‘Bravest woman in Afghanistan’

KABUL | Critics dismiss her as foolish. Some even want her dead. For Malalai Joya, an outspoken women’s rights activist and scourge of Afghan warlords, controversy is a kind of oxygen.

The “bravest woman in Afghanistan,” in the view of her admirers, Ms. Joya has continued her defiant critique of the Afghan government two years after she was suspended from parliament for insulting her mostly male colleagues by likening them to farmyard animals.

“These warlords are killers, drug smugglers and dirty-minded criminals who are ruining our country, with support from the United States,” she told The Washington Times in a recent interview at a safe house in Kabul. “This is a mafia regime that has betrayed its people.”

The Kabul government’s stated willingness to negotiate with militant fundamentalist leaders such as Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Omar and warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, while tolerating the alleged drug-related activities of President Hamid Karzai’s own brother is, in her view, proof that “one group of criminals has replaced another.”

As for Afghan women, who were supposed to be liberated by the U.S. toppling of the Taliban in 2001, she said, “The situation for most women today in Afghanistan, if I say it is still like hell, this is not enough.”

Ms. Joya, 30, has paid a high price for her outspokenness. Constant death threats force her to change homes daily and keep a detail of armed bodyguards at her side.

Though married, she often doesn’t see her husband for months at a stretch. And in a twist of irony, the burqa — the sky-blue shroud for women emblematic of Taliban oppression — now provides essential cover when she travels.

Arranging a face-to-face meeting is a complicated exercise. First an introduction was sent to an e-mail address on a Web site run by the Committee for the Defense of Malalai Joya, a network of supporters. When reached by phone, Ms. Joya’s assistant said Ms. Joya agreed to a meeting three days later with the proviso that she be contacted again the morning of the interview to confirm the location.

At the assigned place, a bodyguard met and escorted this reporter to walled-off concrete residence a block away, past a half-dozen men with AK-47s, to an inner chamber where Ms. Joya waited. She wore no headscarf and offered a handshake, both brave acts in this conservative society.

Things were not always so repressive, she said. To make her point, she held up a picture taken in 1967 of schoolgirls in black skirts and tights strolling the streets of central Kabul.

Then she held up another picture, of a 7-year-old ethnic Hazara girl named Shiquiba who was raped last year by unknown assailants.

A catalogue of other disturbing examples followed: 12-year-old Anisa from Sari Pul province, kidnapped and gang-raped by five men; 14-year-old Shuqufa, whose ravaged body was found in a garbage heap on the outskirts of Kabul; and Bashira, also 14, raped by three men, one of whom is the son of a member of parliament. The man was never punished, according to rights groups, because Afghan officials were bribed to change his age from 22 to 18 in their investigation.

Building her case, she cited a host of grim statistics: “Last year, 47 women burned themselves to escape abusive husbands. Today 80 percent of marriages are forced. Almost as many women are beaten at home.”

In March, the low status of Afghan women made headlines after a new marriage law was passed by the parliament that denied Shi’ite Muslim women the right to refuse sex with their husbands and the freedom to leave the home without male permission.

An international outcry ensued and Mr. Karzai later scrapped the law. But many women’s activists fear that conservative male lawmakers will push through similar legislation for the majority Sunni population and dilute existing laws against domestic violence.

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