The Taliban came for Dr. Soraya Masood’s family one night in November 2000.  They had feared the midnight knock ever since the Taliban captured Herat where the family lived.  As Tajiks, not only were the Massoods the “wrong” ethnic group in a country ruled by the Pakhtun Taliban, but to make matters worse, the young veterinary doctor and her four siblings had converted to Christianity some eight years ago.  In Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, this amounted to apostasy, a crime punishable by death.

            Although they had not publicised their conversion, the family had quietly practiced their faith and celebrated Christmas for several years. In a deeply religious society, their lack of observance of Muslim rituals, and frequent visits by members of international aid organisations to their house did not go unnoticed and rumours of their conversion were rife in the neighbourhood. It was only a matter of time before the Taliban decided to investigate the matter for themselves.  Dr. Soraya was at a neighbour’s place when they raided her house and her brother sent her a message urging her to flee.  Terrified, she managed to escape to Pakistan with a Hazara family.  She has neither seen nor heard of her family since.

            Being a single Afghan Christian woman proved to be double jeopardy in Pakistan as well.  The Hazaras, who she accompanied in her flight from Afghanistan soon became antagonistic towards her, chastising her for not praying or reading the Quran.  Then, when she sought refuge with another Afghan family, the husband attempted to assault her.  In Pakistan, as in Afghanistan, 28-year-old Dr. Soraya discovered that a woman without a husband, a father or an adult brother is considered fair game.  “Everywhere I go, they ask me where is your husband, where is your husband – what can I do?” she says, wringing her hands in despair.  The family she is currently living with is also threatening to turn her out, maintaining that her Christian faith places their lives in peril.  Dr. Soraya was working as a domestic for an Iraqi family for some time, a deeply humiliating experience for a proud, educated woman, and one that exacerbated her existing psychological problems.  At present she is unemployed, existing on handouts by charitable organisations and living in peril that each day she may be turned out on the streets by her host family.

             Dr. Soraya is one of the many Afghan women who have placed their hopes on obtaining asylum abroad.  A few months ago, she was referred to Islamabad-based Sach, the only NGO in Pakistan that plays a role in the process of resettling single Afghan women abroad.  The staff at the NGO investigate the women according to the criteria set by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).  These could, however, be changed keeping in view the circumstances.  For example, at this point in time, Shia and non-Pakhtun Afghans stand a better chance of having their applications approved, although several other factors, that remain confidential, are also taken into account.

            Cases approved by Sach are then forwarded for further screening – including house visits –  to other organisations such as the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the UNHCR itself and finally the foreign embassy, a process that requires each candidate to clear about seven interviews before she is deemed qualified for political refugee status, usually in the US but on occasion, in European countries as well.

            Dr. Soraya’s case is currently in appeal.  As a candidate for asylum on religious grounds, she failed to clear her UNHCR interview because, according to the interviewer, she was unable to respond satisfactorily to questions about Christianity.  Dr. Noreen, project coordinator at Sach, contends that, “Living in Afghanistan, she hardly had the opportunity for an indepth study of Christianity and we are confident that our appeal will be successful.”

            Twenty-four-year old Gul Jana’s case is also in appeal.  Her case for refugee status could not have been stronger but for an unfortunate turn of events.  Gul Jana’s family, her mother, two young sisters and a brother who was then nine, came to Pakistan four years ago after her father was killed in Kabul.  The Taliban had decreed that all widows and young women must marry, or else they would be forced into marriage with anyone who was willing, age or previous marital status being no consideration.  In Pakistan, Gul Jana and her mother found work as domestic servants.  Now, however, her mother is seriously ill and she is the only breadwinner in the family, supplementing her income with embroidery and stitching jobs once she returns from work.  Tears fill her eyes as she relates her story in a low voice.  Her case went awry when the international organisation deputed to pay her a house visit mistook her neighbour’s house for hers.  Not only was there an adult male present in that house, but to compound matters, Gul Jana happened to be there on a short visit.  It was concluded that the man was a family member and, as such, her case did not meet the criteria. Utter desolation clouds her face at the prospect of her appeal being rejected.

            Once a candidate’s case has been approved by the UNHCR, she is, according to the agreement between the agency and Sach, entitled to be lodged at a shelter run by the NGO for Afghan refugees as well as for Pakistani victims of domestic abuse.  If her application successfully goes through the the various subsequent stages, her sojourn at the shelter can vary between four to eight weeks before her departure for the US, during which she is provided orientation classes including lessons in English.  Upon arrival in the US, the refugees are met by relevant agencies who place them in Afghan communities, some of which are located in Texas.  Although the shelter run by Sach has a capacity for only 30 women, including Pakistanis and Afghans, the numbers vary.  Recently, there were 68 refugees lodged there, besides the Pakistani inmates, necessitating adhoc arrangements for accomodation.  With the increased exodus of Afghans slipping through the Pakistan border in the wake of the US military onslaught on Afghanistan, volunteers at Sach are bracing themselves for even greater numbers of desperate women knocking on their doors for assistance.  Dr. Noreen declines to specify the number of women resettled abroad through Sach, on the grounds that it may raise the hopes of many who simply do not meet the criteria.

            Twice a week, some 60 or more Afghan women pour into the small courtyard of the Sach office.  Some are new cases, while others have come to seek information on the progress of their applications.  Desperation is writ large on their faces; as single women in a society that regards women without male protection as easy prey, the younger ones have to contend with sexual harassment on a daily basis.  Added to this is the stress of  being often the only earning member of their family and making ends meet on meagre salaries of between 800 to 1000 rupees a month, usually as domestic servants.  Even this is a job that is difficult to find, for most people are too wary to employ Afghans in their homes.  Only about 15 interviews can be conducted on one day, while other applicants are shepherded out of the compound with instructions to return on the next date designated for interviews.  Nevertheless,  intermittent knocking continues on the gate for some time.

            About 50 per cent of the women who approach Sach tend to be literate, even if it is in their native language.  Most however, are Persian-speaking Tajiks who worked as teachers in pre-Taliban Afghanistan before the regime expelled them from their workplaces.

            Today, at the Sach office, there are approximately 80 women, of whom only three are Pakhtuns.  One of them, who is in her early twenties, is asked whether she supports the Taliban.  Her face contorted with fury, as she spits out, “Tell me one good thing about the Taliban.  They beat women, stop them from working and close down girls’ schools.”  Then, breaking into sobs, she adds, “They took over my home in Baghlan province and  killed my brother and father because my father worked for Najeeb’s government.”  Virtually without exception, they maintain that if peace was restored to Afghanistan and it was free of Taliban rule, they would rather go home than relocate to a foreign country.

            At the initial stages of her quest for refugee status is Zakia, who moved to Pakistan five years ago from Kabul.  Her husband had a well-paying government job and the eldest of her three sons was an air force pilot.  She recalls the fateful night when the Taliban barged into their house, beat her husband mercilessly and dragged her eldest son away with them. After an agonising wait of two days, they discovered his tortured, mangled body discarded outside their home.  With trembling fingers and moist eyes, she fishes out a photograph of her son, pictured in his pilot’s uniform and flanked by a friend against the backdrop of a propeller plane.  The once educated, well-to-do woman, whose husband is now gravely ill, has been reduced to serving as a domestic to supplement the meagre wages earned by her remaining sons, aged 15 and 17, who work as labourers at the vegetable market.  “We abandoned Kabul because the Taliban had decreed that all able-bodied young men were to serve in their army or else it would be construed as insurbordination.  I had already lost one son.  I wasn’t willing to risk the lives of the other two.”

            Even those who progress through the numerous stages until they are granted refugee status, can sometimes come up against unexpected, last-minute pitfalls.  Ameera, for instance, was scheduled to leave on September 11 for the US via Karachi.  With the two-day closure of  US airspace following the terrorist attacks however, her flight was cancelled and she was forced to return to the shelter.  Widowed twice and a mother of six children, Ameera had been eagerly counting the days to her departure.  Described  as a cheerful, optimistic woman by the staff at the shelter, she now cuts a desolate figure, her eyes glazed with despair, convinced that fate has condemned her to a life in limbo at the shelter. In keeping with Afghan tradition, she had, when she remarried, left her eldest son from her first husband with his family.  An emotional farewell had taken place between mother and son just prior to her departure.  While her remaining five children are to accompany her, she knows there is little likelihood of ever seeing her firstborn again.  Unlike most other Afghan women, Ameera has no desire to return to her home country; if she does so, tradition decrees that she be married off, regardless of her wishes, to a member of her second husband’s family.  No amount of convincing from the staff at the shelter can convince her that this setback is a temporary one and that as soon as the process of resettlement is resumed, she will be able to leave.

           One of the most pitiful cases at the Sach shelter home is that of Lali.  Her story is a chilling illustration of the vulnerability of women – even at the hands of their own men in a primeval struggle for survival.  Lali, who was a teacher in Afghanistan before the Taliban came to power, was prostituted by her husband after they came to Pakistan.  A mother of three small children, Lali was pregnant for the fourth time but suffered a miscarriage.  Upon regaining consciousness in a Peshawar hospital, she found herself abandoned by her husband who had also taken away her children.  Already traumatised by what she had been put through, this incident pushed her over the edge.  Unable to handle her hysteria and aggression, the hospital staff contacted the police.  Members of Sach say that from the brief, halting account that Lali has given them, they gather that she was raped while in police custody before being sent to a government-run shelter home for women.  There too, she faced repeated sexual abuse.  Asked whether she was given any job to occupy herself with over there, Lali told the Sach members, “No… but in the evenings I was told to dress up and then I was presented before different men.”  She stayed there for a year before her case was approved by the UNHCR and she could be given place at the Sach shelter, where the psychiatrist diagnosed her as suffering from acute schizophrenia.  She exhibited radical mood swings, maintaining a stony silence for hours, then lashing out with torrents of abuse.  Says Dr. Noreen, “Her thinking had become so twisted that she thought that the other residents at the shelter, who left for their jobs every day, were actually going out for prostitution.  She even thought that we, the staff members, worked as prostitutes and would argue with us why she was the only one being restrained from selling her body.  Of course, in her case, we could not let her out of the shelter.”  Now however, the psychiatrist says that she has made encouraging progress.  Her departure depends upon finding a sponsor who will undertake to continue the long-term psychological care she would need once she is granted refugee status. 

             Fair and petite, with short hair tied back carelessly, Lali constantly fiddles with her dupatta, twisting the edges around her fingers over and over again.  Her experiences have left her wary of strangers and she barely meets their eyes while answering questions in monosyllables.  When Dr. Noreen gently asks her what she has been writing in her diary, she replies in an inaudible voice that is nevertheless, unmistakably defiant.  “I have my secrets.  Why should I show them to anyone?”

            Psychological problems afflict most of the refugee women, and will in all probability, continue to haunt them for the rest of their lives.  Dr. Rizwan Taj, head of the department of psychiatry at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, (PIMS) in Islamabad, has specialised in the treatment of the survivors of violence.  Having treated over 1000 Afghan refugee women, he says that most were affected by post-traumatic stress disorder.  “Sufferers of PTSD live in a state of constant nervous tension, experience vivid flashbacks in daydreams and nightmares that leave them paralysed with terror; the condition can be permanently debilitating unless intense psychological counselling is provided.”

             As Sach has been assigned to deal only with single Afghan women, that is, widows, divorcees or those with only minor male members in their family, those who do not fit this criteria are asked to approach the UNHCR office directly to register themselves as asylum-seekers.  However, with single women seen as the most vulnerable segment of the refugee population, their cases are processed in less time through this route, which is why many Afghan families approach Sach nevertheless, hoping they will not be turned away.

            One of these is Shema.  A slim, tall, 25-year-old, Shema is a Sunni Tajik with an illustrious lineage.  Her grandfather was a member of the Afghan parliament and her father a prominent political personage.  Living with her family in Kabul’s upscale locality of Wazir Akber Khan, Shema was a journalist and her sisters were all either studying or working as teachers.  Their comfortable existence was shattered with the arrival of the Taliban and their medieval version of Islam and the family decided to leave for Pakistan. Shema’s husband was a medical student at the time.  Today he works in an ice factory in Islamabad while she teaches English, Math and Darri in a small school for Afghan children.

            “I have to be careful not to speak against the Taliban before my students,” says Shema in a soft, lilting accent.  “A majority of them are Pakhtuns and they warn me that if I criticise the Taliban or Osama, my life will be in danger.”

            Dr. Noreen says that Shema’s case cannot be taken up by them because with an able-bodied husband who can support her, she cannot be included in the high-risk category.  However, at the UNHCR where she and her husband are eligible to register themselves, there is a considerable backlog of cases – there was a time when 4000 fresh applications were being received by the agency.  This backlog is steadily increasing in the wake of the September 11 attacks in the US because much of the agency’s foreign staff has been evacuated and also because several countries, have clamped a go-slow on asylum-seekers.  Nevertheless, there are certain cases that are entitled to special exemptions and allocated to the fast track via Sach.

            For instance, there was the case of a first cousin of the former president of Afghanistan, Dr. Najeebullah, to whom the dead president’s body had been handed over by the Taliban, three days after it was left, ravaged and violated, hanging from a lampost in Kabul. In mortal fear of their lives from the ruling Pakhtuns who deemed all those affiliated with Najeebullah as deserving of annihilation, he and his family fled to Pakistan at the earliest opportunity.  Death threats continued to pursue them.  Nor were they idle threats: the man’s brother was gunned down outside the UNHCR office in Islamabad. Given the perilous situation of the family, Sach provided them shelter at an undisclosed location in the city, where they lived in hiding for several months until their application for political asylum was processed.  “During the course of his ordeal, Dr. Najeeb’s cousin had developed typical symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder,” says Dr. Noreen.  “Although he was a doctor, his confidence was so shattered that he was not even able to prescribe painkillers.”

            The shelter had initially been demarcated for women but when it opened two years ago, its first inmate was Ashiq Rasool, a liberal journalist in Kabul during Najeebullah’s regime.  In 1993, the city presented a scene from hell, with pitched battles being waged between different mujahideen factions that raped and pillaged their way through much of Kabul.  Ashiq Rasool sent his six children to live with his in-laws in a comparitively peaceful part of the city that still remained under Najeeb’s control.

            Ashiq Rasool did not know the horrors that were in store for him when the Taliban finally made their way into Kabul – and into his house.  He was mercilessly beaten, his library ransacked and his house and writings set on fire. He was then blindfolded and taken to a place he gathered was in eastern Kabul, and shoved into an underground trench, where an unbearable stench hung heavy in the air.  When his blindfold was removed, he saw the area littered with corpses, numbering acccording to his estimate, perhaps a hundred.  Worse was to come.  Convinced that Rasool was privy to intelligence matters, the Taliban employed the most horrific means to extract this “information” from him. One eye was gouged out with a knife; his left ear was chopped off and acid poured into it with a syringe. His body too was doused with acid.  Sleep deprivation was also practised to break the prisoners psychologically.  Moreover, they were compelled to witness the torture meted out to fellow inmates.  Some were hung alive from butchers’ hooks and their flesh carved from their bones.  “I will never be able to shut out their screams of agony from my memory,” he recalled.  Then there were days when they were starved on a diet of salt water and bread, or worse, made to drink their own urine.  At last, convinced that there was no more they could extract from him, the Taliban set him free, but only after his wife’s family had paid them a substantial bribe, which they had collected by selling off their entire property.  He arrived with his wife and children in Quetta and remained at the Sach shelter home before being relocated to the US.

            For the first three months of their resettlement, asylum-seekers are provided financial help from relevant aid agencies, after which they are granted a small stipend from the state government and have to get by as best as they can.  Some, through sheer willpower and tenacity, not to mention a dose of good fortune, manage to make a success of their lives.  One such example is Zartaj Bano.  Belonging to a prominent Hazara political family with communist affiliations, Zartaj’s inherent activism proved to be her salvation and her mainstay as she grew to adulthood.  Arriving in Pakistan with her mother and young brother in 1983, she refused to return to Afghanistan when her mother remarried and went back.  Later, Zartaj was to become an articulate member of the Revolutionary Association for Afghan Women (RAWA). Her fiery speeches attracted the ire of the Taliban and she began recieving death threats.

            After keeping a low profile in Karachi and then in Quetta for a couple of years, she was referred to Sach through the UNHCR.  Her case approved, she is now in the US alongwith her brother.  Despite the fact that she had not been able to study beyond 12th grade, she had refused to give up her aspiration to pursue legal studies. As a foreigner in Pakistan however, she required a no-objection certificate (NOC) from her government to do that – hardly a likely prospect with the Taliban in power. Today however, with the help of a scholarship, she is in her third year of studies at a university in Texas while her brother is in college.  “She sent me a message recently,” says Dr. Noreen with a smile, “telling me with great delight that she is majoring in social sciences and that she plans to use her studies to help her people.”

            Such heartening stories however, remain occasional glimpses of light in a landscape littered with the weight of broken dreams and untold indignities. Generations have been lost to the unrelenting, senseless war that has left families divided across the globe – perhaps never to see each other again.