How the tragic beating death of an Afghan woman gave women a platform

The Takeaway
Afghan women protest

In March, an Afghan woman named Farkhunda Malikzada was beaten to death by a mob in Kabul in broad daylight.

“Farkhunda got into an argument with a caretaker at the [Shah-do-Shamshaira] shrine about charm selling because she considered it un-Islamic,” says Zarghuna Kargar, a reporter for the BBC in Afghanistan. “He got angry that a woman was challenging him — it’s not common in Afghanistan that women challenge men. He shouted, ‘This woman has become an American! She has burned the Koran!’”

Though Malikzada immediately denied the claims, the groundwork for a violent interaction had already been laid.

“People didn’t listen to her and within minutes the crowd gathered and started beating her,” says Kargar. “Straight away the accusation was believed. It was just horrible.”

Someone filmed the gruesome attack on a mobile phone, and the widely-viewed footage elicited outrage across the country. Malikzada's mother, Bibi Hajera, watched the footage, and is quoted in Kargar’s BBC documentary about the killing.

“What pains my heart is when she's sitting and her head is bleeding. The police are just standing there and watching. They don't say anything. Why?" Hajera asks. "Why don't they bring a car over or call a police woman? I see the crowd go through the shrine and pull her hair to bring her out. That's what really tortures me.”

During the course of her reporting, Kargar says the Afghan police chief told her that many officers are ill equipped to handle things like unruly crowds, since most of their training has been focused on terrorism.

“They did try at the beginning to disperse the crowd and protect Farkhunda, but they failed,” Kargar says.

In a trial that was broadcast on television, 49 men were charged with crimes, but only 12 were convicted. Some of them have since been released or had their sentences reduced.

“Several of Farkhunda’s main killers are still at large; they haven’t even been arrested,” says Kargar. “The people who are in prison for the crime — eight of them facing 16 years, three facing 20 years, and one young man, [Mohammad] Yaqoob, is facing 10 years now — they are all in prison for being involved in the incident, but the actual murderers who killed Farkhunda are at large.”

Yaqoob, who was 16 at the time of the attack, will serve time for throwing large rocks at Malikzada's body after she was already dead — a crime that his father, Mohammad Yassin, seemingly dismisses.

“Okay, he disrespected a corpse — he got carried away by his religious fervor, his religious passion. But it wasn't just him,” Yassin says. “There were a thousand people there — a thousand people saying one thing. Who was to say at the time that a thousand people were lying, and the one on the ground was telling the truth?”

Though Yaqoob’s parents condemn Malikzada's killing, they believe he should not be punished for participating in the defamation of her dead body. And it is flippant attitudes such as this that frighten women in Afghanistan.

“Generally, the women that I speak to on a regular basis say they have lost trust in the police,” says Kargar. “They couldn’t protect one woman from people who didn’t have guns — they were not terrorists, though they were terrorists in a different way. They stand by men, and they feel the attitudes need to be changed. A lot of the activists have told me that the pervasive misogyny that is in the society needs to be eliminated, though it might take generations.”

The country itself has been tortured by Malikzada's killing. A thousand people gathered in Kabul for her funeral, and in a historic moment, women — not men — carried her coffin to her grave. But female activists know symbolic gestures are not enough.

“The young people who killed Malikzada's were only 5 or 6 years old at the beginning of the Karzai government. Now they're young men,” says Sahra Mosawi, a women’s rights activist in Afghanistan. “They were wearing modern clothes. Very good clothes. But their attitudes are still outdated. Respect for the law in our society doesn't exist. Respect for each other doesn't exist.”

While more needs to be done to protect Afghan women and ensure equality, Kargar says that strides have been made.

"There is hope in the way women came out in the street, and the way people stood and called for justice,” she says. “On one side, there might be these feelings of inequality towards women and violence against women, but on the other hand there is a force working towards change.”

This story first aired as an interivew on PRI's The Takeaway, a public radio program that invites you to be part of the American conversation.

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