The Favored Daughter Read online

  THE FAVORED DAUGHTER

  ONE WOMAN’S FIGHT TO LEAD

  AFGHANISTAN INTO THE FUTURE

  FAWZIA KOOFI

  WITH NADENE GHOURI

  To my mom, who was the kindest,

  most talented teacher in the world;

  to both my daughters, who are the stars of my life;

  and to all women of Afghanistan

  THE FAVORED DAUGHTER

  Copyright © Fawzia Koofi, 2012.

  All rights reserved.

  First published in France as Lettres à mes filles by Michel Lafon.

  First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the U.S.—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

  Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

  Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

  ISBN: 978-0-230-12067-9

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Koofi, Fawzia, 1975–

  The favored daughter : one woman’s fight to lead Afghanistan into the future / Fawzia Koofi with Nadene Gourhi.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-230-12067-9 (hardback)

  1. Koofi, Fawzia, 1975– 2. Women legislators— Afghanistan—Biography. 3. Legislators—Afghanistan— Biography. 4. Women—Afghanistan—Biography. 5. Afghanistan. Ulasi Jirgah—Biography. 6. Women—Social conditions— Afghanistan. 7. Children—Social conditions—Afghanistan. 8. Women’s rights—Afghanistan. 9. Human rights—Afghanistan. I. Gourhi, Nadene. II. Title.

  DS371.43.K66A3 2012

  328.581092—dc23

  [B]

  2011025829

  A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

  Design by Letra Libre

  First edition: January 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  1 Stories of Old

  2 “Just a Girl”

  3 A Terrible Loss

  4 Running

  5 A Village Girl Again

  6 When Justice Dies

  7 The War Within

  8 Losing Her

  PART TWO

  9 One Ordinary Thursday

  10 Retreat to the North

  11 Everything Turns White

  12 A Taliban Wedding

  13 An End before a Beginning

  14 The Darkness Pervades

  15 Back to Where I Began

  16 A Daughter for a Daughter

  17 The Darkness Lifts

  18 A New Purpose

  19 A Movement for Change

  20 A Dream for a War-Torn Nation

  A Historical Timeline of Afghanistan

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  September 2010

  The morning I wrote the letter that begins Chapter 1, I was due to attend a political meeting in Badakhshan, the province of Northern Afghanistan that I represent as a member of the Afghan parliament. Badakhshan is the northernmost province of Afghanistan, bordering both China and Takjikistan.

  It is also one of the poorest, wildest, most remote, and culturally conservative provinces in all of Afghanistan.

  Badakhshan has the highest rate of maternal mortality and child mortality in the entire world, due in part to its inaccessibility and crippling poverty, but also in part to a culture that sometimes puts tradition ahead of women’s health. A man will rarely seek hospital treatment for his wife unless it’s clear she won’t survive otherwise. With childbirth, this often means a woman may undergo three or four days of agonizing labor. By the time she reaches a hospital—often on the back of a donkey after traveling over rocky mountain tracks—it is usually too late to save both mother and child.

  On the day I wrote the letter I was warned not to travel because there had been a credible threat that the Taliban planned to kill me by planting an improvised explosive device (a roadside bomb) underneath my car. The Taliban dislike women holding such powerful positions in government as I do, and they dislike my public criticisms even more.

  They often try to kill me.

  Recently they have tried even harder than usual to murder me, threatening my home, tracking my journeys to work so they can lay a bomb as my car passes, even firing on a convoy of police vehicles that was supposed to protect me. One recent gun attack on my car lasted for 30 minutes, killing two policemen. I stayed inside the vehicle, not knowing if I would be alive or dead when it was over.

  I know the Taliban and those others who seek to silence me for speaking out against corruption and bad leadership in my country will not be happy until I am dead.

  But on this day I ignored the threat. I have ignored countless similar threats, because if I didn’t, I could not do my job.

  But I felt the threat. I always feel it. That’s the very nature of threat, and those who threaten know that.

  I awoke my eldest daughter, Shaharzad, who is twelve, at 6:00 a.m. and told her that if I didn’t come home from this trip in a few days, she was to read the letter to her ten-year-old younger sister, Shuhra. Shaharzad’s eyes, full of questions, met mine. I placed my finger to her lips and kissed her and her sleeping sister on the forehead as I quietly left the room and closed the door.

  I regularly tear myself away from my children to do my work, despite knowing I might well be murdered. But my job is to represent the poorest people of my nation. That purpose, along with raising my two beautiful daughters, is what I live for. I could not on that day, and will not ever, let my people down.

  Dear Shuhra and Shaharzad,

  Today I am going on political business to Faizabad and Darwaz. I hope I will come back soon and see you again, but I have to say that perhaps I will not.

  There have been threats to kill me on this trip. Maybe this time these people will be successful in doing that.

  As your mother it causes me such bitter pain to tell you this. But please understand I would willingly sacrifice my life if it meant a peaceful Afghanistan and a better future for the children of this country.

  I live this life so that you—my precious girls—will be free to live your lives and to dream all of your dreams.

  If I am killed and I don’t see you again, I want you to remember a few things for me.

  First, don’t forget me.

  Because you are young and have yet to finish all your studies and can live independently, I want you to stay with your aunt Khadija. She loves you so much and she will take care of you for me.

  You have my authority to spend all the money I have in the bank. But use it wisely and use it for your studies. Focus on your education. A girl needs an education if she is to excel in this man’s world.

  After you graduate from eighth grade, I want you to continue your studies abroad. I want you to be familiar with universal values. The world is a big, beautiful, wonderful place and it is yours to explore.

  Be brave. Don’t be afraid of anything in life.

  All of us human beings will die one day. Maybe today is the day I will die. But if I do, please know it was for a purpose.

  Don’t die without achieving something. Take pride in trying to help people, and in trying to make our country and our world a better place.


  I kiss you both. I love you.

  Your mother

  PART ONE

  ONE

  STORIES OF OLD

  Even the day I was born, I was supposed to die.

  I have stared death in the face countless times in my 35 years, but still I’m alive.

  I can’t explain this, other than knowing that God has a purpose for me.

  Perhaps his purpose for me is to govern and lead my country out of the abyss of corruption and violence. Or perhaps his purpose is simply for me to be a good mother to my daughters.

  I was my father’s nineteenth child out of a total of 23, and my mother’s last child. My mother was my father’s second wife. When she fell pregnant with me she was physically exhausted from the seven children she had already given birth to. She was also depressed at having lost my father’s affections to his newest—and youngest—seventh wife. So she wanted me to die.

  I was born out at pasture. During the summer months, my mother and a host of servants would make the annual journey to graze our cattle and sheep in the highest points of the mountains, where the grass was sweeter. This was her chance to escape the house for a few weeks. She would take charge of the entire operation, gathering enough dried fruit, nuts, rice, and oil to sustain the small party of travelers for the three months or so they would be away. The preparations leading up to the trip would be a source of great excitement, my mother packing and planning every last detail before a convoy on horses and donkeys set off across the higher grounds.

  My mother loved these trips. As she rode through the villages, her joy at being temporarily free from the shackles of home and housework, and being able to breathe in the fresh mountain air, were evident to all.

  There is a local saying that the more powerful and passionate a woman is, the nicer she looks while sitting upon a horse in her burqa. It was also said that no one ever looked more beautiful on horseback than my mother did. It was something about the way she held herself—her uprightness, her dignity.

  But the year I was born, 1975, she was not in a celebratory mood. Thirteen months earlier she had stood at the large yellow gates of our hooli (house), a large, sprawling, mud-walled, single-story structure, and watched a wedding party descend the path that snaked down from the mountains through the center of our village. The groom was my mother’s husband. My father had chosen to take a seventh wife, a girl who was just 14 years old.

  Each time he remarried, my mother was devastated—although my father liked to joke that with each new wife my mother became yet more beautiful. Of all his wives my father had loved my mother, Bibi jan (literally translated, the name means “beautiful dear”), the most. But in my parents’ mountain village culture, love and marriage very rarely meant the same thing. Marriage was for family, tradition, culture, and obedience, all of which were deemed more important than individual happiness. Love was something no one was expected to need or to feel. Love only caused trouble. People believed unquestioning duty was where happiness lay.

  My mother had stood on the large stone terrace safely behind the hooli’s gates as the party of more than ten men on horseback ambled its way down the hillside, my father dressed in his finest white shalwar kameez (a long tunic and trousers), brown waistcoat, and lambskin hat. Beside his white horse—with bright pink, green, and red wool tassels dangling from its decorated bridle—were a series of smaller horses carrying the bride and her female relatives, all wearing white burqas. They were accompanying the bride to her new home, which she would share with my mother and the other women who also called my father husband. My father—a short man with close-set eyes and a neatly trimmed beard—smiled graciously and shook hands with the villagers who came out to greet him and witness the spectacle. They called to each other, “Wakil Abdul Rahman is here! Wakil Abdul Rahman is home with his most beautiful new wife!” His public loved him and they expected no less.

  Wakil (Representative) Abdul Rahman—my father—was a member of the Afghan parliament, representing the people of Badakhshan, the same people who I represent today. For as long as my family can be traced back, local politics and public service have been our tradition and our honor. Politics runs through my blood as strongly as the rivers that snake all over Badakhshan.

  Before my father and I became members of parliament, my father’s father, Azamshah, was a community leader and tribal elder.

  The Badakhshani districts of Darwaz and Koof, where my family and my last name originate, are so remote and mountainous that even today it can take up to three days to drive there from the provincial capital of Faizabad. And that’s in good weather. In winter the small mountain passes are completely closed.

  My grandfather’s job was to help people with their social and practical problems, connecting them to the central government in Faizabad and working with the provincial district manager’s office to provide services. He never once flew on a plane or drove a car, and the only way he could physically take issues to the government authorities in Faizabad from his home in the mountainous Darwaz district was on horseback or on donkey, a journey that often took him a week to ten days.

  Of course, my grandfather wasn’t the only one who traveled this way. Horseback or foot was the only way any of the villagers could connect with the bigger towns: It was how farmers could buy seed, how the sick could reach a hospital, how families separated by marriage could visit each other. Travel was only possible in the warm spring and summer months, and even then it posed great dangers.

  Atanga was the greatest risk of all. Atanga is a large mountain bordering the Amu Darya river. This clear green river is all that separates Afghanistan from Takjikistan on the other side. The river was as dangerous as it was beautiful. In spring, as the snow melted and the rains came, its banks swelled to bursting, creating a series of deadly fast-flowing currents.

  The Atanga crossing was a series of rough wooden stairs fastened to either side of the mountain, for people to climb up and then down the other side. The steps were tiny, rickety, and slippery. One small trip or mistake and a person would fall straight down into the river and be swept away to certain death.

  Imagine returning from Faizabad holding the goods you’ve just purchased, be that a 15-pound bag of rice, salt, oil, or other precious cargo that had to last your family all winter. Tired after one week of walking, you have to risk your life negotiating a deadly pass that had probably been the demise of many of your friends and relatives already.

  My grandfather could not bear to see his people killed this way year upon year, and he did all he could to force the government to build a proper road and a safer way to pass. But although richer than most people in Badakhshan, he was still just a local official living in a remote village. (Although a district today, back then Koof was considered a village.) In the end, traveling to Faizabad was as much as he could do. He had neither the means nor the power to travel to Kabul, where the king and central government were based.

  Knowing change would not come in his lifetime, my grandfather decided his youngest son would take over his campaigning role. My father was just a little boy when my grandfather began grooming him for a future in politics. Years later, after months of solid lobbying, one of my father’s biggest successes in parliament would be the realization of my grandfather’s dream to get a road built over the Atanga Pass.

  There is a famous story about the road and my father’s audience with King Zahir Shah to discuss the project. He stood in front of the king and said, “Shah sahib, construction of this road has been planned for years, but there is no action—you and your government plan and talk but do not keep your promises.” Although the parliament at that time was made up of elected representatives, the king and his courtiers still ran the country. Direct criticism of the king was rare, and only a brave or foolhardy man would attempt it. The king took off his glasses and looked long and hard at my father before stating severely, “Wakil sahib, you would do well to remember you are in my palace.”

  My father panicked, thinking he had go
ne too far. He hurriedly left the palace, fearing that he would be arrested on the way out. But a month later, the king sent his minister of public works to Badakhshan to meet my father and make plans for the construction of the road. The minister arrived, took one look at the mountain and declared the job impossible. There was no more to be said; he would return home at once. My father nodded sagely and asked him to go for a short horse ride with him first. The man agreed, and they rode together to the top of the pass. As they dismounted, my father grabbed the man’s horse and raced back down, leading it behind him, leaving the minister alone on the mountain all night long to give him a taste of what it was like for villagers who got trapped on the passes.

  The next morning my father returned to pick up the minister. He was furious, half bitten to death by mosquitoes, and he had lain awake all night terrified that he would be eaten by wild dogs or wolves. But now he had a clear understanding of how harsh life was for the local people. He agreed to bring engineers and dynamite so the pass could be created. My father’s pass at Atanga is still there, and this feat of engineering has saved thousands of Badakhshani lives over the years.

  But long before the pass was built and my father became a member of parliament, my grandfather had appointed the little Abdul Rahman an arbab, a leader of the village. Even at the age of 12, this effectively gave him the powers of a tribal elder. He was asked to settle the villagers’ land, family, and marriage disputes. Families who wanted to arrange a good match for their daughters’ weddings came to him for advice on picking suitable husbands. Before long he was negotiating road-building projects, raising funds, and meeting with the provincial officials in Faizabad. Despite being barely more than a child, he had the support of local people, so these officials were prepared to deal with him.

  These early years gave my father such a solid grounding in the issues facing our community that by the time he grew into adulthood, he was ready to lead. And the timing was perfect. For this was the beginning of real democracy in Afghanistan. In the decade between 1965 and 1975, the king decided to establish a democratic parliament, and to allow people to be involved in the decision-making process by voting for their local members of parliament.