Pubdate: Wed, 28 Sep 2005
Source: Boston Globe (MA)
Copyright: 2005 Globe Newspaper Company
Contact:  http://www.boston.com/globe/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/52
Author: Farah  Stockman
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Afghanistan

WOMEN PAY A PRICE IN WAR ON AFGHAN DRUG TRADE

Poppy Debts Paid With Daughters

SHINWAR, Afghanistan -- In the thirsty hills of Nangarhar province, 
debt is a way of life. Every autumn, sharecroppers take loans from 
drug traffickers to plant their poppy crops. After every harvest, 
they repay them in poppies, which are eventually turned into heroin.

This year, a US-backed eradication effort has sharply cut Nangarhar's 
lucrative poppy cultivation, but the sharecroppers' debts remain. 
Now, some of the region's poorest farmers say they are being forced 
to repay traffickers with the only thing they have left: their daughters.

Giving a daughter to repay a debt is a rare but age-old practice 
among the rural tribesmen of Afghanistan. A payment of last resort, 
the daughter is almost always given as a bride to the money-lender or 
to his son, but is sometimes given as a servant, according to the 
International Organization for Migration. There are no statistics 
about how many girls have fallen victim to this practice, but human 
rights groups and the International Organization for Migration have 
documented cases, and interviews with more than a dozen indebted 
farmers and tribal elders from four districts of Nangarhar described 
witnessing or participating in such transactions.

"Of course, it is a failure when people sell a woman," said Arbab 
Asif, a landowner who leases plots to 58 sharecropping families. "But 
these people are very poor. They don't have any other alternative."

A report last month by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimated 
that the eradication program -- a combination of crop destruction and 
persuading farmers not to plant -- reduced Afghan poppy cultivation 
by 21 percent this year. In Nangarhar, the reduction was 96 percent.

The US and Afghan governments have billed the campaign, which began 
in November of 2004, as the most significant victory in the battle 
against narcotics in Afghanistan, the world's largest producer of 
opium poppies. But the dark side of that success has cast a shadow 
across the remote villages of this province, where sharecroppers are 
reeling under the crackdown. Some Afghans refer to the practice as 
"giving bad," a traditional method of conflict resolution in which a 
murderer, a thief, or a debtor is forced by tribal elders to give a 
daughter or sister as payment to the victim's family. Others describe 
the practice as a marriage transaction. In a culture of arranged 
marriages, where a groom usually pays the father of a bride between 
$200 and $5,000 depending on her social status and skills, a man can 
cancel his debt by arranging for his daughter to marry the lender or 
the lender's relative.

The practice is secretive and full of shame. It can rarely be 
reversed, as the girls are married into a new household and divorce 
is unheard of here. Pashtun tribal laws prohibit community members 
from discussing the issue openly, so those involved would speak only 
on condition of anonymity. It was not possible to interview the 
victims, who live in households associated with traffickers.

A tribal elder from Chaparhar District described one case in which a 
poppy farmer could not pay off a loan of about $1,166 because his 
crops were eradicated. The farmer offered his 14-year-old daughter, 
but the trafficker refused because the girl was mute. So the farmer 
arranged her marriage to a 40-year-old neighbor, and paid off the 
trafficker with the money he received from the marriage, according to 
the elder.

"The problem is solved now," he said. An elder from Khogiani District 
described another case in which a man who owed about $6,600 offered 
his two daughters, ages 6 and 10, as payment. The group of tribal 
elders refused that form of payment because the girls were too young, 
he said. The farmer fled with his family to Pakistan to avoid paying 
the debt in cash. A friend who had guaranteed the loan has since been 
arrested, the elder said. Tribal elders carry the authority of a 
court to intervene in family disputes.

One 25-year-old-man, a juice-seller in Jalalabad, the provincial 
capital, said he got married last year to a 14-year-old girl whose 
family could not pay off a poppy loan to his father. He said his 
father had waited two years for the loan to be repaid before 
requesting the debtor's daughter. "After two years, my father went 
and asked him, 'Can you return my money to me? Otherwise, my son is 
an adult. Please give your daughter to him,' " the 25-year-old 
recalled, describing the transaction matter-of-factly. "I am quite 
happy with my wife, but there is still tension between the families. 
They do not express their feelings, but they remain secret enemies." 
He said he allows his wife to keep in touch with her family, but that 
it is common for husbands in the Pashtun tribal areas to bar their 
wives from contact with the world outside the home, including with 
their own parents. The practice of giving away a daughter to pay a 
debt is expected to increase sharply following the campaign against 
poppies, especially if farmers feel they have no alternative but to 
continue to plant in areas that could be hit hard by the eradication 
programs, and thus risk not having enough income to repay loans they 
took out to finance their crops.

Lal Gul an indebted father of five whose crop was destroyed this 
year, recalled that the Taliban cracked down on poppy-growing one 
year when they were in power and "we witnessed plenty of cases" of 
paying debts with daughters. "This year, I'm sure the number of such 
cases will increase because there is no source of income to pay back 
the loans."

Last year, the International Organization for Migration's annual 
report described human trafficking in Afghanistan as a growing 
problem, and included special sections in the report on the practice 
of marriage to cover a debt and the exchange of women for the 
settlement of disputes. USAID spent $18 million in 2005 on immediate 
alternative-livelihood projects in Nangarhar to give farmers another 
source of income. But those funds, for short-term manual labor 
projects, fell far short of providing sharecroppers with enough 
income to repay their debts.

Nearly all farmers interviewed said they planned to grow poppy again, 
since it is the only crop for which they can obtain credit, and the 
only one that can earn them enough to pay off past debts.

Traffickers often double or even triple the debt if they are not 
repaid within one year. Several farmers said that some traffickers 
have killed people or taken their houses when a debt remained 
outstanding for too long. "You have three alternatives. You could pay 
him, you could give your daughter or sister, or you could run away," 
said the elder from Khogiani. "The father always rejects and denies 
to give his daughter, but there are many obligations. That is why so 
many families escape to Pakistan." In a region known as Shinwar, the 
birthplace of Afghanistan's opium industry, about an hour's drive 
east of Jalalabad, about 30 families out of a village of 200 had 
recently run away to Pakistan or Iran because they could not afford 
to pay poppy-related debts, said tribal elder Malik Afsar, 84. He 
said no farmer in his village had given away a daughter.

But hours later, a farmer from Afsar's area acknowledged that his 
sister-in-law, a child, had been given away for marriage two years 
ago to the family of a man who had lent her father money to plant 
poppies. He said the families would wait until she grew up to conduct 
the marriage. Jandad Spin Ghar, regional manager of the Afghanistan 
Independent Human Rights Commission, said the group has received 
numerous complaints involving debt collection, but only one that 
specifically referenced the sale of a woman because of a poppy debt. 
His team visited the area to investigate, but families there refused 
to divulge any information.

Ghar said his office has intervened to stop more than 20 cases of 
girls and women being "given as bad" but most of those were as 
payment to victims families in cases of murder.

Abdul Hamad Razzaq, a Kabul-based human rights researcher who helped 
investigate 500 cases across Afghanistan of girls and women being 
given away to settle disputes, said only about 20 were to cover 
financial debts. That research, done as part of a report by a new 
Afghan organization known as the Women and Children Legal Research 
Foundation, reported cases of women as old as 32 and girls as young 
as 3 being given to another family. Hangama Anwari, a human rights 
activist working to persuade communities to stop the practice, said 
the victims often live out the rest of their lives in isolation and 
shame, treated as servants even if they are wives. "It's a crime," 
said she said. "It's against all civil laws, and it is against Islam. 
. . . But the people who are applying the laws don't care."
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake