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‘Afghanistan: The Missing Peace’. Rudaw 2019
Rudaw English correspondent Robert Edwards was in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul when the US-Taliban peace process collapsed in September.
He and a team of Afghan filmmakers documented the hopes and fears of the city’s war-weary population, spoke to those involved in peace talks, and to those who will live with the consequences.
Now, as the peace process gets back on track, this new documentary and six-part written series explores a city anxious for peace – but terrified of the cost.
Read part I here
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Part II: ‘When women are in danger, it’s not peace – it’s surrender’
Many Afghans fear a peace agreement with the Taliban will cost them their basic civil liberties, in particular the rights of women.
Although Afghanistan’s constitution guarantees women’s rights, a stubborn combination of religious conservatism, tribal custom, displacement, and sluggish rural development has left Afghan women and girls trailing behind. And in areas under Taliban control, their chattel-like status has been further cemented.
I meet my documentary film crew in a nearby cafe over an Afghan lunch of soup, kabobs, rice, naan, and beans, washed down with green tea. The rice is thick with tender chunks of mutton, raisins, and lashings of oil. Although I’m groggy from a lost night’s sleep travelling, now made worse by the heavy meal, I’m eager to learn more about my new Afghan colleagues.
Hassan, our cameraman, is from the west side of Kabul, a predominantly Shiite area that routinely comes under sectarian attack.
Working part time for Afghanistan’s biggest domestic broadcaster, Hassan proudly shows me photos of his time working on set for Baghch-e-Simsim, Afghanistan’s very own version of Sesame Street.
The show courted controversy in 2017 when it cast its first female character, Zari, a hijab-clad puppet designed to teach Afghan boys respect for women.
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After lunch we make our way to the Taj Begum, a cafe owned and run by Laila Haidari. She’s a formidable lady from the Hazara minority – a persecuted ethnic group thought to be descended from Genghis Khan. Her colourful cafe, staffed by recovering drug addicts, is one of the few places in Kabul where unmarried men and women can meet freely in public – much to the distaste of religious conservatives.
The cafe’s profits fund Laila’s rehab centre, the Mother Camp, which she launched in memory of her brother, Hakim. The young army officer had lived under Kabul’s Pol-e Sokhta bridge – home to many of the city’s addicts.
The Taj Begum, named after a princess of the Mughal Empire, is filled with neon yellow furniture, gaudy paintings, and quirky pottery. In the centre of the room where we meet sits a large tank of tropical fish.
When I ask Laila about the rights of women since the fall of the Taliban, she removes her bright yellow headscarf, revealing short, tightly curled black hair. “I can’t talk about the Taliban while wearing this,” she mutters.
“When I established a restaurant as a woman in Kabul nine years ago, that was very shocking for people, that a woman is running a restaurant. And this was not acceptable for people,” she says. “But now you see in every corner of Afghanistan, women run restaurants and run their own businesses.”
Women have become more assertive in recent years, but ingrained attitudes have been harder to change. And with the prospect of the Taliban reentering government under a peace agreement, Laila is concerned the bad old days may soon return.
“People insult us, the way we put on clothes is not acceptable for people. But no one can legally force us to wear our clothes in accordance with their wishes. Or your lifestyle must be according to their wishes,” Laila says. “But if the Taliban come to power, certainly we won’t have the authority to choose our clothes and our lifestyle. Because their ideology is against moral norms and for the removal of women.”
Under the Taliban, Afghanistan’s women were subjugated, forced to remain home and only permitted to venture out dressed in the all-enveloping burqa, while accompanied by a male relative. Girls’ schools were shut down and women forced out of the workplace. Those who defied this strict moral regime could be whipped as punishment or even stoned to death.
Just five days before my visit, a group of men, stirred up by local mullahs, came to Laila’s restaurant and began smashing things. They threatened the staff and even the vulnerable women sheltered in an adjoining dormitory. They accused Laila of running a brothel.
“We have witnessed plenty of violence in the last 18 years. Why? Because there is still a lot of Taliban mentality in this society,” she says.
“We can hear the Taliban’s footsteps. That they are entering into our society.”
The peace process offers little reassurance.
“My major concern is they will bring peace to Afghanistan and we women will go backwards and stay in our homes. They will put us before field courts and torture us in public every day.”
“We can feel those days.”
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Laila’s fears were echoed by several women I spoke to that week. They too were keen to point out the toxic culture which threatens to roll back women’s modest gains.
“There will be no sacrifice,” Latifa Sultani says defiantly.
As the head of women’s affairs at Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission, Latifa is well aware of the threat women face when their rights are not guaranteed.
“If the values of women’s rights and human rights are ignored for the sake of peace in the peace talks, that is not peace. That is just fire under ashes. It will be just a failed contract that will bring anarchy to Afghanistan that it will not be possible to compensate,” she says.
Click here to read Rudaw's full interview with Latifa Sultani
Latifa and her colleagues document human rights abuses in all the far corners of the country and bring them to the attention of lawmakers and the central government. As a result, several of the commission’s researchers have been murdered.
Meeting me at her office on the outskirts of Kabul – a telling sign of the commission’s peripheral status – Latifa highlights the wide gulf between women in rural Afghanistan and those in the wealthier metropolis.
“In isolated places in Afghanistan, in some districts of Afghanistan, there is not full security,” Latifa says. “And we witness women being stoned and flogged. Women are shot by armed groups opposed to the government of Afghanistan. We witness field courts. And worst of all we witness murder by family members. Women are murdered by the closest members of their family.”
A huge number of Afghan women report spousal violence and abuse, yet male perpetrators are rarely prosecuted.
This impunity appears to run deep in Afghanistan’s official culture.
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“For me there is no difference between the current government and the Taliban government,” says Dewa Niazi.
“I have heard that the Taliban were violating women, beating women and others. When we raised our voice for justice, we women were beaten by police. Our hands were broken. Blood fell from our faces.”
Dewa, 27, ran in the October 2018 parliamentary election in the troubled eastern province of Nangarhar, bordering Pakistan, where the Taliban controls several hamlets and the Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K) has blown up local girls’ schools. But it was the security forces of the democratic government who attacked her.
She was among 417 women who stood in that election – the highest number to date – determined to give women in Afghanistan’s distant provinces a strong voice in the capital.
However, she and several candidates say corrupt election officials stole their votes by imposing exorbitant fees. Unable to pay, their votes were redistributed and rival candidates were sent to parliament.
The women, from all corners of the country, banded together to protest the move, calling on the central government to intervene and restore their votes. When the government ignored their pleas, the women staged protests and pitched tents outside the presidential palace. Some went on hunger strike. Others sewed their lips together.
Afghan security forces did not hold back. Video footage has emerged of soldiers destroying the camp. Several of the women suffered broken bones.
“There is no difference between them for me,” Dewa says, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the apartment where we meet on the outskirts of Kabul. “Both the Taliban and the current system commit the same violence.”
I have brought Dewa and several other provincial candidates together to discuss the reality of women’s representation and to hear their thoughts on the peace process. An armed guard patrols the terrace outside, an AK-47 under one arm, our host’s noisy toddler under the other.
Sitting in a semicircle, each woman in turn scorns the weakness of President Ashraf Ghani’s government – a weakness that does not bode well for inter-Afghan talks.
“Some women put up tents to campaign for justice, yet this Afghan government could not even satisfy a few women,” says Dewa, her pale features framed by a loose black hijab.
“Those Taliban who have fought for 18 years and who bleed Afghans simply for power – how can this Afghan government satisfy them? I think the Taliban knows talking to the Afghan government won’t be efficient.”
“When they can’t give women their rights, what will they give the Taliban who fought for 18 years?”
I ask the group what they think of America’s talks with the Taliban. They are unanimous in the view that America has effectively surrendered.
“America knows it has failed in Afghanistan during the last 18 years. They were not victorious,” says Nafisa Selay, a candidate from Maidan Wardak province.
“America has seen its failure and the peace process by Khalilzad is evidence of that. They have failed in Afghanistan and now they want to escape so they have meetings between Khalilzad and the Taliban in Doha in the name of peace.”
Cutting in, Farzana Farahmand, who stood for election in Baghlan province, says the US talks have simply legitimised the Taliban, strengthening the group’s hand in negotiations with the Afghan government.
“How is it beneficial to the people of Afghanistan?” Farzana asks.
I am struck by the power of her oratory; the ferocity with which she speaks; her conviction. She readjusts her headscarf repeatedly while speaking, her gestures sending the mutinous yellow fabric creeping back from her brow.
“They want to bring the project of the Taliban back to Afghanistan by the name of peace. And give them political legitimacy. And give them a place in parliament and the system of Afghanistan. Recognise them officially. And then America can go back to its own place but leave their intelligence system and extract their military force,” she says.
So the prospects for peace aren’t good?
“Civil war will start in Afghanistan,” Farzana says. “And the involvement of Pakistan, Iran, and India will increase. And the next generation of Afghanistan will be the victims, as the people of Afghanistan were the victims in the last forty or fifty years.”
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Almost two decades since the Taliban’s removal from power, Afghanistan is still far behind other nations on metrics of women’s health, reproductive rights, literacy, and leadership. Ironically, with a 25 percent quota for women in its parliament, the country actually outperforms the UK and the US for women’s representation.
Fawzia Koofi was the first woman to become vice president of Afghanistan’s National Assembly. She has become wealthy from sales of her New York Times bestseller, The Favored Daughter, a biography of her difficult upbringing in conservative rural Afghanistan. Sitting in her palatial home overlooking Kabul, I could have been in Beverly Hills, were it not for the power cuts and thumping Chinooks overhead.
Click here to read Rudaw's full interview with Fawzia Koofi
“It’s the worst country to be a mother. If you look at all the indicators it has the lowest literacy rate for women, it has the lowest economy for women. So already we are an oppressed country for women,” Fawzia tells me in flawless English.
“How much more shall we compromise? I don’t think it’s realistic and it shall also be logical to expect women to give up – we don’t have enough to give.”
Fawzia took part in the preliminary inter-Afghan talks in Moscow and Doha. I ask her to describe the sensation of meeting her one-time oppressors face-to-face.
“To sit in one room with the Taliban and to face them for the first time after the government has fallen in Afghanistan was not an easy experience,” she says.
“Every woman who lived in Afghanistan paid the price of Taliban government. Personally, they have stopped education for me and many other women, they put my husband in jail, I have seen women who were beaten up in front of my eyes, I have seen horrible things happen. So every Afghan in Afghanistan remembers those memories. And to therefore go with those memories and face the Taliban is not a nice moment. It is not a pleasant atmosphere.”
Whatever her personal feelings toward the Taliban, Fawzia believes Afghanistan’s leaders have a responsibility to secure peace.
“At the end of the day I believe that we have to talk because there is no war you can win with war. You have to win war with peace. And then you have to talk because you have to end this bloodshed. And the people of Afghanistan expect that.”
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Back at the Taj Begum, Laila isn’t convinced women like Fawzia, from the country’s elite, can stand up for her rights. Whatever happens, those at the top will be shielded, she says.
“Those women who participated in the talks are not capable of talking on behalf of a woman who doesn’t have any protection in society,” Laila says. “They are not able to represent our voice and our struggles … Even if the Taliban takes power, it won’t affect their lives.”
Sitting in her garden sipping chai, Laila asks me about the rights of women in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, where I have lived and worked for almost two years. I take out my phone and show her photographs of traditional Kurdish clothing, with its bold colours, sparkling sequins, and uncovered hair worn long – evidence of a moderate Islamic culture. She smiles admiringly.
I ask whether she’s optimistic about peace.
“When the women of my country are in danger, it’s not peace,” she says. “It’s surrender.”
Click here to read part III
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