The murder of Farkhunda suddenly opened their eyes. Afghan and foreign commentators who sought to explain the public outcry that followed her death often claimed that a nation already traumatized and deeply depressed by never-ending wars had been retraumatized by the crime. But trauma commonly shuts down the sufferer, numbing the emotions and blunting the compassion that binds us to others. The murder of Farkhunda did just the opposite. People said it cut them like a knife. It made them feel again. Men described their hearts as "bleeding." Women spoke of being "emptied" of tears. They wept for Farkhunda -- and for themselves.
Well before the murder, young women complained that men constantly harassed them in workplaces and in the streets, that men regularly treated them with disdain and contempt. After the murder, some women confronted such men. Others insisted angrily that they were sick with fear. Some even said that the faces of their own fathers and brothers now seemed hateful to them. Men swore that they were overcome with shame, and that they now recognized in the sadistic public murder of Farkhunda the private violence so many Afghan women regularly experience in their homes.
A Casket Borne by Women
On the third day after the murder, Farkhunda was buried in a Kabul cemetery. For the first time in memory, it was not men but women who lifted the casket to their shoulders and carried it to the grave. The photographs of that procession were reproduced everywhere. The sight was shocking and brave and new.
The following day opened with a hard rain falling through air so dusty the first drops came down as mud. A demonstration was to be held in front of the Supreme Court to demand justice for Farkhunda. I was apprehensive. Six years ago I had taken part in one of the first demonstrations ever held in Kabul on behalf of women. If memory serves, there were no more than 30 of us, protesting the adoption of the Shia Personal Status Law, known in the international press as the "Rape in Marriage Law" for legalizing that crime and many others against Shia women.
A handful of international volunteers and our Afghan colleagues (encased in burqas or wrapped in scarves to conceal their identities), we faced a mob of hundreds of men who shouted obscenities and hurled stones. A cordon of Afghan police encircled and protected us where we stood. I can't recall that we ever even marched anywhere and yet it was a victory of sorts, just to have survived without serious injury. Afghan women in greater numbers have held many other demonstrations since then, marching proudly, faces uncovered, carrying banners announcing their claims to personhood. Yet they marched alone and their lives remained much the same.
This demonstration for Farkhunda was something new. Thousands of men and women came together to march through unrelenting drizzle. They came individually and in groups, representing all sorts of organizations from Afghan civil society. I walked with colleagues from an Afghan women's organization that aids survivors of violent abuse. Beside us were a group of university men, scholars of Islamic studies.
Our chants -- more sonorous in Farsi -- resonated: "Farkhunda is our sister," "Justice for Farkhunda," "Don't misuse Islam," "Islam is for humanity, not cruelty," "Stop violence against women," "Silence is a crime." A young man thrust a homemade sign into my hand, a cardboard placard on a stick that said, "Punish the Killers." I carried it until, soaked through (like the Afghans around me, desert dwellers unacquainted with raincoats), it fell apart.
In front of the long iron fence that shields the courthouse, a hundred or more men lined the way, shoulder to shoulder, hard-faced and silent. Most appeared to be ordinary workers, ragged and drenched, yet at attention, and draped in the green scarves of the martyred in homage to the murdered woman. At intervals along the line stood large portraits of Farkhunda, as tall as the men who supported them. In the picture she was wearing the black abaya, but with her face uncovered. She seemed to gaze at the passing thousands chanting her name. She was, that is, a presence at her own parade. We marched for hours past the court and back again, time after time.
Here at last was public evidence of a basic truth that men in suits in Washington, American men for whom "women's rights" is a cynical slogan, seem eternally unable to grasp: behind every Afghan woman asserting her right to study or work or pray where she pleases is a man or men who let her out of the house. Here on the march were like-minded, modern women and men fed up with the militarism and corruption that made war criminals wealthy, fundamentalist mullahs powerful, and ordinary young men dangerous -- young men without education, jobs, the money to acquire a wife, or anything much to do but sadistically slaughter an innocent woman in the name of their god to defend a book they cannot read.
Impunity, Change, and a Sister-Martyr
Upon his return to Kabul, President Ghani condemned the murder of Fahrkunda and summoned her family to the palace to receive his condolences. Afghanistan's Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah called upon the family in their home and denounced the "heinous crime." The commissioners, too, had visited the family in the course of their investigation and the women had taken Farkhunda's weeping mother in their arms.
This was no ordinary mourning, for the events of the previous 10 days had made plain the true struggle that lay at the heart of Afghan society -- a struggle that, in all these years, Washington had resolutely failed to understand. While the Americans, who had long ago lost sight of al-Qaeda, were still immersed in a civil war against the Islamist extremists of the Taliban (facilitated by Pakistan), they had also maintained in power for more than a decade their old Islamist extremist pals of the Mujahidin. Those were the warlords of the anti-Soviet struggle of the 1980s whom President Ronald Reagan had famously hailed as "freedom fighters." All these years, the United States had supported one side against another that was eerily similar in its self-interest, patriarchal privilege, and religious fundamentalism. They had backed President Hamid Karzai against his "angry brothers," as he called them, in the Taliban.
