Afghanistan's pioneering female MP seeks asylum as progress for women unravels

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 is currently living in a shelter for battered women 

By Rob Crilly, Kabul

6:00AM BST 11 Aug 2013

 

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 Ms Atmar, 40, speaking in a strong, clear voice, her eye make-up 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 as it marks its 10th anniversary on Sunday, campaigners say Ms Atmar’s case is one of several examples that show how reforms are coming undone.

Not only are conservatives agitating 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 all but impossible.

Human rights groups say this is the latest in a string of measures that will weaken protection for women and raise fears of a return to the days when Islamists all but erased women from public life.

^{Afghan refugee women buy household items from local market in Peshawar (AFP)}

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 Ms Atmar’s family. Her father, an engineer, had died when she was young, but her mother had fought hard so that she might receive an education. Those years, she said, helped her develop the mental toughness necessary to become a campaigner in a conservative country.
The family fled to Pakistan on the day the Taliban marched into Kabul - along with millions of Afghan refugees - returning only after they were ousted by the US-led invasion that followed al-Qaeda’s 9/11 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 Ms Atmar was concerned, it also guaranteed a quarter of the seats for women, offering her chance to take her local message of women’s empowerment to a much wider audience.
Her campaign was run on a tight budget. At one point she sold a gold necklace to keep things moving but managed to win a seat in the women’s section.
It was a heady time, filled with optimism, according to Ms Atmar. 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, she said, at about the same time she got married, towards the end of her five-year term as an MP.
Unable to compete with her rivals’ war chests in what she said was an increasingly corrupt campaign, 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 apologise but then at night he would do it again. Finally I asked for a divorce.”

^{Afghan women during Ramadan, in Kabul, Afghanistan (EPA)}

For most Afghan women, products of a conservative society where even without the Taliban they appear in public only beneath the billowing folds of a sky blue burqa, divorce is not even an option - and even in the more liberal atmosphere of the capital, Kabul, Ms 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.
Ironically, the Nato effort to secure Afghanistan from the militants over the past 12 years, assisted by Western aid donors, has done much to open other doors, by helping girls into education and ensuring that women have a voice in society. Maternal mortality has been slashed.
However, campaigners say that this year there have been a string of reversals for hard-fought women’s rights. 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 US.
Earlier this month, another symbol of women’s emancipation was shot dead by gunmen. Lieutenant Islam Bibi had defied threats from her own family to rise through the ranks, becoming the most senior female police officer in Helmand Province.
 
^{Afghan police-women search voters during the security check at a polling station in Herat (AFP)}

In May, the Wolesi Jirga — the House of the People, the lower chamber of Afghanistan’s national assembly - revised the country’s electoral law, as its conservative-minded legislators ditched the guarantee that at least a quarter of seats in each of 34 provincial councils be reserved for women.
And the parliament has never actually ratified the law, drafted by Ms Atmar and her fellow pioneers, setting penalties for rape, child marriage and baad - the giving of girls to resolve disputes. It was pushed through by presidential decree, but a recent attempt to make the law more enduring by securing parliamentary approval was abandoned after 15 minutes amid stiff opposition and accusations by male MPs that it was un-Islamic.
Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch, said new wording of the criminal procedure code would also prohibit relatives of a defendant being questioned against the accused. It would make it all but impossible to prosecute people who beat, forcibly marry or sell their female relatives, he added.
“While Afghan officials give lip service to women’s rights at the UN, the president, parliament and courts are actively undermining those rights,” he said. “Afghanistan’s foreign donors should be loud and clear that they won’t stand by while Afghan women’s hard-won rights are swept away.”
But the leverage that western donors have enjoyed over recent years is already waning, and as Afghanistan prepares for greater independence from foreign military and financial support it may fade completely away.
Many fear that an Afghan government that is focusing on its own survival is preparing the ground 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. And Ms 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, wrapped in a black overcoat, her head covered by a scarf. “We must remove fundamentalism from Afghanistan. The world should remember that the fire from here might not reach their country, but the smoke will.”

Despite Education Advances, a Host of Afghan School Woes

 

A girl reading in front of her class at Mir Ali Ahmad Girls School in Parwan Province. Female teachers are acutely scarce.

 

 

SALANG, Afghanistan — There is not an ounce of fat on the wiry frame of Abdul Wahid, and no wonder.  

After he finishes his morning work shift, he walks 10 miles down mountain trails in northern Afghanistan to the first road, where he catches a bus for the last couple of miles to the teacher training institute in Salang. He walks back up the mountain another 10 miles to get home, arriving well after dark, just in time to rest up for his day job.       

In his determination to formally qualify as a teacher, Mr. Wahid, 33, exemplifies many of the gains for Afghan education in recent years. “It’s worth it, because this is my future,” he said.

But he also personifies how far the efforts here have yet to go. Mr. Wahid’s day job is being the principal of the high school in his village, Unamak. Though he has only a high school diploma, he is the best educated teacher that his 800 students have.

It is widely accepted that demand among Afghans for better schooling — and the actual opportunity to attend, particularly for girls — is at its highest point in decades. For Western officials seeking to show a positive legacy from a dozen years of war and heavy investment in Afghanistan, improvements in education have provided welcome news.

But for those who are working to make it happen — local Afghan officials, aid workers, teachers and students — there are concerns that much of the promise of improvement is going unfulfilled, and major problems are going unsolved.

In interviews, they pointed out an abysmal dropout rate, widespread closings of schools in some areas of conflict and a very low level of education for those who do manage to find a seat in a class. Overcrowding is so bad that nearly all schools operate on split shifts, so students get a half-day, and many of them are on three shifts a day, meaning that those students get only three hours of instruction daily. And many children are not in school. Unicef estimated in 2012 that one in two school-age children did not attend at all.

Further, while there has demonstrably been positive and rapid growth in the public school system, there have also been daunting challenges, particularly a lack of capacity to find or train qualified teachers, print enough textbooks or build enough safe schools.

According to statistics compiled by Unicef, only 24 percent of Afghanistan’s teachers are qualified under Afghan law, meaning they completed a two-year training course after high school. In many rural places, there are sometimes teachers with 10th-grade educations teaching 11th and 12th graders.

Forty-five percent of the country’s 13,000 schools operate without usable buildings, under tents or canvas lean-tos, or even just under the branches of a tree; in a country of harsh extremes of climate both in winter and in summer, that means many missed school days.

The Afghan public school system has expanded immensely in recent years, buoyed by extensive international aid — the United States Agency for International Development alone has given $934 million to education programs over the past 12 years, according to the government agency. The education minister, Farouk Wardak, insists that 10.5 million students are enrolled this year, 40 percent of them girls, a huge increase from an estimate of 900,000 enrolled students, almost none of them girls, under Taliban rule in 2001.

Those numbers are widely quoted by Afghan and Western officials as a marker of success, but the claims are seen as unsupportable by many here.

Jennifer Rowell of CARE International, who has been conducting a study of education in Afghanistan, cautions that enrollment numbers are not actual attendance numbers.

And she said that when CARE tried to contact the headmasters of schools around the country, using contact lists kept by the Education Ministry, “half to three-quarters of phone numbers of school masters were missing, or the man we call has not been in the job for years.”

That makes it difficult for the Education Ministry to do any meaningful monitoring of actual school attendance around the country. Beyond initial enrollments, attendance tends to drop off quickly, often within just a few weeks. Only about 10 percent of students make it through to graduation, according to U.S.A.I.D. figures.     

Those numbers are even lower for girls, most of whom drop out between sixth and ninth grades, after puberty makes them marriageable in many areas. Female teachers are acutely scarce, and families worry about the safety of sending their daughters to school given continuing threats from the Taliban and resistance from some local elders.

The schools themselves have an incentive to inflate their figures, since their financing, which comes from Kabul, is based on enrollment.

In the eastern province of Khost, bordering Pakistan, Education Ministry documents from Kabul officially list 252,000 students enrolled last year. But in Khost Province’s education department, Kamar Khan Kamran, who works as a recruiter of teachers, said those numbers were wildly inflated. “I think we would hardly be able to enroll 20,000 to 25,000 students this year in the province, though the demand for education is booming rapidly.”

The shortage of teachers is so acute that in many districts the schools are hiring teachers who graduated only from sixth, seventh or eighth grade, Mr. Kamran said, “even though it’s not legal.”

For all of that, even those who warn that establishing quality education in the country is a mission far from accomplished will acknowledge that improvement has been marked over the past decade.

One United Nations official, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to anger Afghan officials, noted that while there still was not enough attention paid to the quality of education being provided, “enrollment has been tremendous, very encouraging, particularly for girls.”

S. Ken Yamashita, the head of U.S.A.I.D. in Afghanistan, said that even though reliable statistics are hard to come by in Afghanistan, “what’s absolutely clear is the number of kids in school has gone up, the participation of girls has gone up, and it’s such a huge differential.”

He added, “Education is very much a success in Afghanistan.”

A good example of that success is the Sardar Kabuli High School for Girls, in the capital. It was built for $27 million from the United States — and is still not the most expensive American-financed school. The Ghazi Boys High School in Kabul cost $57 million.

Last year Sardar Kabuli High graduated 290 girls, more than a third of the number of this year’s first-grade enrollments, and half of them passed university entrance exams.

“This school is an example to the whole country,” said the headmistress, Nasrin Sultani. Two years ago, it consisted of 38 tents and students attending in three shifts.

Now its 6,600 students, in two shifts, all have their own desks and no more than two students share one textbook.

In Zamina Stanikzai’s 12th-grade math class, when she asked for a show of hands of girls who want to go to college, all but one of the 40 students’ hands shot up. The one was a younger girl, waiting for her sister to finish classes to take her home.

When the girls were asked how many thought their families would allow them to go to college, however, half of the hands went down.

A girl in the back stood up and asked to speak, which she did in halting but good English. “Many of our families still believe in the old ways,” she said.

Mr. Wardak, the education minister, expressed pride when he talked about what has been accomplished despite the challenges, and particularly in remote areas, like Ghor Province. “For the first time in the 5,000-year history of Afghanistan, for instance, Ghor has 800 schools, 173 of them high schools,” he said in an interview.

He becomes defensive, however, about the quality issue. “I have $70 per student per year to spend,” he said. “In the U.S. you spend $20,000, in Pakistan $130. You don’t expect to do much for $70 a year.”

Outside Kabul’s public school system, the difference in quality can be drastic. At Mir Ali Ahmad Girls School in Char-i-Kor, in Parwan Province, the girls share their building with boys — two shifts for boys, one for girls. Only the boys have sports fields and playgrounds. One set of textbooks is shared by three or four girls. Two girls share a seat at each desk.

And even in the capital, most public schools are not the showpiece that Sardar Kabuli High is.

At Sayid Ismail Balkh School, 8,000 students are enrolled in three shifts, three hours each. They have buildings, but one set of them has no roofs or windows — it was a World Bank project, but the contractor took the money and ran — and another set was a Japanese-financed project that also was never finished, so only the first of two stories were built. Canvas tarps are slung over the walls to provide shelter.

“When it rains, we take the day off,” said Barat Ali Sadaqi, the headmaster.

Toilet facilities and running water systems have not been finished, and the odor of sewage permeates the small compound. Electricity is intermittent, and there are six computers for the whole student body.

On a given day, only 5,400 students attend out of the 8,000 enrolled. Still, they are crammed in: three to a desk, 40 to a class, 10 textbooks per class.

“This is development after 10 years in Kabul,” Mr. Sadaqi said.

 

At Sayid Ismail Balkh school in Kabul, 8,000 students are enrolled in three shifts of three hours each.

 

A teacher gave orders to pupils as they left class at Sayid Ismail Balkh school

 

Some buildings at Sayid Ismail Balkh school have no roofs or windows — the contractor took the money and ran.

 

A class for teachers in Parwan. According to statistics compiled by Unicef, only 24 percent of teachers are qualified.

 

Most Afghan girls drop out of school between sixth and ninth grades, after puberty makes them marriageable in many areas.

 

A school in Bamian. The public school system has expanded immensely in recent years.