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For Lalia

By Alexa

Under Sharia law, the victims become the criminals, again.

Afghanistan is building new jails for women. Though there are only 300 female prisoners now, that number is expected to grow.

While there are no signs of a crime wave, one of the reasons for the increase is an unlikely one. Lacking in transitional houses for released prisoners, a suggested solution includes using jails as secure places where women can stay until they are reintegrated into society.

By some strange logic, funding for building jails is much easier to come by. But again, half of the women in jail should not be there at all.
A 2006 report from MSNBC describes the attempted suicide by self-immolation of a 16 year old Afghan girl.

Photo credit: Musadeq Sadeq

Blood dripped down the 16-year-old girl's face after another beating by her drug addict husband. Worn down by life's pain, she ran to the kitchen, doused herself with gas from a lamp and struck a match.

Desperate to escape domestic violence, forced marriage and hardship, scores of women across Afghanistan each year are committing suicide by fire. While some gains have been made since the fall of the Taliban five years ago, life remains bleak for many Afghan women in the conservative and violence-plagued country, and suicide is a common escape.

Young Gulsum survived to tell her story. Her pretty face and delicate feet were untouched by the flames, but beneath her red turtleneck sweater, floral skirt and white shawl, her skin is puffy and scarred.

This isn't an isolated incident. How frequently do women and girls take their lives in Afghanistan?

Reliable statistics on self-immolation nationwide are difficult to gauge. In Herat province, where the practice has been most reported and publicized, there were 93 cases last year and 54 so far this year. More than 70 percent of these women die.

Herat public health director Raoufa Niazi has seen about 150 self-immolation cases over the past two years and pleads with women who survive that fire is not the way to escape their problems. 

"I tell them to go to complain to the government, but the government doesn't help them," Niazi said. "The government doesn't punish the people who hurt these women. Instead, they just say, 'Why has she done this to herself?"'

Because she is not safe, has never felt safe, and the very idea of someone not being able to treat her and mistreat her in any manner he sees fit, under the auspices of the law, is as foreign to her as life on Neptune to us.

Because she expects to be beaten, raped and eventually killed by the arranged husband she must depend on for food, shelter and daily survival?

Because when there was no food to eat, every Afghan kitchen would have matches and she used the only means available to her in her time of greatest despair?

Those of you still reading may not be surprised to know what happens if an Afghan woman survives a suicide attempt. She would be divorced (verbally divorced as the divorce process in Sharia is the husband's decision and informal declaration of dismissal) and jailed.

Afghan women have no right of person.

My family's dear friend Lalia, 27 years old, was born in Kabul. At age 8, she was smuggled into Peshiwar by her uncle, a naturalized American citizen, and eventually brought to the United States. Lalia remembers begging for food as a child on the streets of Kabul. She remembers her mother, starved and exhausted, slipping her tiny bits of stolen bread. The city of homeless orphans, starving children, and no hope is still there, six years after the reported fall of the Taliban.

Lalia survived and feels guilty because her mother and siblings did not. Guilty that she walked out of a war zone and lives in the most unlikely luxury of an American apartment with a private bath. Guilty that her kindred are hungry, and cannot eat the French fries from McDonald's that Lalia will not buy, but will accept from me when I remember this is what she loves most to eat. She sometimes spends an hour or more savoring her small order of French fries.

Lalia is a nurse at a university hospital here in the United States. A kind and soft-spoken young woman who nursed my cousin through a bone marrow transplant and became very emotionally attached to her patient who in time, "looked at me with empathy - I, who had stanched her bleeding and cooled her fevers - and greeted me in the language of my childhood as 'hamshira', my sister."

This afternoon, I saw Lalia, my heroine, the hungry and homeless child of Afghanistan, the little girl who got away, the naturalized American who devotes her life to caring for others. Lalia of the quick temper, the anger swallowed down as though a sip of chai, the disciplined mind, the shy smile, the empathy that knows no barriers.

I mentioned the women of Afghanistan, the jails, the suicides, the average life expectancy of 30 years. We discussed the imprisonment of women whose only crime is being female. We have no answers, Lalia and I. We have only sorrow for our doomed hamshira.

Released from the jails, reintegrated into a society that doesn't exist, set free.

"Why would they want to be 'free'?"

Not only are an estimated half victims themselves, but they are further victimized by the criminal justice process. And on release from prison, they face victimization for a third time. This can take the form of, at best, the family leaving the woman to fend for herself, and at worst, a so-called honour killing.

Update: A masterpiece history of Afghanistan by Unitary Moonbat is available. I recommend reading them all in order posted, as each is a unique work in and of itself. My cousin asked her novio Moonbat for a History for Kossacks diary on Aghanistan once and I know she was moved to tears of joy and gratitude after reading this incredible series. -- j.

I can't offer much in the way of adding commentary, but I did once do a series on Afghan history.  For those who might be interested in some of how things ended up this way, here are some links:

History for Kossacks: Ancient Afghanistan

History for Kossacks: Medieval Afghanistan

History for Kossacks: Early Modern Afghanistan

History for Kossacks: Afghanistan Before Imperialism

History for Kossacks: Afghanistan & the Great Game

History for Kossacks: Kings of 20th Century Afghanistan

History for Kossacks: Soviet & Taliban Afghanistan

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on August 24, 2008 (boomark / email).