The Afghan Women Who Saw Freedom Ebb Away
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September 30, 2001
The Observer (U.K.)
She can remember the cinemas and the picnics in the sun. She can remember the packed cafes and the student parties and the libraries with their shelves heaving with books and the clean, modern hospitals with the calm, competent doctors that made her decide she wanted to be a doctor herself.
'They were the good times,' she says. 'When the Soviet Union was in control. Since then everything has been a long dark night.'
The Pakistani noonday sun, harsh despite the coming autumn and the thin curtains on the windows, reflects in the smooth glossy red of Saira Noorani's fingernails. She is holding them up to the light and laughing.
'I have painted my nails,' she says softly, smiles a long slow smile and then laughs again. It has been five years and three days since Saira, a 29-year-old surgeon, could paint her fingernails. Five years and three days since the Taliban militia came running through Kabul's wide, tree-lined streets and Saira, newly qualified as a doctor, watched in horror as they began to impose their harsh brand of Islamic law.
Last week Saira finally left Kabul for the relative safety, and very relative liberalism, of Pakistan. Here she will not be harangued, or worse, if a soldier spots her make-up.
'It was hell,' she says quietly. 'It got worse every day. After being used to freedom it was just so much humiliation and frustration.'
Saira is one of the last of the Afghan middle class to leave. Her father, once an important official in the state airline, left two years ago. Saira had hung on in the hope that things might get better. They didn't.
Afghanistan has been stripped of its middle class. All those with capital, qualifications or initiative have left. Some have made homes in Pakistan, the lucky ones have made it to the West.
Only the poor remain. Saira's story explains much about the turmoil in the country - and the twisted logic underpinning the ideology of the Taliban regime which governs more than 90 per cent of it.
She was born in 1972, in the year King Zahir Shah was deposed by his cousin Mohamed Daoud. The king had tried to modernise his isolated and conservative country. Though the pace of change was too fast for the conservative religious and tribal leaders in the rural areas, it was not fast enough for the Soviet-sponsored republican clique that succeeded him. When they tried to impose a radical reform programme there was a rural revolt that threatened the regime's existence. Moscow sent in the tanks to prop it up.
For the next decade rural Afghanistan was racked by war. But, while in the provinces villages were burnt, helicopters dropped mines to kill children and Russian soldiers were staked out in the sun to die, Kabul prospered.
'Life was good under the Soviets,' Saira said. 'Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go wherever we wanted and wear what we liked. A lot of my friends wore miniskirts but I liked my long summer dress which was more comfortable. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday night and listen to the latest Hindi music. I can remember having picnics with my friends after school when it was hot.'
Partly for ideological reasons, partly for practical ones, the Soviet Union subsidised schools and hospitals, built a vast bureaucracy with well-paid jobs for Kabulis and constructed a new city centre with open streets and parks. Saira was one of 1,000 medical students at the University of Kabul. She specialised in surgery and obstetrics. But soon after she qualified things began to change.
'It all started to go wrong when the Mujahideen started winning. They were uneducated peasants. They used to kill teachers and burn schools,' she said.
With massive US support, the Afghan resistance groups finally forced the Soviet Union out of their country in 1979. Three years later they had defeated the stooge government the Russians had left behind and marched into Kabul. Saira watched them entering her city on the television because it was not safe to walk the streets.
'We were terrified. When we saw them they were horrible. With their beards and turbans and their smell they were like wild animals. It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West had supported.'
To the Mujahideen - and to the Taliban who followed them - Kabul was a city of collaborators who had led good lives while they had suffered to liberate their country. Everything was a target - property, women, whole areas of the city.
When the Mujahideen factions started fighting they thought nothing of rocketing civilian areas. Whole parts of the city were levelled, including the Nooranis' house. The family fled, returning to Kabul in early 1996 when fighting died down. But the worst regime was to come.
When the Taliban seized Kabul they were determined to purge what they saw as a satanic den of iniquity and set about imposing their fanatical rule. Music and television were forbidden. Women were banned from schools and universities, and from leaving their homes without a male relative. They were made to wear the burqa - the head-to-toe veil and gown customary throughout rural Afghanistan. It was a visible symbol of the revenge of the countryside on the city.
Saira started work again in one of the main hospitals in Kabul. Supplies were hard to come by and she had to wear the burqa in the streets and a headscarf and veil while operating.
'It was very hard and very difficult to work as a doctor in those conditions. We were not even allowed to talk to the male doctors,' she said. 'I had grown used to so many freedoms and suddenly we could not cut our hair the way we wanted. They made rules about which clothes we could wear even in our homes and banned nail varnish and make-up.
'When the Taliban first came we were happy because the Mujahideen were raping and robbing and we couldn't leave our homes, and at the beginning the Taliban did bring us security, but they just got worse and worse.'
Finally, after Saira had refused to operate on a senior Taliban's relative instead of a seriously ill child, she was banned from her hospital. Her wage - £15 a month - had not been paid for six months anyway. She went to stay with friends in the eastern city of Jalalabad and spent a week illegally watching the television.
On Thursday last week she took an overcrowded bus to the Pakistani border, fought her way through the seething crowds waiting on the Afghan side and bribed her way across. She is now staying, with her young son, in a relative's overcrowded home in the frontier city of Peshawar.
'I do not know what I will do now,' she said. 'I cannot stay here for ever. Unless there is a strong and good government in Kabul I cannot go there. 'But where else is there? Afghans are not welcome anywhere in the world.'
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.[ SEPTEMBER HOMEPAGE ] [ AFGHAN HISTORY ]
