Fariba Nawa – AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST

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  • U.S. curtails Iraq’s newfound media freedoms

    By Fariba Nawa
    June 27, 2003
    Village Voice

    BAGHDAD—The print press is booming here as newspapers rose from five government-run papers during Saddam Hussein’s regime to around 150 now. But U.S.-led forces are dampening the mood of the free press by censoring it.

    The U.S.-led administration here last week threatened to fine or close down any newspapers that incite violence or endanger the security of coalition troops or any ethnic or religious group. They will also shut down any publications supporting Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

    Coalition forces last week raided a distribution center of Sadda-al-Auma newspaper in Najaf, two hours from the capital. They questioned the staff and seized copies of an edition that ordered Iraqis to join the resistance against Americans.

    The Americans defend their decision and consider it necessary for keeping Iraq safe and free of violence. They say the new papers lack responsibility and professionalism, and that they fabricate information. For example, one paper accused a coalition soldier of raping a woman and wrote that troops can see women naked through their night vision goggles.

    Administrator L. Paul Bremer claimed at a news conference last week that Americans were not trying to hamper free speech.

    “It is intended to stop … people who are trying to incite political violence, and people who are succeeding in inciting political violence here,” he said.

    The Iraqi press has had different reactions to the order. Sadda-al-Auma has continued to publish anti-imperialist and anti-American articles after the raid.

    Other, more moderate papers like Al-Zaman in Baghdad said they’re taking the ban in stride. “Of course this limits the freedom of the press, but Americans have reasons for this. We can’t just print whatever we want and increase the problems here,” said Neda Shawkat, one of the editors of the daily.

    Whether the papers in Baghdad actually obey the order remains to be seen. Since the decree was issued last week, political papers affiliated with the numerous Iraqi factions continue to criticize American actions and occupation, at times demanding a violent resistance. Other editors have toned down their condemnations.

    The Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a media think tank that trains local journalists in crisis zones, published a report this week criticizing the American administration’s attempt to control the media in Iraq.

    “Bitter rivalry between the U.S. State Department and Department of Defense have led to an absence of strategy, bad hiring practices and purchasing, and debilitating internal dispute. TV programming, in particular, has been poor,” the report said. “The stakes are high. . . . But the absence of a reliable Iraqi media exacerbates the frustration, and growing anger, felt because of the lack of an Iraqi authority and basic security and services. Powerless and uncertain, Iraqis need a voice.”

    Iraqis rarely watch the state-sponsored Iraqi Media Network television. Now that satellite dishes are allowed, they watch al-Jazeera and other programs.

    On the wide, sweltering streets of Baghdad, people are reading more than they have in decades. A colorful array of weeklies and dailies are lined up on store steps in the morning, held down by stones against the mild breeze. Only a few papers and magazines are left there by the evening hours.

    Hassan Kadhem has owned the Sadun library and bookstore since 1976. He said his readers have quadrupled since the regime fell. “Of course they read more. The want to know how their lives will improve, when the electricity is coming back on, what services are available to them,” he said, pensively fingering his prayer beads. “The events of the day matter now. But we don’t really have freedom of the press. We can go as far as the Americans allow us.”

    The majority of the papers churn out political and religious rhetoric from groups vying for power in the future Iraqi government. Al-Adala, Al-Fater, and Ida Rafideen all belong to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, one of the Shiite groups lobbying for an Islamic government.

    Iraqis, who have had only government-produced newspapers for the last 35 years, are trained skeptics against propaganda and lies. They seem to read with a critical eye, sifting the information they want or a clarification of their own opinion.

    “There are characters and newspapers popping up that you avoid reading, but it’s their right to say what they want,” said Tamer Musa Mohammed Ali, a 43-year-old hardware store owner. “I know which ones to disregard and which ones to believe. It’s not as if Americans are telling the truth.”

    The most-read newspapers seem to be state-sponsored Al-Sabah and the independent daily Al-Zaman, which caters to all Arab countries. The latter is a snazzy 20-pager divided by sections of news and sports and produced by Saad al-Bazzaz, an Iraqi exile and businessman who founded the paper in London in 1997 and recently returned to Baghdad. The paper is increasing its Iraq distribution from 60,000 to 120,000, and al-Bazzaz is planning to start a radio and television program.

    The Al-Zaman office is sparse but comfortable with an air-conditioned meeting room, four computers equipped with graphics software and an Arabic-typing program. Most of the pages are produced in London and Baghdad reporters fill local content. They go out and report, handwrite their articles, then turn them over to typists to enter into the computer for editing. Ali Jaber al-Baidani, one of the Al-Zaman editors, worked for one of the official papers during the old regime. He said the new press freedoms aren’t producing the best journalism.

    “It really is a good opportunity for us, but the quality of the papers coming out is terrible. It has become about quantity, and where will this take us?” he said.

    The coalition’s effort to regulate the Iraqi media has largely focused on “de-Baathification,” ousting any members or participants of the old regime. The Ministry of Information has been bombed and dissolved as 1,300 employees, including journalists, wait jobless. The coalition paid them $20 in the last three months. The former employees have organized against the coalition and have held demonstrations and talks to negotiate their jobs back.

    Batool Ahmed Shekarchi was a designer for television programs. She comes weekly to the building across the street from the bombed ministry with other employees waiting for her salary and news about her job.

    “I was so disappointed because I thought this would be a new beginning’ but I realized this is the end,” she said, smiling. “We’re innocent. Saddam Hussein’s regime insulted us.”

    The Iraqi Media Network, which is a temporary replacement for the ministry, employs about 320 people, but few are from the old guard. Ahmed al-Rikabi, head of the network, said the old employees aren’t trusted because many were government informants.

    “A number of those people were employed because they were the cousin of someone in Tikrit [Saddam’s birthplace] or Baathies,” al-Rikabi said. “We have clear political decision regarding the de-Baathification of this country.”

  • Rumors of abduction frighten Baghdad parents

    By Fariba Nawa
    June 11 – 17, 2003
    Village Voice

    BAGHDAD—Israa Sabah is supposed to be in her seventh-grade classroom finishing her annual exams. Instead, she’s sitting home drawing women’s fashion in her notebook and watching television.

    The active 13-year-old is too scared to go to school. Like many Iraqi girls her age, she fears that armed gangs will snatch her on the way to school, or even while she’s in class.

    “I miss my friends and teachers, but after the war, it’s not safe to go outside,” she said. “My parents prefer I stay home.”

    The deteriorating security in Baghdad is heightening a sense of fear and paranoia among parents who worry that their daughters will be kidnapped. The city’s buzzing with rumors of kidnappings, and parents are taking extra precautions to protect their daughters. The little freedom schoolgirls had has been taken away from them.

    Police and aid workers say there are no verified cases of girls being kidnapped, but the fear has spread rapidly.

    Geoff Keele, a spokesman from the United Nations Children’s Fund says, the UN looked into the case of a 16-year-old missing girl, but the evidence pointed to a runaway case.

    “With the fall of Baghdad, there were reports about children, particularly girls, being kidnapped, and although we don’t have any proof of these abductions having taken place, it’s a rumor that has managed to make its way through the community right across the country,” he said. “We have people who are petrified of sending their children to school.”

    Iraqis say they heard from other people that girls are being kidnapped. They say the police have lost their authority, so families have to protect themselves.

    Israa lives in a middle-class neighborhood building complex and plays in the courtyard with her neighbors. She could be a New York teenager in her cropped jeans and colorful shirt, her brunette locks tied back with shiny barrettes. Israa talks with a big smile and articulates with the confidence of a college student. She seems happy, but the sadness is clear in her eyes.

    “I feel like I’m in prison sometimes,” she said.

    She cannot go swimming or to her friends’ homes like she did during Saddam Hussein’s regime.

    Many girls have gone back to school, but they don’t walk or take the bus anymore. Their parents take time off work to drive them. Schools in richer neighborhoods have hired guards.

    At the premier Risala secondary school, only 70 percent of the 500 girls are attending classes a week before their yearly exams. They come despite their fears.

    Wasan Adil, a junior at Risala, is furious at the increasing crime in Baghdad.

    “When I’m in the car, I’m very afraid. When I’m walking with my friends, any car that passes by, we’re scared of,” she said, her voice rising with anger. “At any time, I’m waiting for someone to open the door and kidnap me. Do schoolgirls in America know what that feels like?”

    The U.S.-led forces responsible for improving security are not getting involved in this issue.

    Iraqis say the fear of girls being abducted is greater than boys because if they are raped, their family honor is at stake.

    Educators complain that these fears are hindering girls’ schooling. One out of three girls attended school before the Americans occupied Iraq but now even that number has dwindled.

    “We’re hopeful for change, but right now, safety has become more important than education. Our classes are half empty,” said Masriya Shaban Mehdi, the principal of one primary school.

    It’s noon when school ends, and Faris Mamoo sits in his car in front of the Special Honors Secondary School, waiting for his 13-year-old daughter to come out. Before the U.S. came, he let his daughter take the bus. Now he picks her up daily.

  • My veil, my decision

    By Fariba Nawa
    May 2003
    Unpublished

    Since the all-enveloping burqa began appearing on television during the war in Afghanistan, Americans became curious, even obsessed, with understanding why Muslim women cover their hair and body.

    Worn in dozens of styles, the veil or hijab in Arabic has had different meanings at various times in its history, ranging from a symbol of oppression to a tool for power. As Americans grasp the complexities and symbolism of the veil, they need to look no further than the US where among the millions of Muslim women, thousands wear the headscarf. Their motivations are just as varied as the women in Muslim countries but the primary difference is that Muslim Americans choose to cover despite the glares and racist comments hurled at them.

    They commit to the veil after a spiritual voyage through Islam. They say their headscarf epitomizes their dedication to an introspective life devoted to God. But each woman has an individual way of interpreting Islam and hijab — exemplifying the diversity of thought among practicing Muslims. Here are stories of three women.

    THE ORTHODOX

    Nargis Nusraty with her hair neatly wrapped in a green headscarf sat fidgeting and eyeing a roomful of New York University graduate students to see who was looking at her bare neck – a part of her body that she had been hiding for nearly two years. It was shortly after September 11 and the Middle Eastern Studies department where Nusraty studies Islamic law had called a meeting to discuss the impact of the terrorist attacks on the students. The outgoing 24-year-old with an infectious laugh was the first student to speak up.

    Nusraty said she had gone to play tennis in Long Island in her usual gear of headscarf and sweats. A little girl began screaming as soon as she saw Nusraty walk on the court. Nusraty thought the girl had hurt herself so she approached her mother. “Her mother told me she’s crying because she’s scared of me,” Nusraty said breaking into tears herself.

    Nusraty began veiling two years ago after years of studying Islam, praying, and conviction. She forsook the tank tops and short skirts that defined her style, the outings in New York’s hot spots and her management job at Hugo Boss because it wasn’t kosher to take men’s measurements anymore — a lifestyle change her parents didn’t think she could uphold. Her father thought it was a phase when she first pinned on the scarves he had brought her from Dubai. Her mother, who took pride in her daughter’s hip style and sleek brunette hair, still doesn’t agree with her daughter’s transformation.

    Nusraty was a year old when her family of four fled the Soviet invasion in Kabul and made New York their second home. Her parents come from the urban elite in Afghanistan and are more relaxed about being Muslims. Her mother doesn’t veil.

    When Nusraty was a teen-ager, she fought for Western freedoms taboo in traditional Afghan culture – being able to wear revealing clothes, swim at the beach, stay out late with friends – but she didn’t want them anymore.

    Nusraty was looking for structure and a spiritual outlet. “I explored existentialism but it wasn’t for me. So I embraced Islam. It’s democratic, liberal and spiritually uplifting.”

    She found more important freedoms in religion. In Afghan culture, parents generally arrange their children’s marriages but Nusraty chose her fiancée Waseem, who she got to know during Friday prayers.

    Her lifestyle change was a process. She began going to prayers at the university Islamic center at 19. Then she changed her major from pre-med to study religions and finally during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, donned the veil.

    The veil defined a way of life, the cloth identified her as a Muslim in public and became an integral part of who she is. And she loved it — the salaam-o-alaikum greetings other Muslims bestowed upon her on the street, the respect of her Muslim peers and her freedom from a material-focused life.

    The suicide hijackings by Muslim men suddenly hijacked her freedom of expression and identity. And the war with Iraq has made the unpleasant stares worse. Her mother pleads with Nusraty to show her hair for safety reasons. Nusraty couldn’t imagine it. She would feel naked without it but to allay her mother’s fears, she left her neck bare for a few days after September 11 straying from the traditional Arab headdress that also drapes around the neck and chest.

    At the graduate meeting, Nusraty put her face in her hands as she wept. “I have to wear my hijab this way now,” she told the silent audience, pointing to her bare neck. Fears of backlash had compromised her cherished modesty.

    Two years after that meeting, Nusraty with her full veil on has her smile back. She could be the fashion diva of veiled women with her designer long skirts, high-heeled, skin-colored boots and color-coordinated headcovers. Appearance is still important, Nusraty said, repeatedly tucking imaginary hair strands under her veil.

    Her view of religion is educated and quasi-scientific. She’s orthodox on certain issues like veiling, and radical on other norms. Her family is from the minority sect of Shi’a Islam but Nusraty doesn’t adhere to sectarian divisions. She consults the scriptures and books on Islamic law for answers on how to live, such as when is it proper to wear nail polish and perfume. She read a passage about a woman being scolded for wearing musk on her way to mosque so Nusraty only uses her collection of designer perfumes at home. “It all makes so much sense, doesn’t it?” she asked rhetorically in the tone of an evangelical preacher determined to convert the ignorant.

    THE MYSTIC

    A poster of Malcolm X, Koranic verses and an embroidered Pakistani tapestry covered the white walls of the downtown Manhattan bedroom just a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. The wall in Hana Siddiqi’s bedroom symbolized her multi-faceted identity. Siddiqi, 22, grew up in a traditional Muslim household in San Jose, Calif. But she explored beyond conventional Islam, fusing her artistic and political inspirations to become a Muslim activist – one that other Muslims might shun.

    Siddiqi lives alone across the country from her parents, interacts with male friends and stays out late socializing – activities that traditionalists deem inappropriate for a Muslim woman. She covers her hair but not in the Arab style. She binds multi-colored rectangular cloths around her waist-long dark hair, twisting her locks back, framing her face and leaving her neck bare. In the same spirit, she prays five times a day and fasts on required holy days.

    “Nobody’s a perfect Muslim,” Siddiqi said. “There are so many debates, so many ways and interpretations of being a Muslim. There are fundamentals and those are what I try to stick to.”

    Religion to her is about tolerance, peace and spirituality. She committed to the veil gradually, wearing it at Muslim events and Friday prayers at first and then in the year 2000, decided to keep it on. But her lifestyle wasn’t altered much. “It was just an extension of my faith and the more I got into Sufism, the more I wanted to disappear physically.”

    Her liberal style has raised eyebrows among conservatives. Her cynical comeback: “It’s practical. I do marshal arts. I can’t be flapping around with all that fabric.”

    Siddiqi’s goal is to teach those ignorant about the true tenets of the religion both to Westerners and to extremist Muslims who she feels have lost touch with the meaning of Islam. She is a writer, a poet and a graduate student in the same department as Nusraty. And her most recent project is heading a New York branch of an organization she founded in her hometown San Jose.

    Muslims Engaged in Creating Consciousness in America or MECCA, aptly named after the holy Muslim city in Saudi Arabia, is made up of Muslim artists who plan events where people can have fun in an environment free of alcohol.

    On a Sunday during the holy Muslim month of Muharram, Siddiqi gathered the New York group at Galaxy Café in the heart of the Arab neighborhood on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Notebook and a pen with an engraving of Eid Mubarak in hand, Siddiqi held court in front of three men and two women.

    Siddiqi had no visible makeup on her face and wore a black, yellow and red headscarf, nose stud, plaid slacks, sneakers and a black sweatshirt with red lettering “Peace be with you” written in five different languages. She was fasting in honor of Muharram, the month when Prophet Mohammed’s grandsons were slain. She laid out the plans for their latest gig – a poetry slam complete with a deejay and food in Manhattan. She was soft-spoken, listening to what her committee members had to say.

    Siddiqi’s strong beliefs and confidence emerged after a fraught adolescence. When Siddiqi was a teen-ager, her parents wouldn’t let her join after-school activities. She couldn’t stay out after dark, attend school dances or go to slumber parties. “It was a big deal that I could do stuff – like go out.”

    Siddiqi was born in London to Pakistani parents. Her family moved to the Bay Area when she was five years old. Her father, who is her mentor, is an Islamic scholar and her mother is a homemaker. She is the youngest of three siblings and the only daughter. The pressures of maintaining the family name and honor weighed heavily in Siddiqi’s life. She rebelled in small ways against her overprotective parents. Siddiqi pierced her nose ignoring her mother’s warnings that only married Pakistani girls can decorate their nose. “When my mother argued with me, I said it’s a tribal tradition that women should wait until they’re married. And we’re Muslims so why do we have to follow that.”

    Siddiqi stopped using the cell phone her parents had given her and bought her own so that her father couldn’t keep tabs on her calls. When her father found out, Siddiqi, then 19, told him she needed more space.

    Now on her own, she appreciates the freedoms – no curfew, no guardians to watch over her and no Pakistani community to criticize her alternative lifestyle.

    Siddiqi is focusing on MECCA and writing her thesis, which she plans to turn into a book. Its title — Muslim Culture, Identity, Politics and Hip Hop in America — is a testament of her multicultural identity and her continuing probe to redefine Islam.

    “I have an ongoing debate with others and myself about how I need to become a better a Muslim but it’s what’s in your heart that matters. Ultimately, God is the judge.”

    THE UTILITARIAN

    Hanaa Arafat took off the veil after seven years of wearing it.

    Then she felt awkward and uncomfortable, conscious of her bare head that had been concealed since she was 16. Muslims didn’t greet her in public anymore. She lost a part of her identity.

    “I was sad. It made me feel like people don’t know who I am,” Arafat said.

    She’s Egyptian, American and above all, a Muslim.

    Arafat unveiled two weeks after September 11 when her 19-year-old sister, who does not veil, was physically attacked on a subway train for having dark hair and dark skin. Arafat’s veil, chestnut brown eyes, full lips and olive skin, made her more vulnerable to be the next victim of rage. God would understand the circumstances, she thought. Taking her border-embroidered scarf was the practical thing to do but it still felt awful. The veil is meant to be a lifetime commitment to God akin to marriage to a husband A week later, she put it back on with a sigh of relief.

    But Arafat doesn’t feel any safer now. “My last name is Arafat, who could look more Egyptian than me and I cover my head. I wouldn’t be surprised if the FBI is after me,” she joked over coffee recently. It doesn’t help that the two masterminds of the September 11 hijackings were Egyptians. Since the war with Iraq, she is finding humorous ways and words to respond to the stares and slurs. She told an old woman, who told her to go back to her country, to buy a better wig.

    It was “too weird” not to wear the veil for that week two years ago. The veil gives her a tangible recognition of being a Muslim and it conveys her modesty.

    “If a man asks (a veiled woman) out, he’ll say I’m interested in you. He won’t say let’s go out for coffee. The hijab sets boundaries.”

    Arafat, also a graduate student at NYU, doesn’t study Islam with a fine-tooth comb or a mystic zeal. She takes a more practical, matter-of-fact approach. Islam is the answer to the universal question of existence for her. “Religion gives life meaning. A lot of people don’t think they have a purpose but this is it. That’s why it’s useful.”

    By the same virtue, it’s flexible, she said. She’s not afraid to voice questions. Why does Islam give rights to communities over individuals? Why are women’s responsibilities more stressed than men’s?

    Arafat cloaks her explanations in academic language. Most of her time is spent reading books and attending activities on the Middle East conflict. She knows her Koranic verses, the rules of orthodoxy, the Egyptian cultural interpretation of Islam but she doesn’t necessarily live by any of them.

    And it irks her that because she veils, Muslims expect her to be “holier than thou.” The veil does not characterize her entire identity and she struggles with the perception that it should. It’s the problem with a monolithic understanding of culture and identity, she said.

    Arafat often wears tight-fitted clothes complementing her white headscarves, which she wears covering her neck and hair. But sometimes a patch of black hair escapes above her forehead. She pulls the fabric over the patch if it’s noticed. When her friends go to bars, she occasionally joins them but doesn’t drink alcohol. Often other Muslims in the bar admonish her for being there.

    “Do you know how many of them come up to me and say ‘you’re not supposed to drink.’ I say thank you and keep enjoying my Sprite with grenadine.”

    Yet since she veiled, she makes more of an effort to pray on time and wants to memorize the Koran. Arafat said she should stop wearing tight clothes but it’s a struggle for her to achieve that level of modesty.

    Arafat was born to middle-class, pious parents near St. Paul, Minn. Most of her friends in her rural hometown were non-Muslims but at home, she woke to her father’s morning recitations of the Koran. She didn’t embrace or rediscover Islam because praying, fasting and charity were rituals of her upbringing. Her family went on vacations to Egypt in the summers. But she evolved and grasped a deeper sense of the religion with age.

    Arafat tussled more with her national identity, feeling pressured to choose between Egyptian and American. So she chose religion over ethnic culture. She chose Islam.

    “I can identify with people on a broader scale. Religion is more universal.”

  • Bombed and Betrayed

    By Fariba Nawa
    March 16, 2003
    Newsday

    I had a friend I had known for 10 years, an Afghan-American with an MBA from the University of North Carolina who left the United States to work for the peace and stability of his homeland, ravaged by 23 years of war. Farhad Ahad was a role model for my generation of exiled Afghans holding on tight to our roots. Now he’s dead.

    His was not treated as a hero’s death. Heroes are remembered and hailed. Their deeds become the material of legends. Ahad’s death was forgotten, as was his cause – rebuilding Afghanistan.

    Last summer this businessman who had spent most of his adult life in the United States returned to Kabul to become the foreign ministry’s acting economics director in the U.S.-backed government, 17 years after his escape from conscription into the Soviet-backed army. On Feb. 24, he and three other Afghan-Americans, including the country’s minister of mines and industries, were killed in a mysterious plane crash off the coast of Karachi, Pakistan. The team was on a chartered Cessna en route to a mining operation where they were to observe the methods in order to emulate them in Afghanistan. They were also key advisers in the country’s $3.2-billion gas pipeline deal with Pakistan and Turkmenistan.

    The Pakistani government says it is investigating the crash. But few in the United States have heard about it, even though four U.S. citizens were killed. Their forgotten deaths are a reminder to Afghan-Americans that once again, our homeland is being abandoned. The U.S. media and government used us when they needed us during the war against the Taliban, and now we’re passé – Iraq is the focus – and so is our cause. There’s a collective feeling of betrayal.

    We had welcomed the United States to wipe out the Taliban, and had told the American public so through the media. We were the familiar link to what the West saw as a strange, unlucky people. But we did it under one understood condition: You can bomb us now, but you’ll help put the country back together once you’re done. America and the world have stood us up. The Bush administration even “forgot” to include $300 million for reconstruction aid in its 2004 budget proposal until congressional leaders made it an issue.

    The war against the Taliban made Afghanistan a local story for the United States, but only for a short time. Isn’t a plane crash with four Americans killed also a local story? This is what my friends in the Afghan-American community are asking. We live and work in the United States, we are American citizens, but our hearts and history are in Afghanistan. We’re feeling now that we are more needed there than here.

    The last time I saw Ahad was at a demonstration in the San Francisco Bay area, where the largest Afghan exile community resides. He was the founder of AfghanSolidarity.com, a Web site dedicated to peace and Afghan unity. Through the site, he had organized a protest against the Taliban. In front of the federal building in San Francisco, he and a handful of others shouted for help, not for imperialism. We wanted the Taliban out. They had hijacked our culture and religion. We wanted a democratic Afghanistan in peace. But our shouts were falling on deaf ears. This was a month before Sept. 11, 2001.

    After the United States had decided to respond militarily to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, there was a sense of hope. Anyone in the community who spoke against U.S. intervention was shushed. Afghan exiles and locals both seemed to believe a new era was upon us, one in which peace and stability would finally prevail. It was wishful thinking.

    Our homeland is better off than it was during the Taliban time, but it’s far from where it should be. Warlords backed by the United States still rule most of the country. President Hamid Karzai’s weak central government struggles to survive. A Taliban and al-Qaida insurgency is gaining strength, as terrorist bombs continue to kill civilians. Many Afghan-Americans have returned to Afghanistan to work for a year or permanently. I was there last summer and plan to go back as soon as I can. We find plenty to do, but not enough money to do it well.

    Ahad had arrived in Kabul shortly after the assassination of Haji Qadir, the minister of public works, who was unpopular with some factions. Ahad reflected on Qadir’s death in a Newsweek article. He was quoted as saying, “I realize I’m a target as well. But if I’m destined to die in Afghanistan, then let it be.”

    I shuddered when I read this. He was such a patriot. He had left Afghanistan as a teenager. I wondered if those of us who grew up in America have any place in today’s Afghanistan. We’re stuck in a time warp, attached to the country through the nostalgia of our parents’ memories. But there’s little time for introspection. If it’s not our duty to aid Afghans, then whose is it?

    We often discuss what the rest of the world can do. How can Afghanistan remain independent and take money from imperial powers? What will be the underlying and more devastating cost of reconstruction funded by foreigners? Will we become pawns of the Great Game of the past century when Afghanistan’s neighbors used it as a buffer zone to contain each other?

    We come up with no clear-cut answers to these complex questions of development. But one thing is clear. The United States and its allies, especially after bombing the country, have a responsibility to maintain peace, and reconstruction is part of the answer to peace.

    Only when this happens will I believe that my friend did not die in vain.

  • Herat Is Where the Heart Lives

    This summer, I went home.
    By Fariba Nawa
    November/December 2002
    Saudi Aramco World

    After 22 years of exile in the United States, my father and I returned to Afghanistan to renew family connections and explore the 5000-year-old culture and its people. I was eight when my parents took me, my brother and my sister west from our home in Herat to flee the 1979 Soviet invasion, thus joining the six million Afghan refugees who spread across the world.

    I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, where some 60,000 Afghans now make up the largest Afghan community in the United States. Immersed in this enclave, I often wished to see what had become of my childhood home. The first time I returned was in October 2000, but I only stayed for seven days. Under the Taliban, Kabul and Herat were silent cities, with no music and no laughter, only whispers of discontent.

    This summer I returned for three months, and it was sounds that I noticed first. Indian pop music was blasting from the shops. The click of women’s heels echoed on the sidewalks. Girls giggled and teased on their way to school. Most important, people talked freely and passionately. While Afghanistan remains a much-troubled nation, I found that a cultural revival was sweeping it from Kabul in the east to Herat in the west, moving at an amazing pace because people have been so starved for self-expression. Afghans also are afraid that the peace may not last, and they have to seize this moment.

    To take the cultural pulse of the country, I did a rather American thing: I took a road trip from the capital, Kabul, 1050 kilometers (650 mi) west to Herat, to see the revival through the eyes of the people I had been missing for two decades.

    It was early June when I arrived in Kabul. The city of two million was growing daily with the flow of returning refugees (and more than a few fellow journalists). Everyone was tuned in, either through palm-sized radios or shoebox-sized television sets, to the proceedings of the loya jirga, the meeting of 1500 representatives from across the country that was forming Afghanistan’s transitional government, the political embodiment of the country’s new beginning.

    Everywhere, it seemed, people were working on or talking about reconstruction. They were rebuilding war-ruined homes, schools, libraries and museums—including the world-famous National Museum, from which most of the artifacts have been stolen over the last 20 years. There were also new institutions: One of the most dynamic is Aina, the Afghan Media and Culture Center, founded in June by Iranian photographers Reza and Manoocher Degati, and funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and several other international aid groups. It is the home of at least 30 media-oriented projects, including cinema production, newspapers and magazines. These are run out of 20 offices, and there are a printing press, radio and video production units and photographic and language-training laboratories. Already more than 100 writers and others have found a voice in these new publications, which are virtually free of censorship. Aina has become a central point for innovative ideas and expression.

    It came as little surprise that young people, who make up 40 percent of the population, seemed the most impassioned, and this was especially true among the repatriating refugees. My talks with young Kabulis were full of hope, and these days everyone, it seemed, was a reconstruction activist.

    On one sizzling morning, I visited the Afghan Assistance Coordination Authority (AACA), the clearinghouse for reconstruction money. I was supposed to meet a friend, a returning exile like myself, but instead I met Akbar Quraishi.

    A soft-spoken 28-year-old, Quraishi came back from Pakistan in January, three weeks after the interim government had been installed. He had been studying computer science. Now, he works in the technology department at AACA to earn some money; on the side, though, when he’s not fixing computer glitches, he’s running a youth center or he’s writing poetry. He sneaks in the fun work when his bosses aren’t looking.

    Dapper in slacks and a collared shirt, Quraishi sported a neatly trimmed beard. His concentration and eloquence showed his literary passion.

    “Literature and poetry aren’t practical,” the closet artist said. “So I had to find a more profitable means for supporting myself. But this is where my heart is.”

    While still a refugee in Peshawar, he published a bimonthly magazine in the two major Afghan languages, Pashto and Dari, called Youth’s Desire. He funded it from his own pocket for about a year, until he could no longer afford it. When he came back to his native Kabul, Quraishi opened one of the first youth centers in the city, this time using money raised from private donors.

    Now, he’s hoping his projects can tap the flow of reconstruction aid coming through the AACA, which so far has amounted to $1 billion of the $4.5 billion pledged in Tokyo last winter by 61 countries and 21 international organizations.

    He described his youth center with a big smile and sweeping hand gestures. It’s a two-story house where more than 100 boys come to play chess and pool, take recreational classes or just hang out. He wants to start league sports, get another youth magazine going and expand so that there will be a place for girls as well. Although there were a few such places during the Soviet-led regime, the demand has never been greater than now.

    “University students come knocking at the door even when we can’t fit in any more people. They’re starved for free fun,” he said.

    After the loya jirga concluded with the election of President Hamid Karzai and the plan to draft a constitution, I left the capital in a minivan in the company of free-lance photographer Natalie Retiring; Chicago Tribune correspondent Laurie Goering; her interpreter, Farouq Samim; and our driver, Naseer. We drove out at dawn, as the muezzins were beginning to recite verses from the Qur’an, before the call to morning prayers. We carried two spare tires, a few boxes of mineral water, our cameras, travel bags and not much else. The road to Kandahar was gravelly at best and bone-rattlingly rocky at its worst, all 550 kilometers (350 mi) of it.

    I talked to Samim. Charming in his manner, with tanned skin, a thick head of black hair and a mustache, he is part of the educated middle class that is desperately needed to rebuild the country, but which is also deeply frustrated by the lack of job opportunities and training. Now 26 and a full-time interpreter, he was in his last year of medical school when his education was interrupted, and his training has been too poor to allow him to treat patients, he said. He spent most of the 23 years of war in Kabul, where he learned to speak fluent English at a language institute. In our conversations, however, we spoke in our native tongue, Dari, the common language of the northern regions.

    As the hot air and dust blew in our faces, he and I admired the vast landscape of smooth-rolling hills and dry desert. We rode past nomads on their camels in Ghazni province, home of the Ghaznavid Dynasty of the 10th century. After three years of drought, rain is again nourishing the acres of green here, and so Afghans who had become refugees because of the drought are returning, too. We could see orchards of apricots and peaches.

    At intervals during our talk, Samim helped Naseer fix first one, then another, and another—in the end, seven flat tires. “I want to find a way to go to an English-speaking country, re-study medicine and then come back,” he says. “Of course I’ll come back. I put up with war for this long; I want to be here to help heal the country.”

    As night began to fall, we had still not arrived in Kandahar. Luckily, there was no curfew there as there had been in Kabul, where residents had to be in their homes by 11:00 p.m. Finally, 17 hours after leaving Kabul, we entered the historic gates of the city. Despite the late hour, shops were still open. In the streets, three-wheeled motor rickshaws whizzed by, and men in striped turbans strolled on paved sidewalks.

    Kandahar is the second-largest city in the country, with 450,000 people, and the central, ethnically Pashtun city, complete with old and new quarters that reflect several eras. The old city, much of which has been destroyed by the wars, is classical Afghan, with its mud-baked walls, its dome-ceilinged rooms, its central courtyards and its fountains. The new city, which emerged during King Mohammed Zahir’s modernization project in the mid-19th century, boasts whitewashed three-story buildings with balconies and windows all around.

    Kandahar was the first capital of Afghanistan at its inception as a separate country in 1747. Before that, western Afghanistan was governed by the Persian Safavid Empire, and the eastern region was part of the Mughal Empire. The founder of Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Durrani, whom Afghans affectionately call Ahmad Shah Baba, built an Afghan empire that stretched from Mashad to Delhi and north to Samarkand—about twice the size of Afghanistan today.

    The city still has four gates, which open onto the highways to Kabul and Herat. There are numerous historical sites, including Chihil Zina, a monument of 40 stairs propped on a hill overlooking the city. Atop a steep stairway is a chamber with Arabic inscriptions on its wall testifying that the founder of the Mughal Empire, Babur, built the monument in the 16th century.

    The next day, the Ministry of Information and Culture invited me to the opening of a new literary association and told me that Wassel Hosanyar, a clothing merchant turned poet, was going to read. He had just published his first book, Za ow Sham (The Candle and I), a series of romantic poems dedicated to the current Afghan enlightenment.

    “I have come out of the darkness and the candle’s flame is giving me strength,” he said. The candle, of course, symbolizes for him the new peace in Afghanistan. A close translation of one of his poems echoes the same message.

    “The heart of my nation has burned with missiles and weapons,
    But I fell on the sand in this storm still content,
    Because these weeks, I see new revolutions.”

    Comfortable in traditional starched, white, loose pants and a knee-length shirt, Hosanyar sat cross-legged outside the ceremony on a plastic chair, his deep brown eyes gazing back at his watching fans.

    At 30, he has been writing poetry for eight years in exile in Pakistan. He’s self-taught, inspired by renowned Pashto poet Khushal Khattak, the Greek philosophers and Shakespeare. For Hosanyar, every image is a poem. Fans say he owes his popularity to his upbeat subjects of love and romance.

    “You don’t need a formal education to be a poet,” he said. “You need to have talent, creativity and a variety of books to read. Every word of my poetry is a part of my body. I don’t like just one or the other.”

    From Kandahar, I traveled with a Spanish writer and a German photographer on the three-hour drive west to Lashkar Gah (“Place of Soldiers”), a city in Helmand province. My earliest memory of Afghanistan is from my family’s two-year residence in this historic city, which in the 1970’s was called “Little America” because of its rapid modernization. I was four, and I recall a narrow trail along the clear water of the Helmand River. On the other side were fields, probably of wheat and barley; villagers were washing clothes in the river, and I ran with other children, barefoot. I remember that once, during a rain, there was a rainbow over the farms and the river.

    Lashkar Gah is home to Qalai Bost, the vaulted gateway to the ruins of a fort and castle dating from the Ghaznavid era. So famous is it that it appears on the 10,000 Afghani note. In the 1970’s, the late President Mohammed Daoud Khan filled the gateway to the top with bricks as a stopgap preservation measure, in order to keep the fragile structure from toppling.

    Rosta Malang is the semi-official guard of the gateway, and he spends part of each day leaning against its side, crouching on the red dirt. When I approached him, I found that his life was a history in some ways as rich as that of the structure he attends. Malang had lived through all the regimes, all the bombs and rockets, sitting in the same corner, fingering his tasbih, or prayer beads.

    He believes he’s 80 years old. He has been widowed three times. Each wife, he said, he loved dearly, but all of them died in childbirth. After his third beloved died, he bid farewell to the material world, and he found peace near the ruins of the great kings. “I gave all my love to them. Now I give it to God,” he said in a voice that quavered with age.

    He said he wanted to die under the archway, which was indeed in danger of collapsing, despite the bricked-up doorway. UNESCO is spending $3 million to refurbish about a dozen historical sites in Afghanistan, including this one. I hoped they got here in time. I squinted under the sun to view the grand structure before me, and I felt privileged to be one of the few tourists around. Malang said that this year they have had about 50 tourists, the most he had seen in six years.

    My final destination was my hometown, Herat. My father was already there, enjoying time with our family. My love and fascination for this city of 330,000 people comes partly from my personal connection, but also from its rich history. Located on the border of Iran and Turkmenistan, Herat was the cradle of culture and civilization in the region, especially in the golden 15th century, during the Timurid Empire. Art, architecture, poetry and literature flourished there.

    More than anywhere else, national reconstruction and the cultural renaissance are visible here. On a drive around the city, I saw workers paving roads, building a state-of-the-art addition to the old public library and creating a new park.

    Herat is the wealthiest province in the country, which partly explains its rapid development. The Afghan transit trade, which has been going on for millennia, begins in Herat and ends in Pakistan, daily transporting hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of goods ranging from electronics to fabrics. Each truck pays customs fees to Herat province.

    Though Herat was destroyed during the war against the Soviets, it was rebuilt after 1992, and the Heratis, as the people are called, are not as worn as residents of the other Afghan cities. They come to the present day with zest and a seemingly insatiable motivation to produce and create. Age-old Herati crafts now blossoming again include thick blue glass, silk shawls and tilework. Many of the craftsmen work in the vicinity of the magnificent Friday Mosque, and from morning until evening prayers they try to meet the demand of their customers.

    The city is a haven for art, including students such as one I met, Roya Hamid. At 24, she seemed to personify Herat’s energy and will. She was accepted at the local medical school, but joined the faculty of fine arts to follow her artistic aspirations. During the six years when women were forbidden to work or go to school, Hamid took art lessons at home. She now has reentered the university as a third-year student. Her most prized work is her oil painting of a woman, shown behind bars; a tear, her symbolic cry for help, falls on an image of the Ka’bah at the center of the Holy Mosque.

    “This is how I have felt for the last six years. But we have been freed now,” she said.

    Hamid uses every free minute to work, even though she does not have a studio. She lays her papers and colors on the family carpet and hunches over them to draw. But her love is drawing intricate miniatures on blue glass goblets. It takes her a month to finish a gold-bordered design, brushing delicate, detailed strokes of color on the curved surface.

    “I used to draw half-heartedly, not knowing who would see my work, but now I’m better and quicker. It’s this sensation, this time. We feel that if we don’t take advantage of it, somebody might take the opportunity away from us. I don’t dream of returning to 15th-century Herat, but that time inspires me to make the 21st century an even greater era.”

  • Afghans eager to go home at all costs

    Refugees undeterred by crime, ethnic violence, warlords’ rivalries
    By Fariba Nawa
    August 19, 2002
    The San Francisco Chronicle

    Maslakh Camp, Afghanistan — Under the scorching desert sun, about 150 men and women gathered in this sprawling refugee camp, listening to an official relay news about their home villages.

    It was hardly encouraging. Fighting continues between armies of rival warlords in many of their hometowns, and parts of the countryside remain extremely dangerous. But the men and women were undeterred. “We still want to go home,” one shouted. “We’ve had enough of camp life.”

    Despite warnings from human rights groups and the United Nations that certain areas of Afghanistan remain unsafe for repatriation and that returning refugees may face starvation, hundreds of thousands of Afghans are determined to go home. After 23 years of war, they are willing to take their chances against ethnic violence, crime and warlords.

    To date, 1.3 million refugees have been repatriated from bordering countries, especially Iran and Pakistan, while about 4.5 million remain in camps outside Afghanistan. Meanwhile, about a million internally displaced people have left camps such as Maslakh, about 10 miles from Herat, for home.

    It is “the largest repatriation of people in history,” said Assistant Secretary of State Arthur E. Dewey, the top U.S. refugee official.

    Shamira, a 50-year-old with four children, said she is eager to go home after spending 18 months in Maslakh.

    “We came because of poverty and hunger, and we have nothing here — not a tent, not enough food,” she said. “God willing, I will go back.”

    Before the fall of the Taliban, Maslakh — “Slaughterhouse” in the Dari language — was one of the largest refugee camps in the world, with 117,000 internally displaced Afghans crammed into a settlement a mile wide and three miles long. Today, it is almost a ghost town. The remaining 32,000 refugees are waiting to be registered as returnees before they can leave.

    But not all of them will be able to go home. Those who are left are the poorest, with no land or possibility of finding work, and they come from areas where tribal conflicts and political instability stand in the way of their return. In fact, about 500 Afghans still arrive at Maslakh each week from the troubled north.

    “The last group told us that they came from Faryab, where they were forced into labor,” said Nasim Aswady, a United Nations worker in charge of security for refugees. “The armed men would force them to work on (the warlord’s) land and bring water from three hours away to their farms.”

    Returning refugees face dire conditions in the countryside, but the camps are not without perils of their own. Although Maslakh is less crowded these days, it is still squalid. Some refugees live in tents, while others sleep in mud-brick shelters. Dozens of refugees die in the camp each month from diseases like tuberculosis, hepatitis, malaria and respiratory tract infections and are buried in the slowly growing cemeteries near the highway linking Herat and Kabul.

    The international community is eager to see the camps disbanded before the coming winter, so aid agencies are subtly trying to encourage the refugees to leave.

    At Maslakh, every family used to get a large bag of wheat each month, but those rations were cut to a daily portion of bread and monthly allotments of lentils and oil, partly to prompt the refugees to relinquish their dependency on food handouts.

    “It’s always a difficult choice,” said Vanessa Mattar, chief protection officer for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Herat. “On one hand, there are clearly people who need help. On the other hand, we want to get them back to their villages and we don’t want these camps in the country to become permanent settlements.”

    The International Organization for Migration, which is in charge of relocating those displaced inside Afghanistan, gives refugees who leave the camp $10 in cash, plastic sheeting to protect them from the elements, a portion of wheat and transportation home.

    For people who have so little, it is a tempting offer. About 358,000 internal refugees have registered to return to their homes in Afghanistan. But last month, the UNHCR abruptly halted assisted repatriation to volatile northern areas such as Faryab province and to the southeast, where the U.S.-led war on terrorism continues.

    In northern Afghanistan, factional fighting between warlords Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum and Ustad Atta Mohammed still continues around Mazar-e-Sharif. In Faryab and in the southwestern province of Farah, minority Pashtuns are fleeing targeted violence, including rape, looting and extortion by local commanders. At the same time, UNHCR has told countries where Afghan refugees remain that they should offer incentives — food, supplies and small cash payments — to encourage refugees to repatriate.

    Human Rights Watch in New York has condemned the United Nations’ stance, calling it contradictory.

    “By advocating for repatriation, UNHCR is sending the message to governments that conditions in Afghanistan are sufficiently stable for a large- scale return,” Rachael Reilly, refugee policy director at Human Rights Watch, said in a recent statement.

    “This is misleading and is contradicted by conditions on the ground.” More than half the refugees in Maslakh are Pashtuns who fled the north not to escape persecution or war, but to try to survive after three years of devastating drought. With more rain falling this year, they are eager to go home. But many have missed the planting season, and if they go home now, they could face starvation again.

    “The return issue is a disaster,” said Duccio Staderini of the French doctors’ group Medecins du Monde. “We know people’s places of origin are not safe in terms of food security, and health provision is zero. But the international community is pushing to have people back home.”

    In the Herat region, four out of the six refugee camps are being closed, and landowners are coming back to retrieve the property where the camps were set up. Many refugees in the four smaller camps are being transferred to Maslakh. In Maslakh, most of the remaining refugees want to go home, even if it means risking their lives.

    Nik Mohammed is from the northern province of Ghor and has lived in Maslakh with six of his family members for the past seven months. “Even if I have a thousand enemies in my hometown, I will still go,” he said. “I don’t want their burned bread here, even though we have no land or work there. We’ll be happy there even if we are dead. That’s where they should bury us.”

  • Foreign female aid workers feel less safe in Afghanistan

    By Fariba Nawa
    August 9, 2002
    The Christian Science Monitor

    Kabul — Patricia Omidian looked up through her glasses. Her palm-sized diary was open to an entry on June 8 — the day a French aid worker was gang-raped by seven men in Pul-i-khumiri, a small town in northern Afghanistan.

    “It’s just starting to sink in,” says Omidian, an American who has been working with Afghans for two decades. “(Security personnel) are telling us if we’re not careful, the same thing could happen to us.”

    The assault — the fourth reported rape here against a foreign woman in the last 10 years — took place more than a month ago, but hundreds of expatriate women here are only beginning to cope with the consequences.

    Under the Taliban rule, foreign female aid workers were spared the rules that oppressed Afghan women, such as being forbidden to work or attend school. As foreigners, they enjoyed a sense of freedom and immunity that local women did not.

    With the Taliban overthrown, however, factional fighting has increased in Afghanistan — and with it lawlessness.

    The new government, under President Hamid Karzai, has little control over citizens beyond Kabul, especially in the north where armies loyal to regional warlords reign. The result is an increase in random acts of violence against civilians and aid workers. Gunmen last month robbed two aid agencies and fired on a health clinic in Sholgara in northern Balkh province.

    Ultimately, human rights researchers say, women — regardless of nationality — are in more danger now than when the Taliban ruled.

    Male bosses are more sensitive to female employees traveling alone or working after dark. In some places, like Mazar-e-Sharif, women aid workers no longer feel safe shopping alone or interacting freely with colleagues.

    Jackie, a Western aid worker who did not want to give her real name for fear of losing her job, has worked in Mazar-e-Sharif and other areas for about a decade. Having endured years of negative confrontations with Afghan men and authority, she’s the first to say that life for foreign aid workers has improved since the Taliban government was toppled.

    “It’s night and day. I can’t even describe it. It’s easier to work with Afghans. There are other women in the office,” she said.

    But since the June rape, her sense of safety and comfort have diminished. “When these incidents happen, you consider leaving,” says Jackie, who survived the massacres of 1998, when thousands of Mazaris were brutally killed and homes were looted. “You realize how naive and vulnerable you can be.”

    Omidian, the only foreign worker for the Afghan agency Coordination for Humanitarian Assistance, shares Jackie’s frustration about the situation.

    Omidian began studying Afghan culture in 1979, eventually converted to Islam, and moved to Pakistan five years ago to work with Afghan refugees on health and gender issues. She lived with and supported an Afghan family of eight until a few months ago, when they returned to Kabul.

    Omidian’s first trip to Afghanistan was in 1998 when the city was silent under the Taliban. Although she wrapped a large head scarf around her body and hair, and interacted secretly with local men and women because it was forbidden to do so openly, she says she was able to work in quiet rebellion.

    Now, while she’s traded in her Pakistani long shirt and loose pants for fashionable Kabuli-style jeans, Omidian says she has less freedom and mobility than in previous visits to Afghanistan.

    “I always felt as a woman I had more of an advantage,” Omidian says. “I could cross over both genders since I’m not Afghan. But now I’ve lost that sense of independence.”

    Aid organizations and the United Nations apply strict measures to protect their employees. U.N. workers have a 10 p.m. curfew in the capital and must travel in a convoy of two cars between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. on long distances. They are discouraged from socializing with local Afghans.

    “U.N. missions are in places where there’s instability and tension. We’re erring on the side of caution,” U.N. spokesman David Singh says.

    Workers like Omidian complain these rules don’t solve the larger problem of instability and limit their access to the civilians they’re trying to help.

    Omidian, who teaches gender workshops to Afghan men and women, is now required by her agency to take a male escort any time she leaves the office.

    “It’s hard to do anything in Kabul now. I feel trapped more than anything else,” she says.

  • Afghan women freer, yet a rise in fiery suicides

    By Fariba Nawa
    August 9, 2002
    The Christian Science Monitor

    Herat, Afghanistan – Sanaa was tired of living with 15 in-laws. Tired of daily fights with her mother-in-law. And tired of being treated like a “servant.” So last month, with her husband watching, she threw a gallon of cooking gas on her chest and lit a match.

    “I did it because, at the time, I felt like I had no other choice,” she says, her speech slurred from the burns on her mouth.

    Sanaa is one of dozens of Afghan women who, since the Taliban’s fall, have attempted self-immolation to escape family dilemmas or unwanted marriages. In Herat, four women have killed themselves this year, according to hospital records – none died this way last year. And out of 26 female burn victims, nine were attempted suicides.

    In a country that traditionally views suicide with grave censure, many citizens and even officials are baffled by the surge in self-immolation. One theory is that expectations of more freedom have been unmet, leaving many women feeling desperate. Some officials also fear that a copycat effect may be building.

    The numbers have authorities so concerned that they’re bringing taboo domestic issues into the open and urging families to communicate with their daughters.

    Herat Governor Ismail Khan visited the burn unit in the hospital last week to speak with Sanaa and another victim. And the city’s television station dedicated an hour-long program to the issue July 21.

    While the vast majority of marriages in Afghanistan are arranged and most girls go along with the tradition, parents occasionally force their daughters to marry. Some parents will even demand dowries up to $15,000 for their daughters and sell them to the highest bidder. More often than not, experts say, self-immolation is a cry for help.

    “They don’t want to die. They’re just calling for attention,” says Asifa Aimaq, a psychologist and head of the Pedagogical Institute in Herat.

    Sanaa, who is expected to heal, says her mother-in-law was always interfering between her and her husband, Abdul Naim. The day Sanaa burned herself, her mother-in-law accused her of throwing dirty water on their food. Sanaa says she denied the charge, and the two women began shouting at each other.

    “[Sanaa] should not have done this, but I don’t blame her,” says her husband. “My mother has been horrible to her, and so I’m going to move out.”

    Sanaa, who suffered first-degree burns on 40 percent of her body, says, “I got what I wanted.” It’s the kind of statement that has authorities worried that other women will follow Sanaa’s example.

    Suicide is less common among men in Afghanistan, but self-immolation has long been the preferred method of suicide for desperate women in the region. In India, for example, suttee is a traditional Hindu practice in which widows burn themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres.

    “It’s an idea in their head because it happens all the time in this country,” said Mumtaz Abazada, a nurse at Herat hospital intensive care unit. “But once they hear somebody else did it and got away with it, then they take action.”

    Hospital staff in Herat say that with the limited medicine and treatment possibilities, 80 percent of these victims die.

    Shakiba, a 19-year-old, died last week after burning herself because her family had sold her to a 28-year-old man for $10,000 as a second wife. From her hospital bed, Shakiba told a Herat television that she agreed to be married because her brother convinced her that she would be taken care of financially.

    But after six months of being engaged, Shakiba said she had received no gifts or financial gain, and her fiancée wanted her to live with his first wife. She was also upset because he refused to throw a big wedding for her.

    “My family was selling me, and I didn’t know what else to do,” she told the television reporter.

    In response to Shakiba’s death, Governor Khan ordered the closure of all wedding halls to discourage pressure on families to throw lavish weddings. Although the proposal was never passed, the gesture symbolized a major departure from the suicide policy under the Taliban regime.

    In Islam, those who kill themselves are condemned to hell. According to Mahbooba Aslami – who registers patients at Herat hospital and also works on a TV and radio health program – the Taliban arrested and beat the father of any girl who attempted to kill herself. By contrast, Afghanistan’s new moderate Islamic government has been trying to implement a socially-oriented solution, she says. “Now they talk to the girls and the family.” As a result, inside many Afghan homes, debates raged – often between generations – over the best way to respond to the tragedies.

    Farrokh Ishaqzai says it’s better for women who attempt self-immolation to die because suicide is a sin, in her view. “They will probably go to hell anyway,” she says.

    But her niece Roya Hamid, a fine arts student at Herat University, disagrees.

    Many women are not aware of their rights and don’t know how to communicate with their family, Ms. Hamid says. In Afghanistan, there are no public agencies or grassroots organizations for such women to turn to.

    “I would fight back if my parents forced me into marriage, but my family’s open-minded so I have a choice,” she says. “But even if they weren’t, I would find another way. You have to take your rights. No one will give them to you.”

  • Return of the native to a nation reborn

    By Fariba Nawa
    July 14, 2002
    London Sunday Times

    EDITOR’S NOTE: As an Afghan living in exile in America, Fariba Nawa was drawn back to her homeland as the Taliban were ousted. She found hope amid the ruins of Herat.

    I can hear the hope in my home town. The once-forbidden sounds echo through the city. In the bazaar, women’s high-heeled shoes clip rhythmically on the pavement and songs from Hollywood films play in the ice cream shop.

    It’s a world apart from the forsaken city I fled as an eight-year-old in 1981. Different, too, from when I first returned here, in October 2000, after 19 years in exile. Then the Taliban were still in control and the city was hushed but for whispers of discontent.

    Now, having spent a total of 21 years away from my birthplace, I’ve come back as a reporter to witness the phenomenal transformation from war to peace.

    My observations differ from those of the other foreign reporters, coloured as they are with memories of a childhood tainted with bloodshed.

    I was born in 1973 on the day Mohammed Zahir Shah was ousted from the throne. My father worked for the national fertilising company. We lived in the southern city of Lashkar Gah, nicknamed Little America for its modernity.

    The night of the 1978 Russian-sponsored coup I was at a wedding with my family, wearing a spaghetti-strapped blue dress with patent leather shoes, digging my five-year old fingers into frosting. Then the wedding singers stopped. “The communists have taken the capital and killed Daud Khan — this is war,” a woman whispered.

    Nobody could have imagined that war would last 23 years. My family moved to Kandahar then to Herat. But I didn’t spend much of my time at home. Most days were spent playing with my cousins in my maternal grandfather’s orchard house across town.

    In my memories our laughter is drowned out by the reverberations of rockets and helicopters flying over the city. On some days the bullets barely missed us.

    One winter my family was sat around the table together when a stray bullet flew over my mother’s head and pounded into the wall. The next summer I witnessed my classmates die when a rocket hit my school. My sister and I stopped attending classes after that.

    At first my father refused to join the mass exodus of middle-class technocrats and intellectuals. Then, in 1981, the communists killed his favourite brother and he received death threats — two events that convinced him to pack up his family and flee, in a six-hour donkey ride, across the Iranian desert to Pakistan.

    We spent a year among the burgeoning Afghan refugee community of Islamabad. Our original plan was to join my brother Hadi in Germany, where he had fled in 1979 to escape conscription. But because my father had worked with Americans in the Peace Corps in Herat, we also applied for political asylum to America.

    The day of our interview, my mother braided my blonde hair — there are many fair Afghans — and held my hand tightly. We looked like a westernised, nuclear family and the bald American man who held our future in his hands stamped our papers and said: “Okay.”

    A fortnight later we were on a flight to Texas. Then we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, now called Little Kabul.

    In California I led a double life, torn between the conflicting cultures of my family and adoptive land. I didn’t have many friends because my life was enmeshed with the family. Sometimes I longed for a family whose values were those of the American ones on television.

    My parents were liberal by Afghan standards, but while they had no problems when I wore shorts, relatives would tell my mother I was losing my Islamic values. I would never bring male friends home because I was not supposed to be friends with the opposite sex.

    I was aware that I had to be more conservative than my classmates, that I could not have boyfriends and attend school dances. I often obeyed to keep my parents content, whether I actually believed in the rules or not.

    Just as I rebelled from it, however, I was drawn to Islamic culture, too. When I moved across the country to college at Amherst, Massachusetts, it was to read Middle East studies.

    There my memories of Afghanistan weighed on my mind and in October 2000 I succeeded in visiting my grandmother in Herat.

    I travelled across the same desert through which I had fled as a child, but this time in a taxi and enveloped in a burqa. My guide admonished me when I wrote in my diary. “The Taliban are more scared of the pen than the gun,” he explained.

    Traditionally Herat was the cultural capital of Afghanistan, known for its poetry, art and scholarship.

    Remnants of this history were still visible in the historic sites — the minarets, shrines and bridges — but now the intelligentsia and artists had become potato vendors and taxi drivers. Wearing the burqa was useful as I could observe the sad faces of men without the interruption of their gaze. The feeling of invisibility was empowering but I had to walk slowly not to fall over the flowing fabric. I avoided the Taliban and instead I focused on rediscovering my family. On the last day of my trip I visited my grandfather’s orchard home. I climbed the roof overlooking the city and wept cathartic tears. Less than a year later I would be stood on another roof, this time in New York, watching another devastating scene.

    By the time the September 11 attacks happened, I was studying for a masters degree in New York. I watched the twin towers collapse from the roof of my apartment on the opposite side of the Hudson River, little imagining that the next site of destruction would be my homeland.

    The dual identity I had constructed came crashing down as my two countries went to war. I was the embodiment of what so many perceived as the clash of civilisation between the West and Muslim world. Two weeks later, I took a leave of absence from university and flew to Islamabad to cover the war from Pakistan.

    On the phone I got minute-by-minute updates from commanders on the front line in Afghanistan, but I could not contact my relatives in Herat to check they were still alive.

    But the fall of the Taliban was a consolation. This summer I returned from America to Afghanistan. I now wanted to see it not just as a journalist with a reporting job to do, but also as an exile coming home to see how my countrymen were coping with the transition.

    I took my 72-year-old father with me. This time I crossed the border wearing an Iranian hijab, a headscarf tied under my chin, and a long summer coat.

    I left my father in Herat and travelled to Kabul to cover the loya jirga. Across the country I witnessed hints of a cultural and political revival. Whether it is taking off the burqa or going to school, men and women are both busier than ever taking advantage of what they see as an opportunity.

    Their response to the American bombings is oddly positive. There’s a high tolerance for casualties here if the long-term result is peace. But that tolerance is wearing a little thin as US-led forces keep bombing civilians by mistake.

    Afghans are impatient for reconstruction to pick up. They want the basic infrastructure such as telephone lines, electricity and water.

    Their response to exiles like me coming back is mixed. There’s a resentment that we have abandoned them to suffer while we led the good life. But they also are grateful that we want to come back and rebuild the country.

    Strangely, I feel more comfortable in this new Herat than my father. He came back hoping to feel at home but is leaving a month before he planned, disillusioned. “There are no intellectuals left here. Men sit around in their traditional clothes and their beards spitting tobacco on the streets. This is not the city I came from,” he said as I tried to persuade him to stay. “I don’t even want to be buried here.”

    I truly believe Herat could again be the enlightened centre it once was. I believe in the young people here. Since I have come back from Kabul, I have been enjoying what the oasis city has to offer. I sleep on the balcony under a sky lit up by shooting stars. The 40C heat is cooled by the famous 120-day winds.

    Nearly every house in Herat has a garden with pomegranate trees and vegetable fields. We eat three meals a day, which begins at sunrise with morning prayers. To cool off, we savour the fruit in season — watermelon and peaches.

    There is a wedding and a funeral every day and families invite hundreds to attend. Ismail Khan, the warlord in charge of Herat, is considered a moderate in comparison with the Taliban but young people still want more freedom. They want cinemas, parks and restaurants. Khan has promised them all that but he swears to keep the city Islamic. Last week the police shaved the heads of a group of young men caught drinking alcohol in public. The men were shown on television as clerics preached for two hours about the ills of alcohol.

    In Kandahar last month Wasil Hasanyar, a shopkeeper turned poet, released his first book, The Candle and I, a series of romantic poems dedicated to the Afghan enlightenment. “I have come out of the darkness and the candle’s flame is giving me strength,” he said at an opening ceremony of a literary association. I feel the same sense of hope about having come home at last.

  • Afghan women debate the terms of their future

    By Fariba Nawa
    June 30, 2002
    Women’s eNews (womensenews.org)

    EDITOR’S NOTE: Afghan women agree that they should play a role in the rebuilding of their country. They are divided, however, on what role Islam should play in the new nation–integral to the new government or a belief system guiding a secular state.

    Kabul — When at last she was welcomed under the tent of the loya jirga, the grand council convened to determine the future of Afghanistan’s government, Rahima Jami decided to wear a headscarf knotted under her chin. A long coat hid the curves of her body.

    Nasrine Gross had waited a long time to help determine the next two years of her country’s government, too. She wore a black pants suit and tied her soft black hair in a ponytail.

    “If you’re wearing this because you really believe in it, I respect you, but if you feel you have to wear it, you should take it off,” Gross told Jami. “I’ve chosen to keep my hair visible and I’m sure you respect that too.” The veiled Jami nodded but said, “If you just put on a small headscarf, it would be much better.”

    This significant discussion took place during the nine-day loya jirga that ended June 19. It was the first meeting of its kind since 1964, when then-king Mohammad Zahir Shah reformed the constitution to give women the right to vote, go to school and earn the same wages as men.

    Since Afghanistan’s interim government took power in December, women–who comprise 60 percent of the country’s 20 million people–have regained their right to work and go to school. They continue to wear the burqa–the head-to-toe covering that was not a tradition in the capital before the Taliban took over–because they still don’t feel safe. Nonetheless, women are back on television and radio as announcers and performers, and these freedoms are giving them the confidence to speak up.

    At this year’s loya jirga, an Afghan woman became a presidential candidate for the first time in the country’s history. Two women secured seats as ministers, and 200 women across the country joined more than 1,300 men to demand more rights for women.

    Women’s Minister Calls for Dismissal of Warlords from Loya Jirga Tajwar Kakar, the deputy minister of women’s affairs, stood up to powerful warlords during the loya jirga, calling for their removal from the council. Many of the warlords in control of the provinces are the Mujahideen, freedom fighters who fought against the Soviets. Now some of them are fighting hard to subjugate women.

    “I told the country these men are responsible for the destruction of the country, for the widows and orphans who have nothing to eat,” Kakar said. “They should be in jail, not sitting in the front seat in the loya jirga.”

    Kakar’s comments made headlines across the globe but did little to diminish the warlords’ influence.

    While most of the women at the loya jirga agreed on the need to expand rights for women, what those rights are and how they should be implemented were the source of debates and shouting matches that continue.

    At issue is the role of Islam in the government. A small but vocal group of Afghan women such as Gross want a secular government that does not impose the veil or patriarchal laws. But many other women want a religious regime, arguing that it would be more effective to fight for women’s rights under an Islamic framework.

    The Islamists supported by the former Mujahideen who control the current government are, as observers expected, gaining ground. The secular or moderate Muslim activists have been beaten off with one word: communist, a potent insult in a country that blames its demise on the former Soviet Union.

    Death Threats for Woman Who Allegedly Criticized Islam Dr. Sima Samar, minister for women’s affairs under the interim government, was scared into resigning her post this month after she was threatened with death and harassed for questioning Islam during an interview in Canada with a Persian-language newspaper. During the loya jirga, conservatives took out an ad in a local newspaper calling Samar the Salman Rushdie of Afghanistan, equating her with the Indian-born author who was threatened with death for blasphemy.

    Samar denies making any statements against Islam but concedes that she supports a limited role of religion in government. President Hamid Karzai is expected to replace her with an Islamist woman to appease the religious establishment. Samar has accepted a less powerful post as a member of the country’s human rights commission.

    “I don’t want to leave,” Samar told The Associated Press. “That’s the easiest way.”

    Women Islamists, who do not want the iron rule of the Taliban but a moderate interpretation of Islam, condemned the harassment against Samar even though they do not support all of her views. Women, they say, should wear modest clothing and Sharia, the law of Islam based upon the Koran, should be implemented in civil cases involving issues such as divorce and property disputes. They believe that any radical or secular measures to improve the lives of Afghan women, whose basic rights to education and work were denied for six years under the Taliban, will backfire.

    “I don’t wear this for men,” Jami told Gross, pointing to taupe cotton fabric on her head. “I wear this because I have faith in my religion. Islam is democratic and the best way for women to achieve their rights.”

    Jami is a mother of seven children and a teacher who spent the 23 years of war in northwestern Afghanistan. But Gross has written two books on Afghan women and represents the urban, educated Kabully who fled the capital for the West when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. She argues that Islam is part of Afghan values and daily life. Therefore, she says, it doesn’t need to be reinforced in government.

    “What we need to accept is pluralism of social groups,” the 56-year-old Gross said. “There’s not one model of Afghan woman. None of what I’m wearing is from the West. I dressed like this 37 years ago.”

    Gross, who is married to an American and traveled to Afghanistan specifically for the loya jirga, is a member of Negar, a Paris-based Afghan women’s group involved in securing human rights in Afghanistan. Her group succeeded in convincing Karzai to sign an equal rights law; implementation of the law will be the group’s next challenge.

    The ultimate impact of women’s strong lobbying at the loya jirga has yet to be seen. The delegates–both secular and Islamists–returned to their homes hopeful that they had improved Afghan women’s lives.

    “The fact that most of the men supported my candidacy and I could stand there and be a presidential candidate should show how far we’ve gotten in the last six months,” said Massouda Jalal, who unsuccessfully challenged Karzai as head of state. “I think that we’re only going to move forward.”