Once a beacon of hope for Afghan women, now BROKEN & SCARED
As progress for women unravels, one of the country’s pioneering female MPs is now living in a battered women’s shelter.
For years she was a symbol of a new country rising from the ashes of Taliban rule, as one of the women whose voices were finally being heard after a decade of brutal oppression in Afghanistan. Noor Zia Atmar, a young activist and then one of the country’s first woman MPs, travelled the world with her colleagues to show that things were changing.
That was three years ago. Now, she lives in a shelter for battered women, the victim of an abusive husband, and a symbol of the way progress in women’s rights is unravelling as the West withdraws and more traditional conservative values return to the fore.
“Women are in a worse condition now. Every day they are being killed, having their ears, noses cut,” said Atmar, 40, speaking in a strong, clear voice, her eye makeup hidden behind dark glasses. “It is not just women in villages, it is also people like me.”
Progress in women’s rights is frequently hailed as one of the great successes of NATO’s coalition, the International Security Assistance Force, but 10 years on, campaigners say Atmar’s case is one of several examples that show how reforms are coming undone.
Not only are conservatives campaigning to close women’s shelters, which they describe as whore houses, the country’s parliament is considering a change in the law to prevent relatives testifying against each other. That would effectively make prosecutions for domestic violence impossible.
Human rights groups say this is the latest in a string of measures that will weaken protection for women and herald a return to the days when Islamists all but erased women from public life.
Under the Taliban, girls’ schools closed, women were banned from working outside the home and were forced to wear the burka.
It was a difficult time for Atmar’s family. Her father, an engineer, had died when she was young, but her mother had fought hard so that she would receive an education.
The family fled to Pakistan on the day the Taliban marched into Kabul — along with millions of other Afghan refugees — returning only after they were ousted by the U.S.-led invasion that followed alQaida’s Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.
She first worked for community groups, travelling to remote villages to help women find education and health care. Then came elections in 2005, under a new constitution that was drafted with American guidance and which guaranteed the rights of women and minorities. At the time, the polls were hailed as a decisive break with the Taliban’s medieval mindset.
More importantly, so far as Atmar was concerned, it also guaranteed a quarter of the seats for women, offering her the chance to take her message of women’s empowerment to a much wider audience. It was a heady time, she won a seat and was filled with optimism. She helped push through landmark legislation banning 22 acts of violence against women and still has the visa stamps in her passport from her visits to the UK, India, Turkey and France where — along with other female legislators — she was welcomed as the embodiment of the new Afghanistan.
But things began to change for her, and for Afghanistan, at about the same time she got married, toward the end of her five-year term as an MP.
Unable to compete with her rivals’ war chests and entrenched corruption, she lost her bid for re-election in 2010. And it gradually became clear that her husband, a businessman who she had hoped would support her career, did not share her ideals.
He refused to let her leave the house and at one point banned her from using the phone. “He would get drunk and demand I remove his shoes. Then he would shout at me to put them back on, over and over. If I refused he would beat me. It was torture,” she said. “He would come to me the next day and apologize but then at night he would do it again. Finally I asked for a divorce.”
For most Afghan women, divorce is not even an option, and even in the more liberal atmosphere of the capital, Kabul, Atmar’s family disapproved. They insisted she do anything but seek a divorce.
“They saw my face bruised, and scars from the knife, but they told me it was a traditional society, that I would bring shame on the family,” she said. When she sought out a lawyer anyway, they abandoned her, leaving her to fend for herself.
Home has been a shelter for the past two years. She said she was uncertain about what the future might hold. Informal approaches to the British embassy had ended with a curt message that asylum was not available for victims of domestic abuse. “They said that would open the doors to too many women to come,” she said.
As the West scales down its involvement, a conservative society is gradually reasserting itself through parliament, overturning quotas and legal protections which many see as imposed by the U.S.
Many fear that the Afghan government is preparing for a peace deal with the Taliban, and is more interested in shoring up support among conservatives than in pushing through reforms.
At the end of next year international combat troops will have completed their withdrawal. Atmar, and other Afghans like her, wonder whether that means the world will forget about Afghan women all together.
“It will be a huge tragedy if this happens,” she said. “We must remove fundamentalism from Afghanistan. The world should remember, the fire from here might not reach their country, but the smoke will.”
‘Women are in a worse condition now. Every day they are being killed, having their ears, noses cut. It is not just women in villages, it is also people like me.’
NOOR ZIA ATMAR, One of Afghanistan’s first female MPs