doesn’t want to return to her family, and the fact that it is involved a high risk of girl’s murder if she gets back (as we saw in previous cases), the DoWA and other women’s rights protector including the Governor Office, Independent Human Rights Commission and Civil Society Forum continues their advocacy for this lovers.
However, instead of supporting and protecting women’s rights in Bamyan, the Provincial Court has ordered my suspension and two others from our job and prosecution just because we are following this case so closely and the FACT THAT MOST OF THE JUDGES in provincial court are from Tajik ethnicity.
You can contact Bamyan Governor Office, and the Independent Human Rights Commission to verify this information and plenty of other information that we have. I was wondering if you broadcast this news as you will protect the life of this couple and the fact that we are being threatened to death.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you,
Best regards.
Fatima Kazimi
I called her right away and asked a few exploratory questions—chiefly, would the couple talk and could we take pictures? Fatima said yes and maybe. That was good enough for me. We were on thenext flight to Bamiyan, aboard East Horizon Airlines, which flies to Bamiyan, sometimes twice weekly, sometimes not for months on end. I took with me photojournalist Mauricio Lima and our Afghan colleague Jawad Sukhanyar. A year or two earlier, we could have driven the six to eight hours over one of the two passes through the Hindu Kush into Bamiyan, but both have now been effectively cut off, at least for foreigners, by intermittent Taliban ambushes.
I was already primed to jump on such a story and had long been looking for this sort of opportunity. Honor killings are more often than not one of Afghanistan’s dirty little secrets; instances where they come into the open are rare, and it is even more rare to have a chance to write about stopping a threatened honor killing, especially when the parties were willing to talk and perhaps even be photographed. We were en route before Fatima had a chance to change her mind; I didn’t even call her again, for fear she would reconsider, and the next time she heard from us, we were knocking on her office door in the Bamiyan government office building not far from the airstrip.
Fatima received us from behind an expansive glass-topped desk, framed by windows and the glare from sunlit snow, in a room with walls lined with chairs for supplicants. After summarizing what had happened to Zakia and Ali, Fatima went to fetch Zakia from the women’s shelter, bringing her back to the office under a heavy guard, two green Ford Ranger pickup trucks full of policemen. Zakia had her shawl on but was dressed in loud, bright colors, as I would come to learn she usually was, a pink head scarf and an orange sweater. She caused a stir among the policemen and the government officials who lined the hallways as she was brought in; Afghans find her beautiful, with startlingly large, amber eyes.
She was tongue-tied at first. It was not only the first time she’d ever seen a journalist, it was the first time she’d ever seen a foreigner and the first time in her life that she’d ever talked to a male stranger—moreover, the first time she’d ever talked to a man other than Ali, and Anwar, and her brothers and father. “I knew, because of my case, I had to have that courage to speak. I realized that,” she said much later, recalling how terrified she’d been that day.Expressing herself seemed painful, but with Fatima gently nudging her along, her story poured out through Jawad, who translated. “My whole family is against my marriage,” she said. “I want to go ahead anyway. I request of you, I don’t want to stay in Bamiyan. I can live anywhere but in Bamiyan. All I want is my love.
“The judges told me, ‘We are Tajik and it’s dishonoring us if you decide to marry a Hazara.’ The judges, my mother, and father were all
However, instead of supporting and protecting women’s rights in Bamyan, the Provincial Court has ordered my suspension and two others from our job and prosecution just because we are following this case so closely and the FACT THAT MOST OF THE JUDGES in provincial court are from Tajik ethnicity.
You can contact Bamyan Governor Office, and the Independent Human Rights Commission to verify this information and plenty of other information that we have. I was wondering if you broadcast this news as you will protect the life of this couple and the fact that we are being threatened to death.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you,
Best regards.
Fatima Kazimi
I called her right away and asked a few exploratory questions—chiefly, would the couple talk and could we take pictures? Fatima said yes and maybe. That was good enough for me. We were on thenext flight to Bamiyan, aboard East Horizon Airlines, which flies to Bamiyan, sometimes twice weekly, sometimes not for months on end. I took with me photojournalist Mauricio Lima and our Afghan colleague Jawad Sukhanyar. A year or two earlier, we could have driven the six to eight hours over one of the two passes through the Hindu Kush into Bamiyan, but both have now been effectively cut off, at least for foreigners, by intermittent Taliban ambushes.
I was already primed to jump on such a story and had long been looking for this sort of opportunity. Honor killings are more often than not one of Afghanistan’s dirty little secrets; instances where they come into the open are rare, and it is even more rare to have a chance to write about stopping a threatened honor killing, especially when the parties were willing to talk and perhaps even be photographed. We were en route before Fatima had a chance to change her mind; I didn’t even call her again, for fear she would reconsider, and the next time she heard from us, we were knocking on her office door in the Bamiyan government office building not far from the airstrip.
Fatima received us from behind an expansive glass-topped desk, framed by windows and the glare from sunlit snow, in a room with walls lined with chairs for supplicants. After summarizing what had happened to Zakia and Ali, Fatima went to fetch Zakia from the women’s shelter, bringing her back to the office under a heavy guard, two green Ford Ranger pickup trucks full of policemen. Zakia had her shawl on but was dressed in loud, bright colors, as I would come to learn she usually was, a pink head scarf and an orange sweater. She caused a stir among the policemen and the government officials who lined the hallways as she was brought in; Afghans find her beautiful, with startlingly large, amber eyes.
She was tongue-tied at first. It was not only the first time she’d ever seen a journalist, it was the first time she’d ever seen a foreigner and the first time in her life that she’d ever talked to a male stranger—moreover, the first time she’d ever talked to a man other than Ali, and Anwar, and her brothers and father. “I knew, because of my case, I had to have that courage to speak. I realized that,” she said much later, recalling how terrified she’d been that day.Expressing herself seemed painful, but with Fatima gently nudging her along, her story poured out through Jawad, who translated. “My whole family is against my marriage,” she said. “I want to go ahead anyway. I request of you, I don’t want to stay in Bamiyan. I can live anywhere but in Bamiyan. All I want is my love.
“The judges told me, ‘We are Tajik and it’s dishonoring us if you decide to marry a Hazara.’ The judges, my mother, and father were all
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