2 days ago
‘I am going to find you': the plight of Afghanistan's female judges
The voice on the phone was threatening. 'Do you recognise me?' he growled. 'I'm one of the prisoners you put in jail.'
Raihana Attaee knew exactly who it was: a man she had sentenced to 20 years in jail for murdering his wife after he discovered she had a phone.
'How did you find my number?' Attaee asked nervously. He laughed. 'I found your number and now I am going to find you.'
In most countries a judge in that position would call the police. However, the Taliban had just seized power. They opened the prisons and Afghanistan's 270 female judges were in their crosshairs, symbolising everything they despised and feared.
Many of the women had worked in antiterrorism courts and sent Taliban members to prison. Attaee had been the only female judge on one of the new courts for elimination of violence against women, which had been bitterly contested by conservative forces. The risks were clear. Months before the Taliban had seized power, Qadria Yasini, one of the few female Supreme Court judges, had been assassinated by a gunman on their way to work.
As key players in the project to turn Afghanistan into a modern democracy based on rule of law, one might have assumed that the women judges would be a priority for western forces to evacuate.
Instead, as the Taliban moved into the capital and began cruising the streets in purloined American Humvees wearing discarded American aviator glasses, the women were left to fend for themselves, desperate and panicking. When Attaee got the threatening phone call, she, her husband and their toddler son were hiding in her mother-in-law's house in Kabul.
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'I didn't know what to do,' she said. 'I regretted everything — becoming a judge, being a mother because I dreaded to think what would happen to my son if the Taliban arrested me.' When I interviewed her and others at the time for this newspaper, I was shocked at their plight, hearing utter desperation in their voices.
Helena Kennedy could not believe it either. As director of human rights for the International Bar Association, she had helped train some of these judges. She contacted everyone she knew to raise £2 million to charter planes and persuaded the president of Greece, a former judge, to take them in, as well as the government of Georgia to let them transit. She even bought half a sheep for the wedding of a Taliban commander's daughter to get people without passports through a checkpoint.
Kennedy and her staff would end up evacuating 103 judges and their families, including Attaee and the two sons of Yasini, to Athens, and helped them to find new homes in Ireland, Canada, Iceland and the UK.
Yet, weirdly, her operation gets just two lines in The Escape from Kabul, which purports to tell the story of their 'terrifying escape and the women who helped them', and Kennedy is not even mentioned by name.
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Instead, the author Karen Bartlett focuses on what the book calls the 'sisterhood' — a handful of members of the International Association of Women Judges in the US, Australia, Canada, Spain and one from the UK, with endless detail of how they Zoomed through the night, sometimes from the bathroom to not disturb family holidays.
It's a shame as this is an important story and one of the most shocking indictments of the West's abandonment of the country and particularly its women. Four years after the Taliban took over there is at the moment a spate of books about Afghanistan, including Twenty Years by Sune Engel Rasmussen and I The Finest Hotel in Kabul by BBC doyenne Lyse Doucet.
This one makes no attempt to explain what went wrong or how the Taliban were able to seize power in such lightning fashion. What it does highlight, though, is the bravery of these pioneer women and how they struggled to become judges. In one telling scene, Anisa Rasooli recounts how in 2015 President Ghani had put her forward for the Supreme Court, so she had to appear in front of parliament for a confirmation hearing. In front of her was a sea of men, some of them laughing, asking how it was possible that a woman could present herself as candidate for the Supreme Court. When she asked them to stop talking and listen, she was told to apologise. As she left, one MP, himself a former judge, stood up and announced: 'If you vote for a woman to become a member of the Supreme Court, you will all sin an unforgivable sin and God will make sure you feel the consequence.' That these women went through so much to achieve what they did makes it all the more terrible the way they were betrayed by the people they saw as allies.
Bartlett also illustrates how an earlier trip to meet judges in the US made them rethink some of the practices in their own culture — if one family harmed another family, for example, they would reconcile by giving a girl child as compensation. On her return home one of the judges, Nafisa Kabuli, wrote a report that led to the practice becoming illegal.
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This trip had another effect, though. In the end, it was the humanity of fellow female judges who saved them, where governments failed.
About 200 of the women escaped and are now scattered between the US, UK, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere. With the Taliban imposing ever more restrictions on women, whether they will ever go back to Afghanistan to take up their important work looks far from certain.
The Escape from Kabul: A True Story of Sisterhood and Defiance by Karen Bartlett (Duckworth £12.99 pp272). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
