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| Taliban
kidnapped women, girls |
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| Stories
begin to emerge as families search for abductees |
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By
Kevin Sullivan
THE
WASHINGTON POST |
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| KABUL,
Afghanistan, Dec. 19 — Eight
Taliban fighters kicked in the front door at dinnertime. They
beat Shabnam’s mother and grandmother, according to her
relatives. Then they hustled the 9-year-old girl into a pickup
truck, loot for their commanding officer. |
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‘It
will be difficult to find many of them. We think many of these girls
are no longer in Afghanistan. We think many of them may have been
killed by the Taliban.’
—
GEN. MOHAMMED QASIM
A
top justice ministry official in the new government |
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THAT WAS AUGUST 1997. Shabnam, who would be 13 now, is still not
home.
Her sister saw her once, about
two years ago. She heard that Shabnam had become the property of Col.
Shawali, a top Taliban security officer. So she went to his house and
demanded to see her little sister. She was allowed to talk to her for
five minutes, surrounded by Taliban gunmen, just long enough to see
the fear in her eyes.
“Every time she sees someone
who looks like Shabnam, she cries,” said Islamodin, the sister’s
husband. Shabnam lived with the couple; her mother and grandmother
were visiting at the time of the abduction. |
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“Her clothes are still
in the house, and so are her dolls; everything reminds us of her,”
said Islamodin, who, like many Afghans, uses only one name. “When
the Taliban were forced out of Kabul [last month], we should have been
happy. But we could only cry because she was not with us.”
HUNDREDS OR MORE
ABDUCTED
Taliban soldiers abducted many
women and girls, perhaps hundreds or more, during their five-year rule
of Afghanistan, according to Afghan families, officials of the
incoming government and humanitarian aid groups. Many are still
missing, and their stories are only now beginning to emerge in the
wake of the Taliban’s defeat.
It is impossible to calculate the
number kidnapped. Many families have never spoken out because of the
stigma, especially strong in this conservative Muslim society, of
having a daughter or sister sold for sex. Others fear that protesting
could jeopardize the life of their missing loved ones. Islamodin and
others interviewed spoke reluctantly, and they declined to be
photographed or provide pictures of the kidnapped girls.
But as a new government prepares
to take office Saturday, and the climate of fear created by the
Taliban begins to fade, more and more families are stepping forward to
tell their stories publicly for the first time.
TALIBAN HYPOCRISY
The abductions highlight a
central hypocrisy of the Taliban regime. Their official policy was to
revere women as jewels to be guarded by the men in their family. To
the Taliban, that meant stripping women of virtually all rights,
including education, and forcing them to stay either out of sight at
home or covered head to toe by a burqa in public. |
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One of the most frequently told stories about Mohammad Omar, the
Taliban’s spiritual leader, is how in the spring of 1994 he led a
small band of followers to a warlord’s base near the city of
Kandahar to free two girls who had been abducted and repeatedly raped.
Omar reportedly freed the girls, then hanged the warlord from the
barrel of a tank to avenge his violent treatment of the girls.
But according to interviews with
families and officials in Afghanistan and abroad, the Taliban was
essentially a militia of illiterate young men who often abused their
power in violent ways. That reportedly included claiming women and
girls as sexual prizes.
NEW GOVERNMENT WILL
INVESTIGATE
Gen. Mohammed Qasim, chief
military prosecutor for the Northern Alliance, the collection of
forces that led the fight to overthrow the Taliban, said in an
interview that he believed at least 1,000 Afghan women were abducted
by the Taliban. |
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“This is not what the
Afghan people are like,” said Qasim, who will be a top justice
ministry official in the new government. He promised that the new
government would investigate as many cases as possible.
“It will be difficult to find
many of them,” he said. “We think many of these girls are no
longer in Afghanistan. We think many of them may have been killed by
the Taliban. But the parents want us to find them, and we will try.”
Qasim said that many of the girls
were used as concubines by Taliban officers, some of whom kept a dozen
or more. He said many others were sold as sexual slaves to wealthy
Arabs through contacts arranged by the al Qaeda terrorist network of
Osama bin Laden. Proceeds helped keep the cash-strapped Taliban
afloat, he said.
‘WHISPERS’ BEGIN TO
EMERGE
Farhat Bokhari, a researcher for
Human Rights Watch in New York, which recently released a report on
the plight of Afghan women, said in a telephone interview that
“whispers” about large numbers of abductions under the Taliban
have emerged recently.
Bokhari said that in interviews
with Afghan women in refugee camps in Pakistan late last summer, “A
few women said they had heard of more than 20 abductions; others gave
estimates in the hundreds, so there’s really no good accounting.”
Bokhari said abductions have been
underreported because of “the whole issue of dishonor.” She said
Afghan people would not talk about sexual abuse, because it could harm
a woman’s chances of marriage. And, she said, families would fear
for their lives if they complained to the Taliban.
Afghan women and girls have
suffered greatly in the past two decades, during wars among Afghan
factions, 10 years of occupation by the Soviet Union and then under
the Taliban, which was accused in a State Department report last month
of “egregious acts of violence against women, including rape,
abduction and forced marriage.”
NOT ONLY TALIBAN
KIDNAPPED GIRLS
One Western official, who said
kidnappings of young girls had been common under the Taliban, noted
that the mujaheddin who fought for control of the country before the
Taliban took over also frequently abducted and raped women. “The
Taliban didn’t invent this,” he said. |
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Qasim, the Northern
Alliance prosecutor, said there were many abuses of women during the
years of factional fighting. But he said the abuses were never
sanctioned by the government, as they were during the Taliban era.
Qasim said some women and girls
who had been abducted were left behind by Taliban fighters when they
fled Kabul on Nov. 13 as Northern Alliance forces entered the city. He
said many of those women have been reunited with their families. But,
he said, many more were abducted by Taliban troops on their way out of
the city.
Islamodin has been spending his
days lately touring the police stations and security offices of the
incoming government to urge officials to investigate Shabnam’s case.
So far, he said, no one seems to be willing to do anything. Still, he
said, attitudes are different than in the Taliban days.
“The Taliban would not
listen,” he said. “I went to one Taliban government official to
complain and he just shouted at me. He said, “You are from Panjshir
[a Northern Alliance stronghold]. You are not a true Muslim. You are a
communist. Get out.’”
Maizer Mohammed, a Kabul police
commander who met with Islamodin on Friday, shook his head when asked
if his officers would be able to find Shabnam. “This was so common
in the time of the Taliban, especially among the Pakistani and Arab
Taliban,” he said, referring to foreigners, many of them members of
al Qaeda, who came to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban. “I
don’t think we will be able to find out where she is.”
‘I WILL KILL HIM’
“If I am not able to get her
back, I will take my revenge,” Islamodin said, standing on a frigid
street outside the bakery he runs with a friend. “I will find that
man’s close relative, and I will kill him. In other countries it is
different, but this is tradition in Afghanistan. Here it is justice.
And justice should be done.”
Shah Suleman has been trying for
more than five years to find his cousin, who was 13 when she was
abducted in September 1996. He is now a police officer in Kabul, a job
he said he took to help in the search.
“I have asked my chiefs to try
to help, but there is nothing they can do,” he said, standing in a
busy Kabul market wearing the woolly green pants and shirt of the
newly formed police force. He would not give his cousin’s name,
fearing reprisals from whoever might have her.
Suleman said his cousin was
abducted in Kabul by a group of Taliban soldiers that came to the
family home and dragged away two young male relatives. The soldiers
returned a few hours later, saying they would kill the boys unless the
family let them take Suleman’s two female cousins, aged 25 and 13.
Suleman said his aunt was forced
to let the girls go to save her sons. For two years there was no word
from either of them.
Then a man came to the house with
the 25-year-old. He said he had seen a Taliban soldier beating her in
Gardez, about 80 miles south of Kabul. He said he paid the soldier -
Suleman did not know how much - for the woman, then brought her home.
He asked for the family’s permission to marry her. Suleman said his
cousin was so grateful to the man for freeing her that she agreed, and
the family consented as well. They now live in Pakistan, Suleman said.
But there has been no word from
the other girl, who would be 18 now. “Nobody has ever seen her, and
we don’t know where she is,” Suleman said.
© 2001 The Washington Post
Company
The home page of the
Revolutionary Association of
the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)
RAWA is a
political/social organization of Afghan women struggling for peace,
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