. I can’t go home, they will kill me.”
Shakila’s story reflects a growing fear among women in Afghanistan that the rights they have struggled so hard for are now being traded away by their government and Western allies as a way to negotiate peace with the Taliban. In a 2011 survey, the NGO AactionAid found that 86 percent of the 1,000 Afghan women polled were worried that a Taliban-style government could return.
After more than a decade of state and peace building by the international community, Afghanistan still has the world’s highest number of asylum seekers. In 2011, 35,700 Afghans claimed asylum in 44 industrialised nations, an increase of 34 percent on 2010, according to the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency. Sweden saw a 74 percent increase in Afghan asylum seekers in 2011, from 2,400 to 4,100. No hard statistics are available about what percentage of them are women, or specifically unaccompanied women.
The IOM, the UN’s migration arm, uses statistics from the UN’s Population Fund that show women make up 43.6 per cent of Afghan migrants, but that figure hasn’t changed since the 1990s. The UNHCR says it has no data on the sex of Afghan migrants, though it recognises that Afghan women are at risk if they are divorced or widowed.
Last year, the UNHCR flew 15 Afghan women – three widows and 12 female heads of household – and their children from Iran to a resettlement centre in Slovakia. The UNHCR said their situation as widows or divorcees meant they would be at further risk of abuse or exploitation if they were to return to Afghanistan.
While there may be no statistics about the number of women fleeing Afghanistan, there are many stories and anecdotes. Najia Haneefi, whose flight to Canada was the subject of a documentary some years ago, says she has several friends, parliamentarians and activists, who have left Afghanistan in the past three years because their lives were in danger. They now live in “troubled conditions” in India, waiting for their applications to be processed, she says.
Lauryn Oates, project director at Canadian Women for Afghan Women, a Toronto-based NGO, says embassies in Kabul are seeing a “spike” in the number of women applying for asylum compared with five years ago.
She says many Afghan women are preparing for an exit based on a “perception of what is to come. Some try to get invited on scholarships or to training opportunities overseas, and seek out family members who can sponsor them if it comes to that.”
Paradoxically, it is the same women who have pushed women’s rights onto the agenda who are now trying to leave the country, she says. “Educated women have more to lose with a regime change,” -- but these are just the women who are needed in Afghanistan to ensure that women have a voice in future discussions with the Taliban.
Women have indeed made huge strides since the fall of the Taliban: women’s rights to work and education are now enshrined in the constitution, some three million girls are in school, and women have key roles in government; 27 percent of parliamentarians are women.
But many of these gains have been the result of pressure by the West and of aid tied to women’s inclusion, and are still not accepted practice by much of the country. While three million girls are indeed in school, another three million are not, and female parliamentarians report continued harassment and death threats.
Three weeks after her first message, Shakila confessed her sense of desperation. She said she was worried she could not provide the type of "strong documentation" her immigration lawyer said was needed to prove her life really was in danger in Afghanistan. “I am really afraid and scared about what will happen," she wrote. "I can't stay here illegally, it is a big risk."
But a few days later, her son fell very ill and she was forced to come out of hiding and approach immigration so that she could get him to a hospital. In a final message, written hastily on a computer after she had registered her case formally, she said had no idea what would happen next. However, she did not regret taking the risk. “I just couldn’t jeopardise my baby’s future.”
