What next for the women of Afghanistan? An interview with Tahmeena Faryal - The Humanist Interview - Cover Story - Interview

Humanist, May-June, 2002 by Daniel Consolatore

The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) is a high-profile political and social service organization in Afghanistan with a stated mission to work for peace, freedom, democracy, and women's rights. RAWA has been active for decades providing social services within Afghanistan and has built an impressive reputation as a political opposition movement, best known in the West as the source of the secretly filmed video footage of the execution by the Taliban of a woman in a burqa accused of adultery. Filmmaker Saraih Shah incorporated this material into her documentary Beneath the Veil. A good deal about the organization's inspiring and surprisingly effective work can be learned from its website www.rawa.org.

This past fall, Tahmeena Faryal was RAWA's envoy to the United States. Among her many activities, she testified before the House International Relations Committee and was interviewed while wearing her burqa by CNN's Larry King. Threats against her life and the lives of other RAWA activists prevented publication of her photograph and her real name. But she lectured to overflow audiences at numerous college campuses and, perhaps ironically, was named Glamour magazine's Woman of the Year for 2001. Most surprising to many during her visit were her forthright comments critical of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance. For example, on November 28, the Institute for Public Accuracy quoted Faryal as saying:

   So many of those now involved in what has come to be called the Northern
   Alliance have the blood of our beloved people on their hands, as, of
   course, do the Taliban. Their sustained atrocities have been well
   documented by independent international human rights organizations, such as
   Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and others. From 1992 to 1996
   in particular, these forces waged a brutal war against women, using rape,
   torture, abduction, and forced marriage as their weapons. Many women
   committed suicide during this period as their only escape. Any initiative
   to establish a broad-based government must exclude all Taliban and other
   jihadi factions unless and until a specific faction or person has been
   absolved of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Otherwise, the people
   will again be plunged into the living hell that engulfed our country from
   1992 to 1996--under elements now involved in the Northern Alliance--and
   continue to the present under the Taliban.

In this context, part of the reason the Taliban was able to secure power in the first place was because so many in Afghanistan wanted an end to the rampant violence perpetrated by the Northern Alliance. Furthermore, it was under the rule of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, a notoriously fundamentalist Northern Alliance leader, that the first laws suppressing women were passed.

On behalf of the Humanist, I interviewed Tahmeena Faryal in person on November 24, 2001, and by e-mail in mid-March 2002. We discussed the developing political situation in Afghanistan, fears regarding the Northern Alliance, Afghan women and Islam, Islamist political movements, human rights, and the history and future of secularism in Afghanistan. I was fascinated to get a close look at this young woman at the center of the global struggle for women's rights and learn her perspective on the politics and culture of a country that continues to hold the world's attention.

THE HUMANIST: RAWA has long expressed great ambivalence about the Northern Alliance, which you believe is, to a large extent, made up of the same mujahideen fundamentalist rulers and soldiers whose misrule and lawlessness while in power during the early 1990s helped the Taliban gain support. Were the crimes of the Northern Alliance serious enough that it should be excluded from participating in a new government?

FARYAL: The Afghan people celebrated the departure of the Taliban but not the arrival of the Northern Alliance. But when we speak of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban as criminals, I think that we should be very clear that not each and every person involved in either is a criminal or necessarily has on his hands the blood of Afghanistan. More than 50,000 people fought with the Taliban or worked for the Taliban, and 60 to 70 percent of those were forced to fight. They fought with them because of the money; without the money they were not going to fight. The same is the case with the Northern Alliance soldiers. That is the only way for most of them to earn a living. I don't think the people of Afghanistan would consider them very responsible for all the death and destruction since 1976. So whenever we're talking about responsibility, we're talking only about the commanders as the criminals.

THE HUMANIST: What's the proper way to handle the situation? Does RAWA endorse the idea that a truth and reconciliation tribunal or an international court should be established to hold accused Taliban and mujahideen leaders responsible for their crimes and allow only those cleared to participate in the political process of a new representative government?