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March 8, 2004

New York Times

For More Afghan Women, Immolation Is Escape
By CARLOTTA GALL

ALALABAD, Afghanistan - Waiflike, draped in a pale blue veil, Madina, 20, sits on her hospital bed, bandages covering the terrible, raw burns on her neck and chest. Her hands tremble. She picks nervously at the soles of her feet and confesses that three months earlier she set herself on fire with kerosene.

Beside her, on the next bed, her mother-in-law, Bibi Khanum, and her brother-in-law, Abdul Muhammad, 18, confirm her account but deny her reason, which Madina would explain only outside on a terrace, away from her husband's family. "All the time they beat me," she said. "They broke my arm. But what should I do? This was my home."

Accounts like Madina's are repeated across Afghanistan, doctors and human rights workers say. They are discovering more and more young women who have set themselves on fire, desperate to escape the cruelties of family life and harsh tribal traditions that show no sign of changing despite the end of Taliban rule and the dawn of democracy.

Doctors and nurses in Kabul and Jalalabad say they have seen more cases recently, partly because the population has been swollen by the return of two million refugees and because cases are being tracked for the first time by rights groups, hospitals and the government.

But the trauma and social upheaval of decades of war, poverty and illiteracy in Afghanistan have also intensified the traditional pressures on young women, they say.

The recently formed Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission recorded 40 such cases in just the past six months in Herat, a western city of half a million people.

Karima Karimi, one of the commission's officers, says she suspects that the actual figure is higher, and President Hamid Karzai has ordered an investigation. Officials at the commission said it was reasonable to estimate that Afghanistan had hundreds of such cases in a year.

"It is not only in Herat; it is in all of Afghanistan," said Dr. Soraya Rahim, deputy minister of women's affairs, on her return from a government investigative trip to Herat.

"It takes different forms in different provinces," she said in a telephone interview. "Some take tablets. Some cut their wrists. Some hang themselves. Some burn themselves.

"But the reason is very important. The first reason is our very bad tradition of forced marriage. Girls think this is the only way, that there is no other way in life."

Educated women in the cities who were repressed by the old Taliban government have benefited from the changes in Afghanistan, and many are now working and studying. But in villages and remote tribal areas, the new order has not improved women's longstanding low status.

Daughters are often exchanged between families, are given in marriage as compensation for crimes, or are married to men two or three times their age.

When young girls marry, they leave home to live with their husband's extended family, where the mother-in-law rules the household. Often they are seen as little more than a new source of labor.

While the authorities have little idea of the full extent of the burnings, because families hide them out of shame and often claim they are accidents, the desperate attempts of young women to escape lives dictated by tribal customs and a deeply conservative Islam are undeniable.

Often they resort to burning, since kerosene and cooking fuels are easily accessible to women. In heavily populated eastern Afghanistan, the chief of anesthesiology at Jalalabad's Public Hospital No. 1, Muhammad Naseem, said the hospital received an average of 20 burn cases a month, at least two or three of which were self-inflicted.

The rest were household accidents, most caused by pressure cookers, gas or oil stoves or kerosene lamps, which account for many more cases of burns to women and children than those that are self-inflicted.

Nurses often learn the difference only in moments of confidence, or they spot telltale signs of family problems, like the absence of hospital visits by the husband. For the first time, human rights officials are paying attention, too.

The tribal areas, populated by Pashtuns who live by a code entirely their own, are particularly harsh in their treatment of women, said Sharifa, an officer from the human rights commission in Jalalabad. Like many Afghans, she uses only one name.

She said that when she visited the women's wards of Hospital No. 1 one day last month, she found five women who had tried self-immolation. One morning at the hospital, one of the five died after suffering for 11 days.

Madina's account is typical of the hardships young women encounter. She was married at 15 in an exchange of daughters between two families, a common practice in Afghanistan. She married Din Muhammad, and his sister was married to her uncle.

Madina said she had borne two children - Najiba, 4, and Taj Muhammad, 2. When her husband was jailed for drug offenses three years ago, she moved back from Pakistan to live with her in-laws in the village of Charbagh, in eastern Afghanistan.

In the interview on the hospital terrace, Madina explained that her troubles began a year ago, when the girl who had married her uncle died during pregnancy. Madina's mother-in-law turned her grief on Madina. "She would say, `My daughter is in the grave, and you are still alive,' " Madina recounted.

In the hospital room, her mother-in-law, Bibi Khanum, a small woman with blue eyes and tiny hands, denied driving Madina to try to kill herself.

"God knows if it was cruelty," she said. "The reason she was impatient was because her husband was in jail."

"It's not true," Madina whispered.

Madina's husband, freed from prison and remorseful, has promised to take her to live away from the rest of the family. They are poor, and she is painfully thin and ill, but recovering. Away from her mother-in-law, she does not tremble.

Qadri Gul, 20, one of Dr. Naseem's patients, was less fortunate, dying after 11 days. Married for five years, she was the mother of two children. Her husband took a second wife shortly after they had wed, and she told the hospital staff and her family that her husband and her in-laws had beaten her daily, and had even encouraged her when she had threatened to burn herself.

She visited her parents and her numerous sisters in Jalalabad for the Muslim festival of Id al-Fitr in November. "Her body was completely bruised," her sister Basmina recalled. "She had marks on her buttocks and said, `I don't know if I will get better.' "

They did not tell their mother, who nevertheless sensed that all was not well. "She was upset," the mother, Bibi Jan, recalled. "She did not put henna on her hands. She looked unhappy."

She went home after the holiday with a toy car for her son, but when the children started fighting over it, she took it away. That sparked a fight with her husband. He slammed a glass into her head, knocking her out. When she regained consciousness, she threatened to kill herself by setting herself on fire.

"He laughed and said: `There are the matches and the kerosene. Burn yourself,' " Basmina recounted.

As she lay dying in the hospital, Qadri Gul told her mother and sisters what had happened. Sharifa from the human rights office also interviewed her.

Her mother said: "She blamed her husband, her brother-in-law and her mother-in-law. I will leave them to God, but I will just ask them the question `What did you do to my daughter?' " She was sitting in her courtyard, surrounded by relatives and mourners on the third day after her daughter's death.

"She was a very good girl," her mother said. "From neck to legs she was burnt."