For Afghan Lovers, Joy Is Brief, Ending in Arrest

Source: New York Times
By JAWAD SUKHANYAR and ROD NORDLANDJUNE 7, 2014
KABUL, Afghanistan — His Juliet thinks she is pregnant with her Romeo’s child.

So much for the good news.

Neither is now taking much joy from that, as the escape of this pair of star-crossed Afghan lovers, who eloped in March after her family threatened to kill them, came to an abrupt end on Friday.

Mohammad Ali, 21, the husband, was captured by six of his male in-laws on a street in downtown Kabul and dragged to a police station. The authorities booked him on a charge of kidnapping, which carries the death penalty in Afghanistan.

A short, slightly built man, Mohammad Ali was easily overpowered by his wife’s brothers and uncles who apparently had been tipped off to the general area where the couple had been hiding. But he defied their angry demands to divulge her whereabouts.

His wife, Zakia, 18, whom he is accused of kidnapping, was in a house only a few hundred yards from where Mohammad Ali was captured. After learning what had happened, she donned a black abaya, covering everything but her eyes, and fled to try to meet with her father-in-law, Anwar, who supports the couple’s decision to marry for love.

Zakia and Mohammad Ali fled threats of arrest and death in Afghanistan as a result of their marriage, which crosses cultural boundaries.
CreditDiego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
It was a day of high drama. Zakia and Anwar — whose families both use only first names — are from farm families in a village in mountainous, isolated Bamian Province and promptly got lost in the sprawling capital city. They could not find each other for hours.

Throughout the day on Friday, women’s advocates from an organization called Women for Afghan Women pleaded with Zakia and her father-in-law by cellphone, trying to convince them that she should turn herself in to one of the organization’s shelters. She would be safe from attack by her family, they said, as well as from arrest on criminal charges and the risk of sexual abuse in custody, which is common here.

But she was wary. Women charged with social crimes are protected from arrest while in such government-approved shelters, but they are not allowed to leave until their court cases are resolved — effectively kept under a form of house arrest while awaiting a possible conviction and prison sentence.

Zakia’s family members have publicly declared their intention to kill her for dishonoring them by marrying against their wishes and outside their ethnic group; she is a Tajik and her husband is a Hazara. They have accused her of bigamy, as well, claiming she had already been married — without her consent or presence — to her father’s nephew.

Bigamy carries a five- to 15-year prison sentence.

The charge against Mohammad Ali is more serious, a capital crime.

“I know this is a love story,” said Brig. Gen. Jamila Bayaz, the police chief of District 1 — the first female police chief in Afghanistan, whose station initially received Mohammad Ali. “The boy eloped with a girl who loved him.” But she added that the courts would have to resolve the charges against him. “Higher-level officials told me, ‘Please make sure he doesn’t escape,’ ” she said.

As his wife and father tried to find each other on Friday, Mohammad Ali sent word via a cousin who visited him in jail and insisted that Zakia should not turn herself in to the women’s shelter. Zakia had previously spent six months in a shelter in Bamian, where, she said, she was treated as a prisoner until she finally escaped last March by climbing over a wall after midnight to meet Mohammad Ali, who waited outside.

Shukria Khaliqi, the program manager at Women for Afghan Women and a successful family lawyer, argued that the shelter was the best option in an obviously dangerous situation.

“I can win this case,” she said, adding that the claims of Zakia’s family were so clearly false that any reasonable court would throw them out. “We have experience with cases like this, but if they do not legally solve this problem, they will always be in hiding. Their whole life will be spent like this.”

By nightfall Friday, Anwar and Zakia were together, joined by a reporter who spent several hours with them as they drove around the city deciding what to do. The father-in-law said he had nowhere to stay in the city where he would not be found by her family; their only option would be to flee into the countryside. Zakia had to go with him because women who are not accompanied by a close male relative can be arrested.

Anwar, 65, burst into tears at the thought of the arduous journey ahead. He was too old, he said, and suffered from high blood pressure; he could not climb into the mountains as the young couple had done in their own escape.

And Zakia was pregnant, he said, and not feeling well herself.

She did not respond to that revelation; pregnancy is not something that Afghan women would normally discuss in front of strangers.

Zakia had been crying, too, but stopped then and pulled the abaya and veils off her head. She half-turned so she could address Anwar, who was sitting behind her, directly. She spoke in a strong, calm voice after a day of so many tears that they left streaks on her cheeks.

“Uncle,” she said, using a term of fondness for her father-in-law, “don’t worry about me. I’ll be safe and I’ll stand by your side and we will get the boy out. I will go to the shelter.” She arrived there after 10 p.m. on Friday.

In an interview at the shelter on Saturday, Zakia said that she was relieved that the couple’s months on the run had ended and that she was happy to be in a safe place — at least until the court case tied to her decision to run away with her husband is decided.

“At the court, I will say no one kidnapped me, because I went with him by my consent and my own free will,” she said. “I want to be with this boy the rest of my life.”

She said she remained convinced that her family members planned to kill her if they could. “If I see my father and brothers I will tell them, ‘Whatever has happened, has happened, and it is nothing you can change,’ ” she said. “ ‘You cannot change what’s in my heart, so stop trying to do anything about it.’ ”

Her father, Zaman, reached by telephone, insisted that he had no intention of killing his daughter — and, as proof, noted that his sons who captured Mohammad Ali had taken him to the police instead of taking the law into their own hands.

“If I would kill him, everyone would have blamed me for it,” he said. “All I want is that the girl should be handed to her first husband. Then it is up to him whether he accepts her as his wife or not. If that doesn’t work, I will leave it to God.”

The shelter does not allow its residents to have cellphones, so Zakia has so far been unable to talk to Mohammad Ali.

“Please,” she said, as a reporter prepared to leave the shelter, “tell him not to worry about me, not to worry that I might say something bad or confess to something. I will tell this: that I have not been kidnapped.”