By Tamana Taban
Six years ago, Saeeda* defied the norms of her traditional Afghan community and ran away from home to marry a man she believed would bring her happiness. Instead, he brought only suffering. First came the yelled curses, then within a year there were regular beatings as her new husband took out the frustrations of his life as a poor farm labourer on her.
Eventually, things got so bad that Saeeda, 28, turned to the local office of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) in Bamyan, the central Afghan city where the couple live. They were called in for a counselling session during which her husband was warned that what he was doing was a crime he could be imprisoned for.
It worked – the beatings stopped. “At that time, I felt like I had come back to life,” Saeeda says. But then, in 2021, the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan and immediately shut down services like the one that had provided Saeeda with a lifeline when she most needed it.
“Now, whenever he gets angry, he doesn’t say a word; he immediately gets a stick and beats me,” she says. “If there’s no stick, he uses a rope or even a phone charger cable. Many times, my body is left bruised and black and blue.”
Saeeda says the beatings now feel like a form of revenge for what she did.
“You filed a complaint with the commission, and I can’t forget that. You shamed me in front of everyone. You questioned my manhood,” she recalls him telling her.
The AIHRC was established along with the Afghan Ministry of Women’s Affairs under a governance plan that followed the toppling of the first Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001.
The core mission of both institutions was to monitor the human rights situation and address the widespread violence against women in the country through monitoring, raising public awareness and providing support for victims.
Through their offices in each of Afghanistan’s provinces, they documented violations and helped establish safe houses for women who had experienced violence.
When the Taliban returned to power, both institutions were dissolved. Instead, the Taliban established the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, an institution tasked with imposing further restrictions on women’s lives.
With two small children at home and new rules barring women from being seen in public, Saeeda is trapped with her abuser. She says she feels abandoned, with no one to turn to – not even her own family, who live far away, and who in any case disowned her after she ran away to marry.
It’s a situation replicated for many women across Afghanistan who face violence in their daily lives and yet have no recourse to justice. Monitoring organizations say women’s voices are simply not heard in Afghanistan’s judicial institutions, which, far from enforcing justice, are being misused to reinforce gender-based repression.
The U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan Richard Bennett told the Human Rights Council last month the Taliban have dismantled legal and institutional frameworks and eliminated critical protections for women and girls in Afghanistan.
“The Taliban have turned Afghanistan’s legal and judicial sectors into tools for consolidating their organized system of repression, harassment, and gender-based domination,” he told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, describing the Taliban’s policies of harassment and abuse as tantamount to “crimes against humanity”.
– ‘I couldn’t endure it’ –
Like Saeeda, Marwa* faces retaliation for filing a complaint about her violent husband, in her case with the department of women’s affairs in Bamyan.
“I just wanted to find a way out of the suffering, to ease my pain,” says the The 34-year-old mother of three. “I couldn’t endure it any longer.”
For a time after she complained, Marwa’s husband stopped being violent, mainly out of fear of being imprisoned. But everything changed with the return of the Taliban.
“We had almost two good years. My husband tried to control himself and not take his anger out on me. Even his behavior at home had noticeably improved,” she says. “But it didn’t last long, because once the Taliban came, everything fell apart again.”
“He picks fights with me for no reason and beats me. If he feels like it, he pulls my hair. One time, he beat me so mercilessly that the neighbors came and held him back. He could have killed me.”
With a trembling voice, Marwa says her husband often mocks her, taunting her to go and complain to the Department of Women’s Affairs.
“He says, ‘Go ahead, file a complaint with the Department of Women’s Affairs or go to Human Rights. You women were turning our lives upside down.’ Then he says, ‘Tell them your husband is beating you’.”
Such stories are legion in Afghanistan, where for two decades women enjoyed a degree of protection, however limited, only to see it snatched away.
Gulchehra*, 36, describes how her days start and finish to the sound of her husband’s anger.
“When shouting and cursing don’t satisfy him, he slaps or kicks me until my face is covered in blood,” she says. “So far, he’s beaten me with a belt, shoes, sticks, rope, even electrical cables.”
It was attending an educational workshop in her village aimed at raising women’s awareness of their rights that changed things for Gulchehra. She learned that violence against women was a crime, and that as a woman, she could defend herself. Emboldened, Gulchehra decided to file a complaint against her husband with the Human Rights Commission in the spring of 2020.
She said that, with the help of some neighbors, she was able to submit the complaint, and her husband was summoned several times.
“The Commission told my husband that if he continued to beat and abuse me, he would be considered a criminal and could face prison time,” she says.
The warnings from the Human Rights Commission forced her husband to change his behaviour. But when the Taliban returned, he no longer had anything to fear.
“My husband went back to his old ways, but this time the beatings and insults became even worse,” she says. “Now, he hits me with whatever he can find.”
Note*: Names are changed to protect identities.
