Posted on 11/18/2001 4:54:44 AM PST by Happygal
WHEN the Taliban fled the Afghan capital last week, Habib Sakkani, 32, had only one thing on his mind: the fate of his wife, Mujda.
Arrested two months ago, she had been thrown into Kabul’s notorious Pol-i-Charki prison and charged with begging and non-Muslim behaviour. As the city’s new rulers took power, word went out that the 3,000 inmates would be freed. Mujda should have been among them.
But Sakkani’s hopes of embracing his wife faded after he left his home in the squalid slum of Sement Khana and cycled to the grim compound in which the jail stands. “The entrance was barred and guarded by militias armed with Kalashnikovs and bazookas,” he said. “I asked about my wife. They said there were no women and that other men had come to look for them. They had disappeared.”
Mujda, 26 — who was imprisoned along with Ahmed, three, the second-youngest of their seven children — is among several dozen Afghan women feared to have been taken away as sex slaves by the retreating Taliban forces.
Mohammed Ibrahim Sekander, the provisional governor, said he had been inundated by requests from husbands, boyfriends, brothers and cousins for information about women who had disappeared from the jail. Most left his office disappointed.
“We don’t know what happened to the women,” Sekander admitted. “The Taliban took them away. There must have been a hundred of them, with many children.”
The empty women’s section of the jail, which lies at the end of a narrow corridor behind a heavy wooden door, gives a chilling insight into conditions suffered by Mujda and the other unfortunates imprisoned there.
In one of the cells, on a cement floor covered in rubbish and damp stains, lie iron shackles and seven burqas. A second cell contains another dozen burqas, abandoned next to a teapot on a small gas stove. In the third, among the camp-beds that stink of urine, are a few permits for five-minute visits by relatives.
In the guards’ office nearby hundreds of files have been arranged in a metal cupboard: they include arrest warrants, sentences from the religious tribunal, petitions and appeals for clemency.
Documents headed “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” and stamped by the “Department of Islamic Justice” contain a list of the prisoners with their names, crimes and the punishment inflicted.
More than half the women were convicted of fornication — an offence that carried a punishment of four to six years in jail. Others were accused of murder (two to 10 years), adultery (six years) or marrying without the consent of their family (two years).
These bureaucratic registers, in neat handwriting, tell stories of tragedies without hope. Fariba Allahdad, who eloped with her lover, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Nasira Gulam Dasteghir, caught in an embrace with her boyfriend, received 31 strokes of the lash.
Majan Mohammed Aziz, unmarried but six months pregnant, received 39 strokes. Bubu Gul was condemned to 10 years for killing a man who was trying to rape her. Wajma Abdul Sattar, denounced by her neighbours for fornication, was visited in jail by a gynaecologist mullah who confirmed she had had sexual intercourse. Hanging from the bars of the cell windows, covered with sheets of cardboard and plastic to keep out the icy winds, are jackets, trousers, socks and shirts, all in small sizes. In the corner of one cell two nails support a cradle with a tiny blanket and a few strips of coloured cloth.
The fate suffered by women under the Taliban was highlighted yesterday by President George W Bush’s wife, Laura. Taking over her husband’s weekly radio address, she said: “Afghan women know what the rest of the world is discovering: the brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists.”
What misery.
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