The 'Bacha Bazi': Islamic Pedophile Tradition in Afghanistan
A terrible tradition is back in Afghanistan
Ahmad Hanayesh reports on fears that the sexual abuse of children is on the increase in the wake of the war
Ahmad Hanayesh
Saturday March 8, 2003
The Guardian
One of the darker sides of Afghan society - sex between men and underage boys - is quietly reemerging in some parts of the country after it was made a capital offence by the Taliban, according to local people in two provinces.
Residents of Afghanistan's Parwan and Kapisa provinces, just north of Kabul, report that it is quite common for local men, particularly military commanders, to take boys as young as 14 to wedding parties and other celebrations, to get them to dance and, in some cases, have sex with them.
Abdul Marouf, from Parwan province, says: "This is quite common here. Some days ago I went to a wedding party where the singer of the band they had invited was a boy of about 14, who was very good-looking. While he was singing a number of armed men entered the hall, and one of them ordered the boy to dance and the band to accompany him. The singer looked scared and started crying, insisting that he could not dance, but they threatened to kill him. After he had danced for some time they took him away with them."
Marouf says some local commanders competed among themselves to keep the best-looking boy, after luring them with gifts of cigarettes, new clothes and shoes and invitations to watch pornographic videos. "They use these boys as their slaves," he says.
A film-maker in Kapisa province, who declined to give his name, says: "One night some armed men came to my house and wanted me to film their celebrations. As it was late, I made my apologies, but they forced me to go to their party. When I got there I saw a very nice-looking boy dancing. The party continued throughout the night and I had to film everything they did with that boy. What I witnessed were not the actions of human beings. After they finished they took the film cassette from me and let me go."
Despite the deep conservatism of Afghan society, and the strict observance of Islam among its people, there is reported to be something of a tradition of paedophilia in some parts of the country - particularly in Kandahar in the south - even though it is banned by both Afghan and Islamic law.
During the Taliban's rule, men accused of sexually abusing boys were punished by having a wall toppled on them by a tank - which almost always resulted in death.
Some local people in Parwan and Kapisa provinces blamed the brutalising effect of 23 years of war for what they see as a breakdown in traditional society and the increase in child abuse.
"I think the civil war in Afghanistan has created an unsafe and unhealthy environment," says Abdul Waheed of Parwan province. "In particular no attention is paid to the rights of children. I have seen youngsters being repeatedly beaten in the streets by their parents. All that happens is they leave home and quickly get into trouble."
Responding to the reports of sexual abuse of children in Parwan and Kapisa, Abdul Jalil Khan, head of the children's crime department in the interior ministry in Kabul, says: "We have done a lot in this regard to save children from such immoral behaviour, even to the point of trying to prevent them from watching pornographic films showing illegally in Kabul.
"However, our activities are confined only to Kabul. We haven't enough funds or staff to help children in the provinces."
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Kandahar Relishes Its New Freedom
Further evidence of the bright era now dawning in Afghanistan: life is returning to normalcy in Kandahar after the grim supervision of the Taleban clerics. On accounts by Tim Reid in the London Times and more recently John Lee Anderson in the New Yorker, joyful sons of sodom are to be seen driving along the boulevards of the ancient city, their catamites demurely installed in the passenger seat. Reid knowledgeably discloses that Kandahar has long been fabled as the San Francisco of South Asia. So delirious are the peculiar enthusiasms of the Pashtun that local wisdom has it that birds fly over the city using only one wing, the other covering their posterior.
It seems that the rape of young boys by warlords was one of the key factors in Mullah Omar mobilising the Taleban, in yet another manifestation of that intolerance that has so aroused the indignation of many liberals, prompting them to cheer on the B-52s. There was a famous fracas in 1994 when two warlords faced off in a dispute over which of them would have the right to rape an attractive young fellow who had fallen into their clutches. There was gunplay in which civilians were killed. Eventually the lad was freed by Mullah Omar's group and the one-eyed zealot was promptly inundated with requests to help in other such disputes.
The inhabitants of Kabul, who had seen their city devastated and thousands killed in the war between muj warlords similarly yearned for the security, albeit puritanical, offered by the Taleban. Farmers and poor city dwellers who had seen mass rapes of their daughters by the warlords' armed rabble, strongly supported the Taleban, reckoning that the compulsory burkas were no bad thing if it betokened the safety of women going out in public.
One of Omar's first decrees when the Taleban took power in 1994 was the suppression of homosexuality. Accused sodomites endured Trial by Wall Push. Reid offers the example of one such trial in February of 1998 when "three men sentenced to death for sodomy in Kandahar were taken to the base of a huge mud and brick wall, which was pushed over by tank." Two of them died, but in an instructive example of how the Taleban tempered its stern ways with a acknowledgement of the captious workings of Allah, one crawled away to live and love another day.
But now pre-Taleban normalcy is now returning to Kandahar, just as it is to the rest of Afghanistan, where tens of thousands are fleeing to Pakistan to escape banditry and starvation. "One can see the pairs returning", Reid reports. "Usually a heavily bearded man, seated next to, or walking with, a clean-shaven, fresh faced youth." He adds that "it is usually a terrible fate for the boys concerned" but that they accede out of poverty. "Once the boy falls into the man's clutches - nearly always men with a wife and family - he is marked for life, although the Kandaharis accept these relationships as part of their culture."
"They say birds flew with both wings with the Taleban," Muhammad tells Reid. "But not any more." Is it not stirring to learn of such fruits of Pax Americana!
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Vice creeps back to Kandahar
Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press
In this city whose storied excesses gave rise to Mullah Mohammed Omar and his puritanical Taliban, the old vices of the past are making a spirited comeback.
Gambling, opium smoking and - in male-dominated Pashtun society, paedophilia - have all re-emerged as strict Taliban rule has disappeared.
"Kandahari card trick!" a merchant exclaims on a night of card-playing - one of many well-known addictions of Kandahar's people, and one of many banned by the one-eyed Omar during the Taliban's five-year rule.
Slapping down cards, the merchant comes to the point after several minutes of patter, saving the queens but tossing all the one-eyed jacks and kings out of the deck.
"No more Mullah Omars!" the merchant cries. "Ha! Kandahari revenge!"
To western eyes, Kandahar looks like no den of iniquity, just an overgrown version of any market town outside Kabul, the capital. Women bustle about on errands only under cover of silky full-length cloaks; there are no bars, or even teahouses, no movie theatres where men and women might mingle.
But to Central Asians, Afghanistan's second-largest city is Babylon with burqas, Sodom and Gomorrah with sand. Security forces now are closing opium stalls and seeing to it that the racier selections in newly reopened video stores are kept under the counters.
In a society where to flirt with women is to flirt with death at the hands of their angry male relatives, men turn elsewhere - sometimes to young boys. Even though such acts are banned in the Islamic religion, paedophilia has been a practice in Pashtun society.
The Taliban tried to stamp it out, but with the stern militiamen gone from power, Kandaharis say the practice is coming back.
In pre-Taliban times, the battling warlords who laid waste to this city also were known to argue over boys who caught their eyes.
Local legend has it that Mullah Omar was first called from his mosque to settle one such feud, in 1994 - stepping in between two militia commanders and winning the return of a young abductee, although accounts differ as to whether it was a boy or girl.
Citizens were so grateful, residents say, that the episode started the Muslim cleric on his rise to power.
"I was beautiful. I never left home for a year and a half - I was that afraid," says Farid, a trader's son, recalling his ordeal nine years ago aged 11, when an Afghan commander took a liking to him from afar.
Farid went into hiding, then into exile with an uncle in Pakistan.
"That's why I grew a beard, and that's why I was happy the Taliban came, at first."
Some Kandaharis claim that was the origin of the Taliban edict ordering men to grow beards. The Taliban wanted to separate the boys from the men, to keep youngsters out of the army.
A Kandahari saying: He who does not smoke opium is a pumpkin-head.
"It's a vice, but a small vice," says trader Amenullah, excusing himself for taking a crammed mouthful of Afghani nicotine-charged green snuff, while keeping an eye out for customers for the raw opium on offer at his stall.
"Opium has come back a little - hashish, too, too much," one Kandahari says.
Opium planting, banned under the Taliban, has surged. A local official, in fact, alleged that many of the thousands of southern Afghans planning a religious pilgrimage to Mecca this month paid for it out of opium profits.
Afghan authorities, under pressure from western governments, are shutting down the opium stalls and promise to destroy the poppy crops in the spring. Kandahar's people say they are happy the Taliban are gone, and hopeful that order is here to stay after long years of war.
Kandahar's security forces promise to keep it that way.
"After 20 years, people are tired of it all," said Ahmad, a Kandahar commander. "Opium is banned now, hashish is banned. Don't worry. Everything will be banned."
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