Why Can’t These Lovers Be Saved?
The desperate plight of an Afghan couple reveals the contradictions of the West’s asylum policy
KABUL, Afghanistan — By rights, Zakia and Ali, the Afghan couple who are the subject of my book, The Lovers, should have been in Europe by now, applying for asylum and on their way to resettlement in a third country, possibly Canada or America. Instead they remain in Afghanistan, hiding out in remote Bamiyan Province, cleared of any criminal charge, but still worried about the very real possibility that her family will make good on their loudly voiced threats to carry out an honor killing against her. There is nothing to stop them from committing that crime, because as her family well knows, honor killings are only crimes in law books written at the instigation of Westerners, not real crimes, and even in the unlikely event anyone were ever arrested for committing such a crime, the penalties would be slight. Afghanistan, after all, is a country where the law limits the punishment for an honor killing by a man of his wife, or any female relative, to a maximum of two years in prison (a woman who kills her husband for an offense against her honor is subject to the death penalty).
No one disputes the risk that the couple faces if they stay in their own country, but so far no one has been able to help them do anything about it.
The offense that the couple committed was to fall in love and marry without the permission of her father, in defiance of his will, in a society that regards a daughter as her father’s property, a wife as her husband’s property, a sister as her brother’s property — with complete control of the patriarchal figure over every aspect of her life, from what she wears to whether she can see her kids, let alone whom she marries. Compounding their offense, Zakia and Ali were from different ethnic groups (she is Tajik, he Hazara), different religions (she is Sunni, he Shia), and races (she is Caucasian, he Asian). As the result, they qualify under international asylum rules on four of the five grounds by which refugees can be granted resettlement in a new country: persecution because of nationality, race, religion, or political views (i.e., belief in the right to choose ones own spouse). And because their case was widely covered in the press, especially by stories I wrote in the New York Times, but in many other places as well, documenting their right to asylum would be simple.
Few of the more than a million refugees who reached Europe in the past year — a substantial number of them from Afghanistan, which contributed the second largest portion of migrants after Syria — would have such good cases for asylum as Zakia and Ali have. Yet the couple decided against joining that tide flowing to Europe, not because they didn’t want to leave their country, but because they didn’t feel they should risk their lives — and the life of their baby daughter Ruqia, born nine months after they eloped — on the perilous trip west. It made no sense to them that they shouldn’t be able to apply for asylum in their own country rather than go through the charade that we impose upon millions of people every year:
Risk everything, and if you don’t die before you get here, we’ll talk.
The West’s asylum policy is a cynical and absurd historical usufruct that should be undone. Outrages like the death of Aylan Kurdi, the toddler washed up on a Turkish beach, or the drownings of hundreds of Eritreans in overloaded boats headed to Italy, or, indeed, the mass sexual abuse of German women by young migrant men in Cologne on New Year’s Day, would all have been avoided if the international community had any sort of sensible asylum policy. It is hard to believe that real asylum seekers would show the kind of contempt for their host societies that those migrants did.
The right to asylum arose after World War II, when millions had fled their countries or been driven from their homes by war, and under the Geneva Conventions, the international community set those criteria for asylum but added that it would only be available to people who had fled their homelands. That made sense when so many millions had spilled across borders to neighboring lands; it makes much less sense in a world in which refugees are journeying across scores of countries, and thousands of miles, at great peril in order to reach the relative handful of countries who will treat them decently: those in Western Europe.
If the asylum protocols set by the First Geneva Convention were changed so that people could apply for asylum through embassies in their home countries, or in neighboring countries in cases where the regimes at home prevented safe visits to embassies (Syria, for instance), so many of the ills experienced this past year in Europe would be avoided.
More than 3,000 people drowned crossing the Mediterranean and the Aegean, many of them women and children. Many others were systematically robbed and raped by traffickers. Scores suffocated in freezer trucks and closed containers. Others were killed on train tracks trying to cross through the Eurotunnel.
A sensible asylum regime would say to would-be refugees: Prove your case before you come, or stay home.
Combined with a determined policy of rejecting any refugees who arrived without being previously screened, such a policy would work. It would save lives of migrants, and it would prevent some of the excesses we have seen. Most of the young men who are fleeing to Europe are economic migrants, looking for a better life — often sent by their families, who raise enough money to get at least one family member to Europe. That’s particularly true of most Afghans, in my experience; they aren’t coming from the most dangerous parts of the country, but usually from the safest. And it’s even true for many of the Syrians, though it’s hard to make any case for sending Syrians back where they came from.
Told ahead of time that they would be summarily returned if they hadn’t been screened for asylum in advance, most migrants would stay home rather than endure a costly and dangerous journey with no hope of success. You would no longer find hundreds of migrant men from other cultures milling around the Cologne or Malmo downtowns late at night, preying on German or Swedish women, knowing they would still have a legal right to stay and make their asylum cases even if arrested. The spuriousness of most such asylum applications would be much more easily and quickly spotted closer to home.
For a long time I was frustrated at the unwillingness of Zakia and Ali to try to flee themselves, as so many of their countrymen did. But the asylum system did not make any sense to them. Having found love and one another, they felt they had something too precious to squander on the migrant trail. They know they remain at risk if they stay, but rightly or wrongly, they have figured that risk to be less than what they face if they leave.
What is harder to understand is how the massive attention to their case did not spur some Western embassy to act on their behalf. There have been cases where asylum has been granted to people still in their own country, though most Western embassies do not admit it or talk about it very openly. In the onslaught of reader mail that pursued me throughout reporting the couple’s story, many people wondered why an organization as powerful as the Times had not been able to get the couple out, or at least inspire someone to do so.
One literary agent suggested hiring a team of retired special forces operators to absail into Bamiyan and hoist them out on choppers — with an eye, obviously, to making the movie.
Things like that work better in movies than in real life. In real life, they would need a country to take them, and for that, a government would have to act. Even so, it’s a little mysterious to me why none of them did. A few years ago, there were many such cases where female victims of abuse easily found refuge abroad, without having to sail across the Mediterranean (and remember, nearly all of these refugees come from countries where few people ever learn to swim — which is especially true in landlocked Afghanistan).
I don’t really know why the international community has been so reluctant in the case of Zakia and Ali, but I have a theory. First, everyone wants to get out of Afghanistan as quickly as they can (with the possible exception of American generals), but they don’t want to leave behind the impression that nothing was accomplished. Progress on women’s rights is the one thing that all of Afghanistan’s Western supporters and donors really believed in, even long after their publics nearly all turned against the war itself — particularly if it meant keeping troops there.
No one wanted to admit even that was a failure, and giving asylum to abused women or women who were victims of abusive customary practices (like honor killings) sent the wrong message, in the view of Western countries. Making it easy for them, and for people like Zakia and Ali, to claim asylum would only magnify that negative message:
$100 billion later, and we haven’t even been able to make women’s lives meaningfully better.
In the end, though, what this will really mean is that once again we have turned our backs on Afghanistan, and the women who are its most vulnerable and ill-treated citizens.
Watch a recent video of the couple, in hiding with their daughter:
Rod Nordland is an international correspondent-at-large for the New York Times and author of The Lovers, Afghanistan’s Romeo and Juliet, the True Story of How They Defied Their Families and Escaped an Honor Killing, just published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
