The Lovers (46 page)

Indignant protests by her family forced prosecutors to take a
harder look at the suicide theory, and eventually Mr. Behishti and the other two men were charged with murder and his wife was arrested as an accomplice. He and his wife were released with charges dismissed, however—he had powerful friends in the Hazara community—and only his nephew, Abdul Wahab, was convicted. The Behishtis then unsuccessfully sought to overturn Mr. Wahab’s conviction on appeal, but after a judge tried the difficult feat of pointing such a gun at his own heart at the same angle and pulling the trigger, he refused—although Mr. Wahab has remained free on further appeals. Shakila’s arms were too short for her to have held the gun and fired it from the necessary position. Someone had stood behind and above her head as she lay on her back on the floor, having just been raped, and shot her through the heart.

Two years later no one had served jail time, and the prime suspect, Mr. Behishti himself, was never prosecuted. DNA samples taken of semen found in her body simply disappeared from the investigative file, as did fingerprint impressions taken from the weapon. The circumstantial evidence against Mr. Behishti’s nephew was the same as that against the MP and rested on the absurdity of his claim not to have heard a gunshot less than fifty feet away from where he sat at the time. Yet only his nephew was prosecuted, and not very successfully.

THE VIRGIN RAPE

Sometimes the saddest cases are not the ones in which the victims die but in which they are forced to live with their shame and humiliation perpetually unresolved, their lives irredeemably ruined. So it was with the case of a girl who was beaten until she admitted having been raped, then was lashed a hundred times as an adulterer but later was tested and found to be still a virgin.

It happened in the district of Jaghori in Ghazni Province, to a girl named Sabira, who was fifteen at the time, in 2012. Jaghori is a peaceful corner of Ghazni famous for its high level of education, for both boys and girls. Largely Hazara, the community prides itself on being broad-minded and progressive, and the proliferation of
girls’ schools is higher than in any other part of Afghanistan, with the exception of Kabul, the capital. The community’s most famous daughter is Sima Samar, the head of the Afghan human-rights commission, whose well-to-do family’s philanthropies included many of Jaghori’s schools. Even in Jaghori, though, Sabira ended up being publicly whipped on the orders of mullahs and elders for having been raped—despite the protests of her family, and her own claim that she was a virgin, and the insistence of the accused rapist that he’d not had sex with her. Her virginity was confirmed by a forensic exam, but it was not carried out until a couple of months after the fact. The only supposed offense anyone was able to prove against Sabira was that she had been seen alone with a tailor for five minutes in his shop in the middle of a crowded bazaar.

A report later by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission details her story, in an English-language version,
²⁶
based on an interview with Sabira:

I went to a tailor’s shop where both the tailor and his assistant were present. After a while, the tailor asked his assistant to go out and bring something from the bazaar for him. When the assistant left the shop, the tailor took my hands and brought me to the closet. He asked me to have sex with him while I denied and tried to shout, but his palm was faster. He put it on my mouth and forcibly raped me. He then threatened me not to disclose the case.

Terrified by what would happen if she talked, Sabira remained silent and returned to her home.

Days later, around four p.m., I went with my younger sister to our lands to collect some almonds, where suddenly a villager beat me with a long stick and took me to my paternal uncle’s house. I saw around 50 men from my village gathered in the house. They beat me as well and asked me with whom I have had a relation. After continued beating and under the pain I felt, I finally admitted that a tailor raped me.

Later Sabira recanted her testimony and said that she had admitted to rape only to stop the beating and because it seemed less dire than to admit to consensual sex—which she had not had, but which the men beating her were convinced she had, and so they’d continued to beat her until they had her “confession.” It seemed clear from the reports on the case that Sabira was simply so inexperienced that she was not really clear about what constituted either sex or rape.

When district police arrested the tailor, villagers intervened and insisted that they did not want to see a legal process and preferred to handle the case in a traditional way, through a
jirga
of clergymen and elders in their village of Nawdeh Hotqol. The government acquiesced in that and released the tailor, handing both Sabira and him over to the villagers for judgment. The villagers believed the tailor’s denials and released him, but for reasons that defy logic they continued to insist that the girl had engaged in sex based on her confession to rape.

Four clergy asked me to answer their questions, which lasted about 15 minutes. I told them that the tailor raped me, but they did not accept my answer and said that my claim was not reliable. They finally decided to lash me a hundred times, while the perpetrator was released because of his denying. I rejected their decision and said that I would appeal for an official due process. But they did not let me go.

Denied any legal process, Sabira was taken out into the desert on the edge of the village and forced to lie facedown in the dirt as crowds gathered on the roofs of homes and on nearby hillsides to watch. The lashes were administered by one of the old mujahideen, a commander from the days of the anti-Communist (and antifeminist) jihad. “One of the famous commanders [was] ordered to lash me one hundred times, but he lashed me one more, one hundred and one,” Sabira said. The 101st lash was the unkindest cut of all. A hundred lashes is enough to severely injure the victim, if administered vigorously, and these lashes reportedly were. The man who
whipped her was named Salaam, the junior commander to a local militia leader named Bashi Habib, another former jihadi stalwart, now working as the head of an
arbakai
unit—a sort of informal police body but really no more than a self-appointed militia.
²⁷

Sabira was lashed so brutally that she suffered a permanent injury to her hip. When her parents tried to stop the punishment, they were set upon by the villagers and badly beaten; her father, Iqbal Masoomi, sixty, was hospitalized for two days, and he said that his wife suffered a permanent dent in the side of her skull from the attack.

Zahra Sepehr, executive director of the Development and Support of Afghan Women and Children Organization,
²⁸
who worked closely with Sabira and her family, said that Sabira had never been raped, nor had she engaged in sexual intercourse, as the later forensic examination done in Ghazni city showed. Said women’s-rights activist Hussain Hasrat, “They felt that if we do not lash the girl, other girls will follow her and have sex, and the community will be destroyed.” In other words, it didn’t matter whether or not she had sex. The mere suspicion that she had was enough to warrant punishment in order to set a good example, in the eyes of these people from one of Afghanistan’s better-educated communities.

Protests by women’s groups over the girl’s lashing forced authorities to arrest thirteen persons, who were eventually charged in the beatings of Sabira’s parents. The mullahs who ordered her lashing and the two jihadi commanders who carried them out were initially charged but then released after a protest from the Ulema Council—of which one of the mullahs was a member.
²⁹
“Many agencies or NGOs were not interested to follow the case because the Ulema Council was involved, and they didn’t want to confront them,” Ms. Sepehr said. The thirteen who were arrested were convicted but received minor fines of three thousand afghanis each, less than sixty dollars—for beating the girl’s father and mother. No one was punished for administering the crippling lashes to Sabira.

The tailor fled Afghanistan, while Sabira spent a year in a women’s shelter in Kabul. She tried to join the Afghan National Army when she reached the legal age of eighteen in 2014—her
dream had been to enroll in the military academy and become an army officer. But she had stopped her education at the tenth grade when all this happened, and upon trying to enlist as a common soldier, she was rejected on medical grounds, because of the injury to her hip from the lashings. She was officially classified as permanently disabled.

As of late 2014, she was languishing in a juvenile-detention facility in Kabul, waiting until she turns nineteen. “She has just given up,” said her father. “They ruined her life and took away her future.” It also ruined Mr. Masoomi’s future; he was fired as the village schoolteacher and did not get his job back even after his daughter’s innocence was proved. Until all this happened, Mr. Masoomi’s children had been doing admirably well. One is a nurse, and another is studying obstetrics at medical school in Kabul; except for Sabira, all the others are still in school.

There were eight daughters and no sons in the family, which was the heart of Mr. Masoomi’s problem, said Ms. Sepehr. Not only did that mean he had no sons to defend the home when the other villagers rampaged in response to their suspicions about his daughter, but it also meant that in the eyes of his fellow Afghans he was somehow deficient as the sire of mere females.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to recognize the spirit and generosity of the Afghan and Iranian poets and musicians quoted in this book, who all readily extended permission to cite their work, and who are evidence that love will flourish even in the harshest of environments.

This book was conceived with the help and nurtured by the encouragement of my agent, David Patterson of the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency in New York City, who was instrumental in shaping it as well as placing it; they do not come any better. My editor at Ecco, Hilary Redmon, did a masterful job of guiding me through smart and insightful edits that always preserved my voice while encouraging me to make the book ever better. Copy editor Maureen Sugden’s industry and intelligence were impressive, and occasionally life-saving. Thanks as well to Ecco publisher Dan Halpern, whose early and continued enthusiasm for
The Lovers
was very gratifying. The entire team at Ecco and HarperCollins, including Sonya Cheuse, Ashley Garland, Emma Janaskie, Rachel Meyers, Ben Tomek, Sara Wood, and Craig Young, welcomed this newcomer into their house with tremendous hospitality and support.

Throughout my work on this book, no one was more important than Jawad Sukhanyar, from the Kabul bureau of the
New York Times,
who was my indispensable interpreter, guide, and intermediary
with the lovers and their culture. Jawad’s concern and diligence saved many a day. As a reporter on women’s issues, he has no equal among Afghan journalists of either gender.

My best friend, Matthew Naythons, M.D., was a constructive critic throughout every stage of both my reporting this story and writing the book. The writer Ruth Marshall was my first and most intelligent reader, whose insights and advice proved invaluable. My
New York Times
colleague Alissa Johannsen Rubin, who I am proud to say has twice been my boss, brought to bear her deep understanding and long reporting experience on Afghan women’s issues, which greatly improved the context I was able to give to the lovers’ travails. Thanks as well to my editors at the
Times
and especially Douglas Schorzman, whose usual enthusiasm for stories from Afghanistan gave this one a strong ride early on, making everything that followed possible.

Finally, and most of all, my heartfelt appreciation goes to my wife, Sheila Webb, and to our children, Samantha, Johanna, and Jake Webb Nordland, who all understood the importance of this book and readily accepted seeing even less of me than usual over the past year and a half.

Kabul, October, 2015

NOTES

All quotations in this book are based on my own interviews unless otherwise indicated in the notes; similarly, factual assertions not based on my own reporting are recorded here.

1: UNDER THE GAZE OF THE BUDDHAS

1
.   
New York Times,
Mar. 10, 2014, p. A1, www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/world/asia/2-star-crossed-afghans-cling-to-love-even-at-risk-of-death.html.

Mar. 31, 2014, p. A6, www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/world/asia/afghan-couple-finally-together-but-a-storybook-ending-is-far-from-assured.html.

Apr. 22, 2014, p. A4, www.nytimes.com/2014/04/22/world/asia/afghan-couple-find-idyllic-hide-out-in-mountains-but-not-for-long.html.

May 4, 2014, p. A10, www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/world/asia/in-spite-of-the-law-afghan-honor-killings-of-women-continue.html.

May 19, 2014, p. A10, www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/world/asia/afghan-lovers-plight-shaking-up-the-lives-of-those-left-in-their-wake.html.

June 8, 2014, p. A14, www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/world/asia/for-afghan-lovers-joy-is-brief-ending-in-arrest.html.

2
.   On the Persian calendar, the year begins on March 21, the first day of spring.

3
.   A permanent terminal building at the Bamiyan Airport was constructed with foreign-aid money in 2015.

4
.   UNESCO website, “Cultural Landscape and Archaeological Remains of the Bamiyan Valley,” whc.unesco.org/en/list/208.