ICC warrant against Taliban chief gives world a second chance to do right in Afghanistan

The Print

6 days ago

Last week, the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague issued arrest warrants against the Emir of the Islamic Emirate, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and his chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, for crimes against humanity 'on gender grounds against girls, women and other persons non-conforming with the Taliban's policy on gender, gender identity or expression.'
Two months before the execution, Najeba was sold by a marriage-broker to a man in Khost. Later, the same broker bought the younger daughter, Shaista. We do not know their stories, nor those of the sons left behind in Kabul.
For twenty days after she was executed in the penalty area of Kabul's soccer stadium, as small boys roamed through the packed terraces selling tea and sweets, Zarmina's body lay outside the morgue, waiting for a loved one to claim it. Three years earlier, in 1996, Zarmina had poisoned her violent husband, Alauddin Khwazak, with sleeping pills. Later that night, according to an investigator, her older daughter, Najeba, crushed her father's head with a single blow from a five-kilo mason's hammer. Local authorities eventually buried Zarmina at the Khair Khana cemetery, the last page of her story marked with a small, blank tombstone.
The warrants may mean little in practice, as experts Rachel Reid and Roxanna Shapour point out. Hibtaullah, like Chief Justice Haqqani, never leaves Kandahar, rendering him immune to arrest. The powers that matter—among them the United States, China, Russia, Israel, India, and Pakistan—are not parties to the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC. Zarmina was killed before the court came into being in 2003.
And yet, the ICC warrants matter. In 1997, as Zarmina was being tortured in a Kabul prison, United States diplomat Robin Raphel was lobbying for an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan into Pakistan, declassified documents show. There were no diplomatic conversations about the reports of women being pulled out of schools, denied jobs, blocked from medical care, and flogged in public.
This time, the proceedings at the ICC reveal Afghan women asking the most important question of our time: Are there some things so awful that they lie outside what it means to be human?
Also read: No male 'chaperone' = no existence. Life under Taliban rule for Afghan women, in their own words
The erasure of women
The singer Inger Bosen recorded this landai, or couplet, as women worked or gathered in private: 'Isn't there a single daring man in this village? My flame-coloured pants are burning my thighs.'
'In an almost playful way,' scholar Rubina Saigol pointed out, 'patriarchy is turned on its head as women are openly expressing passion, while men are implicitly afraid to rise to the challenge. This makes women more powerful, more able to transgress.'
'A woman is best at home or in the grave,' records one old saying. But, as Saigol reminds us, women found other spaces too.
Last year, the Emir silenced even these sounds of dissent. 'Women must also not be heard singing or reading aloud, even from inside their houses. Whenever an adult woman leaves her home out of necessity, she is obliged to conceal her voice, face, and body.' Walls have been ordered raised so women cannot see out of windows onto the street, Ghazal Goshiri reports.
The ICC prosecutors note that for girls, 'secular education over grade 6 was banned and access to university education severely restricted.' Large numbers of women were removed from the workforce, and male relatives encouraged to take their place. Businesses owned and operated by women were shut down. Women could not travel without a male guardian, or mahram.
Female students are now being steered toward madrasas, but their curriculum is limited, journalist Sharif Amiri reports, to Arabic grammar, rhetoric, jurisprudence and the prescribed conditions of prayer. Girls are also taught about the social roles expected of them, including obedience to their husbands and raising children to become jihadists. Eight out of ten girls are excluded from school, Mahjouba Nowrozi reports, and girls above the age of 12 may not receive any education at all.
This has little to do with religion—and everything to do with control.
Also read: Taliban makes women unsafe everywhere. 'Not as bad as in Afghanistan' is now a dangerous tool
The state of jihad
Late in 2022, Hakim published al-Emarah al-Islamiyya wa-Nizamuha, or the Islamic Emirate and Its Government—a constitution for Taliban-led Afghanistan that was authored, According to his son Abd al-Ghani al-Maywandi, the chief justice authored this document even as he led the negotiating team in Doha, discussing power-sharing with the Afghan republic and the United States. The leader of the Emirate, Hakim writes, is chosen by an elite council and bound merely to consult them. The role of the public is to acclaim their decisions and obey.
For Haqqani, the Islamic Emirate is a vehicle for perpetual jihad. The soldiers of the Emirate, he writes, cannot 'forsake jihad solely with the exit of the Americans and their allies from Afghanistan. That is not the aim of the Afghan jihad. The aim of this jihad is the establishment of the order of Almighty Allah over His servants.'
Educated at the Dar al-'Ulum al-Haqqania seminary in Akora Khattak in northwest Pakistan, from 1976 to 1980, Haqqani is deeply influenced by the toxic patriarchal values the leaders of the seminary perpetuated.
To ensure a quiescent population, the Islamic Emirate has embarked on the annihilation of modern education: The Ministry of Education says it has set up 22,972 madrasas, while only 269 modern schools have been built. The curriculum has been excised of references to democracy and human rights, anatomical diagrams in biology, mention of music, television, and celebrations. Afghan cultural traditions, ranging from the Attan dance and Nawruz, to indigenous musical instruments and women's traditional dress, are being erased from textbooks.
The objective is to transform Afghan youth into the kind of young people who made up the Taliban's early ranks, educated in refugee-camp seminaries across the Pakistani border.
For the chief justice, indeed, secular education is a problem in itself—even for men, as religious studies scholar John Butt explains. 'Experience shows that immersion in modern, secular sciences is lethal,' Haqqani writes, both for people's beliefs and for their actions. Teachers and students of these sciences tend to abandon the Quran and sunnah, depend on intellectual reasoning, and abandon the requirements of Islam. Indeed, the wave of atheism that swamped the government of Afghanistan can be put down to the dominance of contemporary sciences over religious sciences.
'The Taliban—notorious before August 2021 for their terrorist attacks on teachers and students at Afghan universities, as well as their destruction of schools in rural areas—have no meaningful commitment whatever to modern, pluralist forms of critical education,' notes historian William Maley. Like the Komsomol and Hitlerjugend before them, they seek a production line of youth trained to kill—and to take delight in it.
Also read: Taliban's Afghanistan has become a giant prison for women. The world couldn't care less
A broken compass
Since the Rome Statute came into force in 2003, most nation-states have found reason to remain outside: The United States will not have its soldiers prosecuted in a foreign forum. China does not want external jurisdiction over its human rights practices. India has concerns over interference in domestic conflicts. Russia faces ICC warrants against President Vladimir Putin for the war in Ukraine, just as Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, does for the murderous campaign in Gaza.
These concerns aren't without merit. As law scholar KP Prakash argues, many believe prosecutions should be sanctioned by the UN Security Council. There are also serious questions about national sovereignty and institutional autonomy.
And yet, while these debates rage, the stonings, shootings, and public executions have resumed. Diplomats from China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and India continue to deliberate over how best to do business with the Second Islamic Emirate.
There has been no greater crime by an organised state since Apartheid: An entire half of Afghanistan's population lives under conditions of penal incarceration, subjected to vile and arbitrary punishments.
Zarmina never got the grave she deserved, nor the justice she was owed. The world community now has a second chance to do the right thing in Afghanistan.
The author is Contributing Editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)