No country for old (or young) women?

Like many a soldier and then later in my career, an advisor, I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. Years in fact. I count myself fortunate to have seen a lot of the country and not just the usual circuits of Kandahar and Helmand Provinces where the majority of UK Armed Forces conduct their operational tours. Logar, Herat, Nangarhar, Balkh, Paktia, Paktika, Kunar, Wardak, Parwan, Kabul were some of the regions I travelled and worked among others.

But there was one thing that I couldn’t help but observe on my travels: This was one harsh country. In every way; geographical, political, economical. A feudal landscape still dominated and ruled through tribal fiefdoms and powerful warlords. Travel an hour in any direction away from the capital of Kabul and the impact of Government was absolutely minimal if at all. A patriarchal patchwork of tribal allegiances and ethnic divides where the rule of law was determined at the local level by elders and men of influence. Patriarchal and male. Country-wide, this is how Afghanistan is really controlled.

Which leaves women with a very shitty deal really. On our first operational tours, even us older, worldly-wise individuals could be surprised at the level of the mistreatment of women in Afghanistan. Coming from a society where gender equality is a given and any mistreatment of a woman regarded as a particularly vile crime, some of the things we witnessed were particularly hard to take.

Again, far from the ivory towers of the Kabul government and their proud, vocal assertions that the foreign money and investment was improving the lot of Afghan women, the ground truth was very different. The medics on our patrols would regularly encounter village women hideously disfigured with scar tissue. Due to the patriarchal protocols our male medics were not allowed to treat these women but could only ask about the nature of the injuries in general and leave some medication with them. These injuries were a result of self-immolation; setting oneself on fire. I was to learn later that in a lot of these isolated villages, with very little else at their disposal, dousing themselves in the kerosene used for cooking and heating was a common way for a woman to attempt to kill herself.

The very nature of that type of suicide attempt pretty much underlines what a miserable existence someone must be experiencing to even consider such an act. On one occasion we learned that the woman we were trying to help had been bought and wed to a much older man, and I’m talking decades older here. She had suffered beatings from his other, older wives, given all the chores to carry out, and was being blamed for the chronic illness he was suffering. She had tried to escape back to her family but had been caught and again, brutally beaten for her transgression. Isolated, abused and unsupported she set herself on fire but did not die and was left in horrific agony with no medical treatment or medication to help.

These incidents were always reported back and initiatives and projects were developed to attempt to improve the situation. The setting up of Female Engagement Teams or FETs as they were called, was one such initiative. Female soldiers, translators, medics and civilian specialist advisors would deploy into the regions to engage directly with the local female populace. It was felt that this would be a good work-around the patriarchal limitations that our predominately male-composed patrols had been facing.

The good news stories soon began filtering back, initially in the formal reports and then onto the pages of each country’s military publications and websites. Smiling FETs with arms around village women, photos of a midwifery presentation being delivered in a crumbling concrete shed, footage of gender empowerment talks given to local women. The FETs were a solid program with great aims and focussed individuals motivated by the best of reasons. But they were fighting an uphill battle.

Although I have many examples, I think the one provided to me by a Dutch colleague gives a good general snapshot of how the program was received by the men in these regions. Anna was the lead on a coalition Female Engagement program that was reaching out to women in the isolated mountain villages and hamlets with a view to identifying their needs and addressing these requirements. Anna travelled everywhere with a complement of Dutch Marines for the protection of her team and allow them to carry out their meetings and work without the additional responsibility of looking after their own security. Anna and her team were usually accepted on a sliding scale of grudgingly to indifferent by the village elders. As for the women, it would take a little time for Anna and her team to convince them that they were there solely with the women’s interest at heart.

Anna loved her job, you can still tell that today by the enthusiasm and passion evident in her voice when she speaks about it. For her, to see and hear first hand how these women suffered fuelled her motivation to provide some improvement, no matter how small, to help them. Medical help, encouragement in self-assertion, offers to provide transport to allow them to attend clinics in nearby areas, provision of hygiene products; just some of the small but important initiatives Anna and her team provided to the women living among these remote, bleak mountain ridges.

To this day Anna is still unsure how the villagers managed to isolate her from her Marine security force. What she does remember is turning towards the door of the small room where she and her interpreter had been delivering a class in how to access further treatment. The door was wide open and the men from the village were pouring inside. The women around her began screaming and rushed past her, colliding with the men as they stumbled out of the doorway. The men ignored their wives and daughters, their sole focus on Anna and her interpreter. The first rock hit Anna on her upper shoulder and she barely had time to cover her head with her arms as the barrage of boulders were hurled at her from a distance where the men couldn’t possibly miss. She was knocked down and tried to call on her radio but her lowered arm exposed her head and she took a rock to the forehead that split the skin and made her reel backwards, blood pouring into her eyes. She curled into a ball, covering her head as best she could as rocks continued pounding her body and bouncing off the wall behind her. She was screaming for her team at the top of her lungs as the men of the village grabbed her and tried to prise her arms away from her head to give them a clearer target where they could use their rocks as hammers to crush her skull. Two loud gunshots sounded and Anna screamed with fear, believing that the villagers were now shooting at her. The grabs and the rock throwing ceased and she could hear the confident commands and the new sound of the village men yelping in pain. The security force had arrived.

Anna knows she was lucky. Bar the split forehead and a ton of impressive bruises, she survived. She is under no illusions that if the assault had continued much longer she would have died and her killers disappear into the mountain passes they knew far better than the foreign soldiers. There was of course an inquiry into the incident, how it happened, whose fault was it, but for Anna, more importantly; Why? She was at a loss to identify the motivation for the attack when all she was doing was providing low-level assistance to these men’s wives and daughters.

Turned out that the men of the villages were getting more and more irate at this foreign woman who was trying to make their women as brazen and shameless as she was. Local elders attended a shura, or meeting with Anna’s superiors to explain the incident and made no bones about the fact that they felt that the men who had stoned Anna and her interpreter had been absolutely justified in doing so and they considered the whole program a direct insult to their culture and religion. And would defend both in exactly the same way again if the foreign soldiers continued with their efforts. They didn’t. Anna’s program in the region was dropped in common with anything that was deemed culturally or otherwise incompatible with local sensitivities.

Anna is not bitter about her experience; she spent another few months in Afghanistan after her incident where she experienced some small successes but invariably ran into the same brick wall of patriarchal dominance and utter control over the lives and existence of the women in their towns and villages. An intelligent woman, she sums up her experience as something along the lines of taking 21st century values and equality ethos to a 14th century feudal society incapable of change. We both agree, based upon our experiences that real change for women, and not just the occasional good news story from Kabul trumpeted to the world’s media for its rarity, will only come with generational change. And quite a few generations.

I know some people will read this post and form the opinion that I maybe misrepresent the misogynistic treatment as being systemic, but I don’t. I think the case that highlights just how deep-rooted the problem continues to be is the barbaric murder of Farkhunda Malikzada back in 2015. This was a well-educated woman studying Islam who had the audacity to challenge the custodian of a shrine who was preying on the women who visited it by coercing them to purchase superstitious amulets. Farkhunda shamed the custodian with her knowledge of Islam and she snatched his paper amulets up, threw them in a rubbish bin and burnt them. The custodian retrieved the burnt ashes, placed them in an old copy of the Quran and went into the street holding it aloft in indignation and claiming that Farkhunda had burnt the holy book.

It was 4pm, prayer time, and Kabul was very busy. The reaction was immediate. Men in the street turned on Farkhunda and within seconds she was being beaten and accused of being an American spy. The police initially tried to help her but the mob had now reached the hundreds and had fuelled themselves into a body of rage. So the police stood back and let the animals have their way.

This whole incident was captured on film so I’m not going to go into it in painful detail as a quick type of Farkhunda’s name into a search engine will bring up the recordings. It is still one of the most vile killings I have seen and serves as a reminder how quickly hatred manifests itself as physical violence.

Farkhunda was stamped upon, beaten with planks and poles, punched then run over by a car that dragged her for 300 metres. Still not enough for the crowd, they threw her body onto the dry river bed and tried to set her on fire. She had been injured so badly however that her burqa was soaked in blood and wouldn’t take light. The mob actually used their own scarves as fuel around her body to ensure it ignited. When the police eventually arrived at this horrific cremation they advised the crowd to step back and be careful that they didn’t get burned.

So; all captured on mobile phones and the footage studied with 49 perpetrators identified, 19 of them police officers. In the end 3 men were handed sentences of 20 years and 1 man given 10 years despite the fact that the death penalty is the standard for such a heinous crime. The policemen were punished with…a travel ban. Yep, not allowed to travel outside their regions for a year. And the men who received the actual sentences? Doubtful any of them will serve anything remotely close to what they got if indeed, they even remain in jail today. And the custodian who started all of this? A proper investigation identified that he had been selling condoms, viagra, and acting as a pimp for women he prostituted from the area near the shrine. But he wasn’t beaten and set alight to by a mob of baying, rabid animals. He had nothing even close to the treatment of his victim despite his proven crimes.

All because Farkhunda was a woman. Her death was not even deemed that important until the pressure from the international community forced the Kabul government to actually deal with the crime. A telling portion of the whole sorry tale was when Farkhunda’s parents arrived at the police station on hearing that their daughter was in trouble. The Chief of Police turned to them and informed them that their daughter had burnt the Quran, that it was a proven fact beyond dispute and there was nothing more to be said about the matter. Case closed.

The title of one of my favourite books of all time is ‘No country for old men’ by Cormac McCarthy and it’s a phrase that always springs to mind whenever I think about the woman of Afghanistan where it remains No country for old, or young, women.

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