Force of nature declares war on peace with Taliban
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN >> The driver of a car that was stopped in the middle of the road, blocking traffic, was shocked when a passing motorist rolled down the window and shouted at him, “Dirty donkey.”
He was even more surprised when he looked up to see that the insult came from a woman. A woman driving a car. A woman driving a car without wearing the obligatory hijab.
That was Laila Haidari, who runs a popular cafe in Kabul that allows men and women to dine together, whether married or not, with or without a headscarf, and uses the profits to fund a rehabilitation clinic for drug addicts.
Nearly everyone addresses Haidari, 39, as “Nana,” or “Mom,” and her supporters describe her as the “mother of a thousand children,” after the number of Afghan addicts she reportedly has saved.
Haidari plans to start a popular uprising against the continuing peace talks with the Taliban.
“Guys, the Taliban are coming back,” she said one day recently to a mixed group of diners at her restaurant, Taj Begum, which has been subjected to virulent attacks in the local media that have all but compared it to a brothel.
“We have to organize,” she told her customers. “I hope to find 50 other women who will stand up and say, ‘We don’t want peace.’ If the Taliban comes back, you will not have a friend like me, and there will be no restaurant like Taj Begum.”
Her nearly always crowded restaurant, on the banks of the sewage-drenched Kabul River, is named after a 15th-century warrior princess from Herat who helped rule a vast kingdom, a rare example of female power from that time.
Haidari is as unusual in her own 21st-century age.
Although most women’s activists in Afghanistan have been Western-financed and supported, she has insisted on organizing her political activity herself, and on her own terms.
“We need to change our own men and our own families first,” Haidari said in an interview. “Don’t think of me as a victim, like so many of our women in public life seem to be. I’m not going to sit across from the Taliban wearing hijab begging for my rights.”
Few women’s activists here challenge patriarchal social norms to the degree Haidari does, and those who do tend to do it quietly and politely, and to come from Western-educated, liberal families who support their rebellion.
Haidari does it loudly and often rudely and comes from a religiously conservative family who married her at 12 to a mullah two decades older.
“Ever since age 12, I feel like I’ve been in a boxing ring,” she said. “Back then I didn’t know that child marriage was something unjust, even though I had this feeling I was being raped every night by a full-grown man, and that was wrong.”
Her family had fled to Iran as refugees, and Haidari bore the mullah three children there. Her husband allowed her to take religious classes, but she secretly began studying general subjects and eventually went to an Iranian university, where she earned a degree in filmmaking.
Haidari divorced her husband — under Islamic law, he kept the children — and returned to Afghanistan, where she discovered her brother Hakim living under a bridge in Kabul, a heroin addict. She promised God she would open a treatment center for addicts if she could save him, and she did, using the Narcotics Anonymous 12-step method, and a dose of tough love.
At the treatment center,
Mother’s Trust, the 20 male addicts have their heads shaved and wear purple uniforms, to discourage them from leaving.
“If they relapse and come here a second time, I shave their eyebrows off, too,” Haidari said.
No smoking is allowed and daily exercise is required, and the men share in the work of cooking and cleaning.
“If they break the rules, I’ll beat them,” she said as the men, gathered around her in an affable group, laughed.
Among the men was a severely disabled youth, not an addict. Haidari said she found him in a trash dump, injured and unable to speak.
Despite appeals on social media,
no relatives have come forward.
“We don’t even know his name, so we call him Omid,” she said. The name means hope.
The addicts all care for Omid, feeding him, bathing him. “It’s good for them to have someone to take care of,” Haidari said.
Many of the addicts tell of having been in government treatment programs like Camp Phoenix, financed by international donors, only to find them rife with easily available drugs.
Haidari says 1,000 graduates from her center have stayed clean for a year or more, out of some 5,000 she says she has treated since founding the clinic eight years ago.