This administration (in the US) started off in December 2008, with an overture to the Taliban - make peace with us and let us leave your god-forsaken rock. Obama wanted out very badly, still does. Damn all the indications the Taliban has not reformed. Just make the deal and let us escape from that hole.
Why should we remain. I am not certain we should, but we should be quite sure what we leave in charge of that place and the people, and make no mistake we are not dealing with civilization or a civilized people.
19 June 2002
ZARMINA'S STORY
From Anton Antonowicz In Kabul
MILLIONS of people have watched this woman
die. Yet none saw her face.
Only a handful of people know the real
story which led to 35-year-old Zarmina being executed on the penalty spot in
Kabul's Olympic Stadium in Afghanistan.
The image of this mother of five children
being driven to her death in a Toyota pick-up for the crime of killing her
husband shocked the world.
This anonymous woman being dragged across
the pitch in front of 30,000 spectators and being made to kneel before the
goalposts until the tall, thin Taliban rifleman blew out her brains.
The scene was recorded with a hidden video
camera and smuggled into Pakistan by the brave women of RAWA, the Revolutionary
Association of Women from Afghanistan.
Later, it marked the opening scenes of
Beneath the Veil, Channel 4's award-winning documentary of life inside
Afghanistan under the fanatical Taliban.
Here was the truth of life in a nation
wracked by 23 years of war yet largely ignored until that day.
When the Mirror first published
photographs of Zarmina's death in June last year we were inundated by calls and
letters from readers.
Few knew of real life under the regime
which came to power in 1996. September 11 changed all that.
But one, simple question remained
unanswered. One which obsessed me from the moment I first saw that secret
footage in spring last year.
If the claim that Zarmina had murdered her
husband was true, what was the desperation, knowing the Taliban's brutality,
which ultimately led her to her death?
And what, if anything, did it tell us
about the life of women under the fanatics' yoke?
These were the questions which took me to
Afghanistan. To a secret rendezvous. To a filthy prison. To a cemetery. To
houses where doors slammed in my face. Where men with guns threatened to kill
me if I continued asking questions.
FINALLY, last Friday, a thin airmail
letter arrived on my desk, post-marked April 6.
It contained three pages of green biro
notes ripped from a school exercise book, confirming details which myself and
colleague Tom Newton Dunn discovered during two separate Afghan assignments.
It also held a tiny photograph, the size
of a thumbnail, from a police file - the face of Zarmina, the woman beneath the
veil.
The letter came from a young
"fixer" I hired in Kabul. It followed a meeting I had arranged with a
woman police inspector who had promised that somehow she would ensure Zarmina's
real story was told. Rana Sayeed works at the central police station in Kabul.
It was sheer chance that we first found her on a rain-lashed day in late February
standing at the entrance to the women's jail.
Rana, a mother in her late 40s, appeared
different from most Afghan women. She did not wear a burka. Her manner was loud
and confident.
She spoke of her training as a detective
and told how she was sent to Moscow by Afghanistan's former Soviet puppet
regime.
Rana said she had been a police officer
for some 20 years. "Even the Taliban needed some women to apply law and
order," she said, suddenly lowering and shaking her head. "Even the
Taliban..."
She took us across the mud-caked compound
into the charred basement of the police HQ.
The room held two desks and one old
typewriter. The air was still heavy with the stench of smoke from hundreds of
fires the Taliban started in Kabul before they fled.
She asked us to wait until her boss gave
her clearance. When eventually the newly-appointed chief of Kabul's police told
her to give us every assistance, she began.
"At last Zarmina's story can be
told," she said. "It is the story of one woman. But it is also the
story of Afghan women under the Taliban, under brutes who turned our country
into a zoo and our women into dogs.
"I thought Zarmina would die when
they brought her here. They beat her for two days with steel cables until she
confessed.
"But she was a tough one. As she lay
on the floor of the cell, she pointed to her one-year-old twins - the girl
Silsila and the boy Jawad - and said she would fight for life, fight as the
mother of these babies.
"There were other children. Zarmina
had a son Hawad, who was 11, and two beautiful daughters Shaista, 14, and
Najeba just 16.
"It was her love for all of them
which drove her to do what she did. The tragedy is that it made life a thousand
times worse for them."
Zarmina, from northern Kabul, was married
at 16. It was an arranged union but blossomed into love.
She was an attractive, feisty woman. Her
Pashtun husband, Alauddin Khwazak, from the village of Paghman an hour's drive
away, was a policeman who also owned a small general store.
It was a marriage which flowered in the
face of war and seemed at first to survive the violence in Kabul.
But almost imperceptibly, perhaps
inevitably, the relationship began to fall apart. Relentless bloodshed changed
everyone. And it destroyed Zarmina's husband.
The bombings, mass rapes, and murders
brutalised Khwazak's mind, infecting it with an insidious poison.
A NEIGHBOUR told me: "He had been a
mild man but slowly he turned into a monster. Perhaps, as a policeman, he had
seen too much.
"He'd rage. He became violent. He was
mad with jealousy, convinced that Zarmina was seeing other men. It was rubbish.
But his head was wrapped in madness."
When the Taliban took control of Kabul in
September, 1996, they effectively handed Khwazak a licence for that madness.
For these fundamentalist "students"
from the south, Kabul was Satan's playground. A place where women were allowed
to wear miniskirts and attend high school and university. A world of sin.
Women had no rights in Taliban
Afghanistan. They existed only to obey.
They were drones to bear children, cook
and satisfy men. They were lashed for their high heels, had their fingertips
amputated for revealing varnish and and were stoned to death for prostitution.
Two women charged with adultery were
hanged from a crane. A boy of 10 was given a gun to shoot his father's killer
and a girl of seven whipped for wearing white shoes.
Girls were forbidden to attend school and
summary justice wrapped in a medieval robe was the creed. Ruthless in pursuit
of purity and perfect proof that no crime is too awful if justified by
religious belief.
Khwazak's moods matched the new doctrine.
His brother, a dour and unforgiving man, hailed the Taliban's fundamentalism
and fed his sibling's fevered brain.
Rana said: "Khwazak beat his wife
every night. He abused her and her elder daughters. I don't know if there was
sexual abuse, but it was something Zarmina could no longer bear. So she plotted
with Najeba to kill him. And finally they did it."
The murder was carried out early one
summer night five years ago.
Some say Zarmina put opium in Khwazak's
food. Rana says she laced his meal with sleeping pills. As he fell into a
drugged sleep Zarmina woke her daughter.
Rana said: "She told me that there,
at the final moment, she couldn't do it."
It was Najeba who took the 10lb mason's
hammer and killed her father with one blow to the head.
Rana said: "They ran from the house
screaming that robbers had broken in and attacked Khwazak. They said the men
were 'shadows in the night'.
"Some believed them, others weren't
so sure. Zarmina's brother-in-law was the first to accuse and called the
Taliban.
"They never found the hammer, but
they got their confession. That was all that mattered.
"Zarmina said she was the murderer.
That she acted alone. She stuck to that story all the time she was tortured. It
was only two years later when she knew me well that she admitted the truth. And
I wasn't going to tell anyone."
ZARMINA was taken to the central jail and
held there with her twins for nearly three years.
Sometimes her mother would come with food.
But she condemned her daughter for bringing shame on all of them and said she
hated her.
She told Zarmina other women in jail would
kill her. Yet it was those prisoners who helped keep her and her children
alive.
Rana went on: "They'd give them
scraps. I gave her a few blankets. Somehow she stayed alive.
"She was a brave woman and fought
desperately against her fears. She told the Taliban she was a mother and that
what she'd done was for her children."
Rana said: "She asked what would
happen to her children without a mother? She pleaded with them to lash her and
let her go to tend her precious kids.
"She had dreams in which her husband
appeared. Then she said she knew she would die."
Zarmina's elder girls and son were given
to her brother-in-law, according to tradition.
He was Taliban and demanded blood law
refusing to let her escape death. Then, two months before the execution, he
told Zarmina's mother he had sold Najeba and Shaista into sex slavery.
"That nearly killed Zarmina,"
said Rana. "Everything she'd done was for her children. Now it had taken
her girls to a living hell.
"The brother-in-law even made sure
she knew the price, 600,000 Pakistani rupees for Najeba and 300,000 for
Shaista. Sold to a man from Khost."
Khost, seven hours south east of Kabul on
the Pakistani border, is a name which echoes loud.
The city was a Taliban stronghold. The
place where al-Qaeda had its main training camp and the tunnels from which
Osama bin Laden issued his fatwa to kill Americans and their allies.
"Zarmina beat herself, smashed her
head against the jail wall," said Rana. "Of course her daughters were
sold to Taliban, but who? To Afghans? To fanatics? To bin Laden? She knew she'd
never see them again."
Then, on November 15, 1999, the radio
announced there would be an execution in two days time.
Zarmina knew nothing of this. She had
spent nearly three years in jail and knew there would be punishment. But still
she convinced herself they would not kill a mother.
EVEN when the guards came for her she said
she expected to face 100 lashes, but no more.
She put on three dresses - two borrowed -
underneath her burka, hoping they would soften the blows.
Rana said: "I was ordered to
accompany her with two women police officers.
"We climbed into the pick-up with her
and prayed together. I couldn't stand it. I left before the truck entered the
stadium.
'And I'll tell you that after what
happened next, those two colleagues never worked again. One had a nervous
breakdown. The other is plagued by nightmares to this day." As the stadium
crowd settled, an announcer described what was to happen: "Zarmina,
daughter of Ghulam Hasnat, is to be executed for killing her husband with a
hammer."
He falsely said the murder happened
"five months ago". But the truth would not have fitted the Taliban
creed of swift justice.
The reality was that her execution was
delayed until a premium price was haggled and paid for her virgin daughters.
The video takes over. It first shows the
Toyota twice circling the pitch, the driver parading his passenger before the
spectators.
Zarmina, flanked by her two female
escorts, sees little. Surgeons in masks stand to one side, ready for
amputations which will follow the main event.
The next clip shows the two women guards
escorting Zarmina to the goal area. She is told to sit. For the first time, the
crowd of men, women and children falls silent. Slowly a tall Taliban steps
forward. Zarmina tries to crawl away. What is not shown is the first shot.
The executioner's hands are shaking. The
cries from the crowd to spare Zarmina unnerve him. Officials refuse all pleas
for clemency. They claimed there were too many in the crowd who wanted to see
death.
The first shot creases Zarmina's hair
telling her at last what her fate would be. Her precious children brought for
the spectacle can only stand and stare.
Zarmina cries out. She says she cannot sit
or kneel without falling. "Someone take my arms," she pleads.
Her last request went unanswered. The
gunman aimed his Kalashnikov again. And Zarmina was dead from a single 7.62mm
bullet. The executioner turned away, blood law sated. He was Zarmina's
brother-in-law. The man who sold her precious girls. The man who, Rana is sure,
escaped to Pakistan with so many others. A man with money in his pocket.
ZARMINA'S body was taken to the Wazir Akbar
Khan hospital.
Her body lay unclaimed in the mortuary for
20 days. Her mother, Shah Sultan, refused any responsibility, telling Rana:
"She brought shame. She deserved what she got. She is not even a memory to
me."
Zarmina was buried in an unmarked grave
300 yards from her unforgiving mother's home.
Rana took me to the cemetery in Khair
Khana, in District 11, north Kabul. She stayed in the car while I tried to find
the grave.
She said it was safer that way. That
locals might object to her being in the company of foreign men. The
gravediggers denied any knowledge of the executed woman. One man produced a gun
and told myself and photographer Phil Spencer we had no business there.
Then a young fellow, perhaps 20 and
dressed in a red blazer, drew up on his bike. "I know what you are looking
for," he said.
"Everyone knows about Zarmina. They
don't want trouble. They don't want reminding. But they are ashamed of what
happened to that woman and her girls."
People know when a wrong has been done.
But there was palpable fear that Afghanistan's turmoil would once again
overwhelm them.
That the Taliban were all around. That
they would return and exact vengeance upon anyone who might now question their
actions.
The cyclist ignored those fears. He led us
through the cemetery. A stark moonscape of a place. So little colour. So much
misery. So many newly dead. Just scores of the thousands who died young in an
incessant war.
My guide pointed out a mound with two
stones facing each other flat on. The positioning meant it was a woman's grave.
But there was nothing else to determine
whose it was. Just the anger of the gunman and other armed men nearby, the
embarrassed faces of the gravediggers and the cyclist pointing and saying
"This is Zarmina".
He refused my offer of money, saying
"It is time Zarmina's story was told." And of course there are so
many of these stories to be told.
"There were so many nightmares
here," Rana said as we drove to The Herat, Kabul's best restaurant. The
place is little better than a greasy spoon. But Rana would not enter.
"It's OK. You go, you sit. Just ask
them to bring me some food in the car." That is how it still is in
Afghanistan. The Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies may be put to rout but still
women's rights are hardly a footnote on the agenda.
WE speak to a beggar woman by the
restaurant door. She has three children all under five. Her husband is dead.
She tells me life should be better now.
She receives about 50p a day.
She says all this through her burka. A
Pushtun barges through the crowd, bends over her and strikes her head.
"Get lost, you whore-bitch!" he shouts. And the woman scrambles away
with her children.
I ask Bashir, our "fixer", why
he did that. Was he related to the woman? "No. He's just a Taliban type.
Any woman is ripe for a beating. They don't need an excuse."
We ate with Rana in the car. She said:
"I remember another stadium execution where the man had 10 bullets in his
body. His victim's family took turns to shoot him.
"I remember a woman the Taliban
accused of having a walkie-talkie. There were 16 of them beating her with cable
wires until she pissed blood. All the time they made sure her head and face
were covered so they should not be tempted by her looks.
"I tell you I thank God for September
11. Not for the innocent deaths. But, without that day, we'd still be treated
like animals.
"The whole place was run by
Pakistanis and Arabs. No one dared say anything against them.
"It was the same the day Zarmina
died. Everyone knew she did not deserve to die. But nobody said anything.
Nobody dared."
Now some do dare to speak. Rana and
Zarmina's neighbours tell me the twins, now six, and their brother Hawad,16,
have been cast adrift.
Unwanted by their fleeing uncle.
Unacknowledged by their grandmother. They beg, they rag-pick at the local
dumps. But nothing has been seen of Najeba and Shaista.
Five children all lost because of a
mother's desperation to give them a better life. "Yes," Rana
repeated, "Zarmina's story must be told."
So, with that photograph arriving on my
desk last week, it has been told. It cannot be the whole truth but from what we
have found and checked, it is nothing but the truth.
The story of a woman beneath veils of
violence, madness and terrible sadness. A woman so many saw die. But never knew
how she had lived.
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