User:Az1347

Dear Zari (book) by: Zarghuna Kargar

It's important for women to know their rights in a country like Afghanistan," one female listener of Afghan Woman's Hour wrote to us.

Another told one of our reporters in Mazar-i-Sharif, "I heard the interview on Afghan Woman's Hour about how Afghan women have started working and earning money by using their skills by taking up carpet weaving. I realized that other Afghan women were doing so much while I was just doing the housework. I now weave carpets at home to earn my own money and have gained my husband's respect because I'm able to contribute to our living costs."

A listener from the eastern city of Jalalabad said, "I always listen to Afghan Woman's Hour. I love it because it features women from all over the country and makes me feel closer to the people of Afghanistan." And a young man got in touch to say, "I'm writing on behalf of my grandmother. Every Monday night she tells us to keep quiet when it's time for her favorite show. She's asked me to let you know that whenever your program comes on the radio she has to sit down quietly and listen to it, and that her favorite part is the stories, as the women featured in them sound so lovely. They make her feel as if they are telling her own life story."

Just as it was for this older woman and for so many others who regularly tuned in to the BBC's Afghan Woman's Hour-both male and female-so too was it for me. I loved the program's life stories, and enjoyed them so much that I would sometimes find myself listening to them again and again. By the time I came to be working on the program I had been away from my country for so long that I'd forgotten just how arduous and cruel life in Afghanistan can be, especially for women and girls. And these women-mothers, wives, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters-all have their story to tell.



When I left Afghanistan in 1994 women were still going to work and girls attending school, so while they may have been limited in what they could do in certain respects, they still enjoyed a great deal of personal freedom. At that point the Mujahedeen were in power. The Mujahedeen were a collection of opposition groups that considered themselves to be engaged in a "jihad"-a holy war-against non-Muslim invaders, and were financially supported by the US, Saudi Arabia, and a handful of Muslim countries. They had begun forming into rebel groups in the 1970s when Russian troops first invaded Afghanistan and made the country-not for the first time-a pawn in the battle between the two superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States of America.

When the Mujahedeen first took control of Kabul in 1992 they seized power from President Najeebullah's government. Dr. Najeebullah was to be the last president of the communist era in Afghanistan, elected at a time when the Afghan communist party was still responsible for selecting the country's president. It was in the decade of the communist era that I was born, becoming a child of what was to become known as the "revolution generation."

In the late seventies and early eighties, a coalition government backed by the Soviet Union had ruled Afghanistan. There was a treaty dating back to 1978 in place with the USSR that allowed the Afghan government to call on Soviet military force, were it ever needed. On April 14, 1979, the Afghan coalition government called in this favor and asked the USSR to send troops to help in the fight against Mujahedeen rebels. The Soviet government responded to this request by deploying a huge number of forces and heavy arms to Afghanistan on June 16th of that year. And so began the Soviet-backed Afghan government's war against the Mujahedeen.

According to what I've since learned, the Afghan government at that time was very powerful. Its institutions were strong; its control extended to all the country's many different provinces and its army was more than capable of taking on the Mujahedeen, even though the guerrilla war that had first been fought in remote villages near the border with Pakistan was gradually spreading to the rest of the country. On the whole, the Mujahedeen forces were backed by ordinary Afghan people, who saw the Russians as non-Muslim invaders, bringing with them non-Muslim values and ideas. The invading Soviet forces, meanwhile, tended to be supported by those Afghans employed by the government in public services and in the factories.

But the Soviet support wasn't just military, as the USSR also provided social, economic, and educational aid, and since the Soviet-backed Afghan coalition believed in sexual equality, many Afghan women and girls also traveled to the Soviet bloc for educational purposes. Meanwhile factories were built in Afghanistan that women could work in, and those who had lost their husbands in the recent war were given priority when it came to securing jobs. It appeared then that both the law and prevailing social attitudes saw women as equal to men, free to walk by themselves in the street, go to the cinema, enjoy mixed-sex education, appear on television singing and dancing, and even wear miniskirts. But despite the liberal social climate in the cities, many families in rural areas continued to practice more traditional customs that they expected their women and girls to follow. For example, while the Afghan constitution decreed the legal age of marriage to be sixteen for both boys and girls, many families in rural areas were still marrying off their children as young as eleven or twelve.

Of course, my personal experience was predominantly a Kabul-based one-a developed city with more open-minded social attitudes, where the law was enforced by the police and security forces, a public bus service operated, and men and women worked side by side in schools, hospitals, and factories. I even remember going to weddings where men and women danced together to live bands. All around me, Afghanistan's cities were gradually modernizing. Women were no longer forced to wear a head scarf or burqa-although some women chose to. Women from different regions of Afghanistan continued to wear traditional clothes: I remember seeing Hazara women in their long, baggy dresses and colorful scarves, Tajik women in their column dresses and loose-fitting white shalwar trousers, and Pashtun women with their brightly colored shalwar and loose dresses.

Just as Afghan women were becoming active in politics and working as doctors, lawyers, journalists, pilots, senior army officers, and government officials, so too were they appearing in films and being encouraged to perform on national television. Alongside these developments in opportunities for women, the Afghan state media was busy broadcasting Western films and music, Bollywood movies and Russian programs, all of which contributed to the sense of Afghanistan opening up to the outside world. Kabul itself was a great ethnic melting pot of people from all over Afghanistan: Hazaras, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Sikh minorities, and Kuchi nomads were all given the same access to education, training, and jobs, as the government was committed to ensuring equal opportunities for everyone. I remember my father telling me at the time that Afghanistan was beginning to move closer toward democracy.

Yet in many ways, life in Afghanistan was the same as it had always been, particularly in rural areas. People with strong religious beliefs tended to continue to follow traditional practices, marrying off their children young in defiance of the national law and allowing women to be given away as a means of settling family disputes, and also denying them any share of family inheritance. There may have been a stable government in place capable of creating new legislation and dispensing justice, but the future of young Afghan girls was still seen by many as a family affair and not one in which the government should interfere. The more traditional communities within Afghanistan generally did not embrace the communist values of the Soviet-backed government, and as a result, the Mujahedeen's propaganda enjoyed greater success in the country's more remote areas. This split between urban and rural values resulted in a number of rural girls' schools being burned down, and in some cases their teachers, or women who dared to appear on television, were even murdered. Fortunately, these attacks were rare.

The government of the time was accused by many of adhering only to communist values and neglecting Afghanistan's own laws. But in practice many Afghans-including my father, who was for four years the Minister of National Radio and later the Minister for Printing and the State Committee-believed deeply in traditional Afghan cultural values. In those days, being seen to be active in party politics was a prerequisite for a successful career in politics; my father was in a high-ranking cadre of the ruling People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Like many of his peers, he believed in Islam and traditional Afghan cultural ideals but was careful not to do anything that could be seen as defiant of the country's Soviet-backed rule. Yet interestingly, even though the school my sisters and I attended (one of the best and most modern in Kabul) was built by the Russians, staffed by Russian teachers, and had Russian language as part of the curriculum, we were also taught the Quran and learned about Islamic history and studies.

Everyday life for the ordinary Afghan was full of hardship. It was compulsory for every young Afghan man to spend two years in the army during the tumultuous period between 1978 and 1992. These men were conscripted and trained to fight against the Jihadi groups. Many Afghan families lost a son, husband, or father in this war against the Mujahedeen; and many young men returned from the fighting severely disabled. While the government made special provisions for war widows by giving them a monthly income, job opportunities, and special benefits for their children (sufficient to keep them off the streets), girls and women still suffered through the decades of war in Afghanistan.

Regardless of which political faction was in power, ...