Blaming the victim: Abused Afghan women often end up in jail
"If my wife goes to the bazaar without my permission, I will kill her. This is our culture," Abdul Qayum shouted scornfully during an interview in his office in the city of Jalalabad.
His colleagues laughed approvingly. "This is Afghanistan, not America," Qayum said.
It's so good that America is wasting precious lives and spending untotaled billions in the forced displacement of one group of brutal assholes with another group of brutal assholes.
As is usual with our self-serving and short-sighted foreign policy, in the end we create more Saddams and more Talibans and more al-Qeadas for us to fight in twenty years.
It's good business for the American military-industrial complex and lots of fun for our politicians but the people of these cultures deserve better than what America forces onto them.
Sitting on the prison floor with a black scarf over her hair and shoulders, she described being married in Pakistan as a preteen to an abusive man, who fathered her son, Bilal.
She said she divorced him and married another Pakistani man by whom she became pregnant last year. Then, she says, a female neighbor kidnapped her and delivered to an Afghan man named Yarul who claimed her as his wife and raped her for three months.
One day she overheard Yarul finalizing a deal to sell her to another man, who wanted her but not her son.
Scared of losing Bilal, she ran away one day late last summer. When Yarul found her and took her home, he beat her and the toddler relentlessly.
She said the boy was placed under a blanket, barely conscious, blood dripping from his mouth.
"When I lifted the blanket, he looked up and saw his mother. I could see that those were going to be his last breaths, and then he died. That was the last time we looked each other in the eyes," she said, her voice cracking, her face crumpled in grief. As she cried, so did the newborn daughter of her second marriage, lying in her lap.
When police came to arrest Yarul, they arrested her, too.
The prosecutor, Qayum, acknowledges that Rukhma was raped by Yarul but still maintains she shares the blame.
"She spent several nights with the man," he said. "She committed adultery. It was rape, but the woman is also guilty."
