At the polls in Bamiyan, the anti-Taliban province that’s seeing a resurgence of female participation.
BY E. BENJAMIN SKINNER
AMIYAN, AFGHANISTAN — On the day before Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections, Razia Hussaini, 30, one of six female candidates from Bamiyan province, was making a valiant effort to be polite to an American journalist and election observer. Sitting on the floor of her family’s humble home in the Hindu Kush, overlooking the old Silk Road, the high-school educated political neophyte had a lot on her mind. Two cell phones in front of her buzzed regularly with updates from campaign workers, to whom she relayed terse directions. Her proud but nervous male relatives sat quietly across the room, serving her guests tea and sweets. If history were a guide, Hussaini, of the ethnic minority Hazara, should have been the one serving. But Hussaini is no victim of history; with these elections, she and other Hazara women hope to write their own.
“I’m waiting and excited,” she said. “I just pray that the elections will be peaceful. Afterwards, I pray that I will be able to help my people in the parliament.” On E-Day, Saturday, Sept. 18, her first prayers were answered, at least in Bamiyan, the Hazara heartland. It may take a month before the certified count will determine whether or not she will join at least 68 other women, whose seats are allotted by law, in the lower house. Win or lose, she and the other Hazara candidates expressed gratitude to be living in what is today Afghanistan’s most peaceful, and in many ways most progressive, province.
Hussaini is not the only female Hazara politician who describes these as Halcyon days for the province. “Today I feel very lucky,” said Bamiyan’s Governor Habiba Sarabi, 44, on Saturday morning. Sarabi had just cast her vote at the Saed Abad Girls School, which served as a women’s polling center here. After the Taliban took over Afghanistan, Sarabi had fled to Peshawar, Pakistan, with her family and began secretly teaching girls on both sides of the border, in defiance of her country’s new rulers. “Ten years ago around this time, I remember being in Pakistan for its independence day. I cried because I could not celebrate my own nation’s independence.”
In March 2005, President Hamid Karzai made history when he asked Sarabi, then serving as his minister of women’s affairs, to return to Bamiyan as the nation’s first and only female provincial governor. The place was still broken from the Taliban’s harsh rule: they had destroyed Bamiyan’s famous stone Buddhas, banned education for girls, and attempted to eradicate the Hazara. Sarabi went to work to repair the damage, and quickly established an international reputation as an environmentalist, winning support for a long-discussed national park which included Bamiyan’s five, sapphire, mineral-rich Band-e-Amir (“Commander’s Dam”) lakes; and as an educational reformer, overseeing a gradual increase in the overall literacy rate of her very poor province. Today, Bamiyan high-schoolers score above national test averages.
Most visibly, Sarabi is known as a staunch defender of women’s rights. In solidarity, then First Lady Laura Bush visited in June 2008, an act that brought the improbable governor a minor coup in the realm of Afghanistan’s fraught “road politics.” Road construction is an indicator of political clout here, and while thousands of miles have been built across Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, precious few have been built in Bamiyan. That changed with Bush’s visit, as the government gave Bamiyan’s eponymous capital city its first few miles of paved roads-which extended to her precise travel route, and little else.
Today, Bamiyan’s women are arguably positioned more favorably than those of any province in the country. On E-Day, Sarabi waved her purple finger as she beamed about the fact that nearly half of all Bamiyan’s girls are in school, and that under her watch the province had accepted Afghanistan’s first female recruits into the Afghan National Police. Behind her at the polling center, a line of women dressed in everything from traditional burqas to loosely-fit, sequined hijabs, became longer and longer, and eventually unruly, as the women kicked up dust and accidentally broke a window while pressing forward to exercise their suffrage. Bamiyan was Afghanistan’s only province where female polling stations outnumbered male ones, yet the Saed Abad Girls School and others still couldn’t keep up with demand, and ran out of ballots well before the close of the polls.
“I’m voting for a woman,” one eager, middle-aged voter in full burqa told me from a nearby mosque-cum-polling center. “Only a woman understands us, and can help us.”
Sarabi’s unlikely journey, and that of other Hazara women, reflect those of many in the province. 1,500 years ago, Bamiyan, then predominantly Buddhist, held out against the Arabs for a century longer than did Kabul. But by the end of the nineteenth century, many Hazara were slaves to the Pashtun. Cheap slaves, at that: a healthy Hazara could be traded for just 150 pounds of wheat or barley at the time.
The next generation of Hazara, including Hussaini, also bears the scars of a long struggle. After the 1979 Soviet invasion, Hussaini and her parents fled to Iran, a country whose rulers, like the Hazara, are Shiite. In so doing, she left behind the land that she loved, along with many of her relatives. While in high school in the fall of 1998, desperate for news of her family, she could gather only fleeting, but terrifying, reports about her homeland.
Until that point, the Hazara had held out against the Taliban’s campaign, including attempted starvation through blockade. Considered infidels by the Sunni Taliban, the Hazara were doubly targeted because they were socially progressive, at least more so than their Iranian counterparts; and triply targeted as they had resisted the Taliban alongside Ahmad Shah Massoud and the Northern Alliance.
Some Hazara were saved when their defenders, Northern Alliance commanders such as Ustad Akbari, defected to the Taliban. Thousands of others faced a harsher fate in mass graves, the victims of attempted genocide. Surviving Hazara in Kabul today recall one particularly gruesome horror known as Raqs-e-murda, or “Dance of the Dead.” They claim that, near Darul Aman Palace, the Taliban would publicly decapitate their Hazara victims while they were standing, immediately cauterize their necks with boiling oil, and watch their bodies flail about in the throes.
Though Hussaini knew few of the terrifying details she, along with the rest of the world, watched agape in April 2001 as Bamiyan’s new rulers’ committed their most infamous act of barbarism: the destruction of the towering stone Buddhas, 1,500-year old icons of its Buddhist past. “Those statues were the history of Afghanistan, not only Bamiyan,” she said. Principally, however, she was heartsick for her remaining family, with whom she had no contact. “Once they destroyed the statues, we feared they had wiped out all of my home.”
Overjoyed at the fall of the Taliban, she returned shortly thereafter to a shattered province, but one that was rapidly recovering. Inspired in part by Sarabi, she began working immediately on women’s development projects in the capital, and created the first women’s festival, along with a weekly market, three years ago.
Since 2005, Hussaini and her fellow Hazara have watched nervously as the Taliban insurgency has exploded around the country. In the south, Hazara have fought ferociously with the Afghan National Army, yet until 2009, their homeland remained calm. Recently, violence from neighboring provinces has spilled over. Prior to last year’s presidential election, the New Zealand military, which commands the Provincial Reconstruction Team here, up-armored their vehicles. On August 3 of this year, insurgents killed one soldier, the first death of a New Zealand soldier during the war, and injured two others, in a nearby ambush.
The latest Taliban threats did not dissuade Hussaini from stepping into the political breach. After receiving the blessing from local mullahs — an act reflecting both political shrewdness and the challenges still faced by women in Hazara society — she ran a vigorous upstart campaign, distributing hundreds of posters, and handing out cards to farmers, government officials, and anyone who would listen to her stump speech.
She backs the governor’s agenda, pressing for more funds for girls’ education, and calling for the creation of an international airport — which could further open the placid and mineral-rich province to tourism and investment. (Bamiyan sits on at least $1 trillion worth of iron ore, among other riches, according to a recent study.) She has also called for refilling the niches that loom over the central valley, which UNESCO declared a World Heritage Site in 2003, by cooperating with Japanese and other international partners to rebuild the Buddhas.
Bamiyan boasts stunning topography, featuring dramatic, snow-capped peaks overlooking verdant valleys and spring-fed streams. Yet despite that, and its rich archeological wealth, the province drew just 750 international tourists last year, thanks to the degenerating security situation in other parts of the country. On the day after E-Day, I climbed through the myriad caves, layered with history and art of generations of dwellers that interlace the Buddha niches. The sites official guide seemed genuinely bewildered to see foreign visitors. On a good day, he said, he’ll show five people the site.
“I speak to the few tourists that come to Bamiyan, and they say that all they hear about Afghanistan in their countries is violence and killing,” Hussaini lamented. “We feel as if Bamiyan is not a province of Afghanistan. This is like a totally different country.”
Hussaini’s bold pronouncements are not limited to Bamiyan pride: she does not shy away from the hardball tactics needed by any long shot candidate. She says that Safora Yalkhani, the incumbent in Bamiyan’s allotted woman’s parliamentary seat, “has done nothing for the people, and particularly the women, of Bamiyan. In five years, she has brought just one bridge for the [the province].” She also accuses Yalkhani of corruption.
She leveled particular scorn against Ustad Akbari, the former commander who had collaborated with the Taliban, and is now an influential power broker and member of parliament. Last year, Akbari made international headlines when he pressed for a Shiite personal status law, backed by Iran and rubberstamped by Karzai. The law included retrograde provisions that women submit to their husband’s sexual demands, and remain in the home unless accompanied by a male relative.
“The wife of the Holy Prophet of Allah: she can go everywhere!” said Hussaini. “The Prophet, peace be upon him, never said anything like that.” She added with a wry smile: “Bamiyan’s people follow the example of the Prophet, peace be upon him. Who is Ustad Akbari to speak against him?”
Speaking on E-Day, Governor Sarabi declined to endorse any one candidate, preferring to “give blessing to all of the candidates.” She did single out Hussaini for special praise, however: “She represents the power of the young generation of Bamiyan,” she said. The power of that generation faces a stern test, regardless of the election’s outcome, in managing Bamiyan’s tremendous potential in the face of national leadership that can most charitably be described as indifferent towards the province.
Across the country, early reports from E-Day 2010 seemed to indicate that both insurgent attacks, and voter turnout, were lower than expected. The Taliban claimed responsibility for some 150 attacks, significantly fewer than in 2009. At least 16 people, including two British soldiers, were killed. And the initial Independent Electoral Commission report indicated that overall there were about one million fewer votes cast than in last years presidential elections.
In Bamiyan, the trend was in the other direction. As is true on most other days, there were no reported security incidents across the province. And election officials stated that turnout had been so strong that thousands had been turned away from the polls due to insufficient ballots. These people of a peaceful province surrounded by war never questioned if they could afford the risk of voting. They questioned when the goods promised by their democracy will finally be delivered.
