Behind the Burqa , livre ebook

Behind the Burqa
Our Life in Afghanistan and How We Escaped to Freedom
by
Sulima and Hala
as told to
Batya Swift Yasgur

John Wiley Sons, Inc.
To our homeland To the women of Afghanistan And to Madarjan
Copyright 2002 by Batya Swift Yasgur. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yasgur, Batya Swift.
Behind the burqa : our life in Afghanistan and how we escaped to freedom / by Sulima and Hala as told to Batya Swift Yasgur.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-470-35007-2 (cloth)
1. Afghanistan-Social life and customs-20th century. 2. Women-Afghanistan-Social conditions. 3. Taliban. I. Title.
DS371.3 .Y37 2002
958.104 082-dc21
2002012139
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: Sulima

Part Two: Hala

Epilogue by Sulima and Hala

How You Can Help
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank all our friends who have supported us through our difficult times in Afghanistan, Austria, and the United States. Although we are not using your real names in this book, you know who you are and how much you mean to us.
Warm and heartfelt thanks to Eleanor Acer and all others at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights for your dedication and fine work on Hala s asylum case and for all the wonderful work you do on behalf of other refugees and asylum seekers. We would especially like to acknowledge volunteer lawyers Lenore and Kalpana for accepting Hala s case on a pro bono basis and for helping her obtain freedom and asylum. Your compassion, warmth, and sense of humor helped us through a period of great darkness, and your legal expertise contributed to bringing us light in the form of a successful outcome. Thanks to Chris Klatell for his legal input into this book project and his loyalty and caring.
Cheryl Skafte and Alisha Horowitz at the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service were especially helpful with information about how to help asylum seekers in detention. Thanks also to Esther Ebrahimian and Steve Rubin, the photographer, for their roles in the original LIRS Asylum Storybook project.
Our appreciation goes to Hana Lane, our wonderful editor at John Wiley Sons, Inc., for believing in this project and for her commitment to bringing our story to the public.
INTRODUCTION
I first met Hala in June 2001. She was one of ten asylees (individuals who had been granted asylum) whom I interviewed for a booklet to be published by the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. The project was designed to inform the public about the plight of immigrants fleeing persecution who arrive in the United States without appropriate travel documents and are incarcerated in detention centers-often for years.
Like many of the other asylees I interviewed, Hala did not want her real name used. She was afraid of reprisals against her remaining family in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Of course, I honored Hala s request, and the LIRS booklet, like the present book, does not use her real name.
Working on the LIRS project transformed me and set the experiences of my own life into new perspective. Some of my problems faded to insignificance when compared to the life-and-death struggles of the asylees. Those problems that remained significant seemed easier to confront when I called upon the inspiration I had gained from the courageous people I was meeting.
All the asylees and asylum-seekers moved me deeply, with their accounts of the brutality they sustained in their own country and then the further abuses they suffered at the hands of immigration authorities in the United States. It awakened memories of stories of my Jewish ancestors fleeing countless forms of persecution, most recently the Nazi Holocaust. Turned away by country after country, many of them were left to perish. As a Jew, I share a kinship with every persecuted human being I encounter. The haunted eyes of the people I interviewed followed me through all my daily activities-writing at the computer, carpooling, washing dishes, eating dinner with friends. But of all the brave people I met, Hala and her story were what embedded themselves most deeply into my consciousness. Every time I left the house, free to walk the streets unmolested, free to let my hair blow in the wind, free to talk to anyone I chose, free to educate my children openly and proudly, free to pray in any manner I chose-or not pray at all-I saw an image of Hala and thousands of Afghan women, oppressed and imprisoned in their own homes. I could not forget Hala and the hundreds of asylum seekers like her, who risked their lives to come to this land of freedom, only to find freedom a cruel hoax as they moldered in detention centers, locked away once again and in many cases forgotten. Most Americans, I found out, did not even know that this was how our country was treating asylum-seekers.
Hala s story had to be told.
I recontacted Hala and asked her if she might be interested in having the short write-up I did for LIRS expanded into a book. She is a modest and unassuming person not interested in being in the lime-light or fame, but she appeared open to the idea. So I traveled to meet her, with the intention of reinterviewing her more extensively and writing a proposal for a book.
I had met Hala s older sister the first time I interviewed Hala, but on this second visit, I got to know Sulima much better and was captivated by Sulima s own story. Over hummus, stuffed grape leaves, and yogurt sauce, she told me her life history. It became clear that Sulima s journey was as compelling and unusual as Hala s and that the memoir would be more powerful if I included both sisters stories. I wanted nothing more than to be the channel through which their remarkable courage could be told to the world.
Then came September 11. Its events catapulted Afghanistan into world attention. All eyes were suddenly focused on the wild and alien terrain of this foreign country that was harboring the most dangerous and wanted man in the world. Taliban and Kabul became household words. Magazines carried photographs of women swathed grotesquely in burqas and fierce, bearded, turbaned men wielding whips. Westerners gasped with horror as the full implications of Taliban oppression became known.
In the wake of the tragedy that struck at the heart and nerve centers of America, immigrants became the unfortunate scapegoats of American wrath. In the minds of the American public, Afghan asylees, many of whom had fled the same egregious system that had spawned and supported the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, were now being lumped together with their oppressors. For all of the president s admirable efforts to distinguish between the Afghan people and the Taliban supporters of Osama bin Laden, between immigrants who abused American hospitality and those who make an ongoing contribution to American society, foreigners-especially Afghans-became the target of racial slurs, and even violent attacks. Someone spray painted the word bitch on Sulima s plant store. Professionals working with survivors of torture told me that many of their clients were severely retraumatized, not only by the sudden, terrifying proximity of war and violence exhibited on September 11 but also by the new wave of antiforeign sentiment.
Sadly, it was not only the general public that exhibited this disturbing and distinctly un-American behavior. Even among lawmakers, the mood and spirit toward immigrants had changed. The ripple effect of these changed attitudes rebounded to asylum law. In early September, Congress had been poised to ease some of the restrictions on asylum-seekers, thereby reducing the numbers in detention centers and paving the way for a more humane and fair system for dealing with undocumented immigrants fleeing persecution. But in the wake of September 11, immigration laws became even more stringent.
It is my hope that by meeting Sulima and Hala, readers will gain insight not only into the hideous conditions under which Afghan women have lived, but also into the deplorable wrongdoing that our immigration system perpetrates upon those who come to our shores, seeking refuge