The following article is one woman’s tragic account of an Afghan mother who found that the pressure of a forced marriage and an equally tragic illness caused her to take her own life…….

The Islamic religion, in most parts of the world, gives men and women the equal opportunity to choose the partner they would like to marry and share their life with.

But in Afghanistan, where masculine traditions, including arranged and forced marriages, are still the dominant rule, this is not the case.

 The outcome of the follow story took place in Kabul in June 2006

 Several years ago, a beautiful princess called Mahboba was born into a life of peace. As she grew up she was seen as a very calm, friendly and helpful person by all her relatives and friends as well as her classmates at school.

She was brought up in an educated family but sadly like many other families in Afghanistan she was forced to accept her idea when it came to marriage and she was forced to marry a man she hardly knew, when she was 16.

She spent most of the day of her wedding in tears. She couldn’t stop crying, but she didn’t tell anyone that her tears were because she was being forced to marry a man who was not the man of her dreams.

 Many people were invited in the summer of 2001 when her mother and father decided that their daughter must marry a very rich man who, it’s believed, was related to Mahboba’s mother.

Sometimes friends heard how she was very unhappy with her life, especially after she moved to a village outside Kabul, and that she had become quite ill.

But one good friend from schooldays who hadn’t seen Mahboba for a number of years and felt very sorry for her, met up with her in Kabul last year and was deeply shocked.

She could hardly recognise her friend, now the mother of two children, who had become very skinny and withdrawn. It’s not the custom to complain about your life in Afghanistan so Mahboba said little about the pain and misery she was really going through in her marriage but her old friend from schooldays could guess as much because of the terrible sadness in Mahboba’s eyes.

She told her school friend she was ill but she didn’t say what was wrong with her, except that her doctor had given her some medication and that it would take a long time to recover.

Before parting company, her friend urged her to take her illness seriously and see her doctor on a regular basis but Mahboba said this would not be easy.

Several months later Mahbob’s friend learned that Mahbob had become incurably ill with breast cancer as well as becoming pregnant again and that pressure and problems with her in-laws had caused her to become deeply depressed.

Apparently she even asked her own family if she could leave her husband and move back with them but they did not take her seriously and refused, telling her she had to suffer in silence.

In June this year, two months after giving birth, Mahboba’s suffering became too much. The victim of an incurable illness and believing that nobody, including her own family, really cared for her, Mahboba decided she had no choice but to commit suicide, by pouring petrol over herself and setting herself on fire. Sadly another 14 painful days passed by before she finally died.

She left three children and a husband who didn’t deserve her – who was jailed after her death but is expect to be released soon because of the corrupt influence of his family.

Mahbob’s story is not unique. There are thousands of women in Afghanistan today who are suffering forced and painful marriages in silence for the sake of their children and because of family pressure.

What is alarming is that the number of women who prefer to die, and commit suicide by setting themselves on fire like Mahboba, is on the increase.

Is this really how Afghan families want their daughters to end up? The answer is NO but as long as men in Afghanistan remain blind to the feelings and needs of women and start seeing them as human beings rather than objects simply to possess and control, little is likely to change.

Marriages in Afghanistan must be on the basis of the woman as well as the man agreeing to marry,  as well as sharing and caring for each other equally through good times and bad, throughout their married life.

Heaven help men who don’t on Judgment Day.

Kandahar...  FILM REVIEW BY FAHIMA MARWA

Almost every time I consume something about Afghanistan, I find it a half told story. I grew up in a point of century when political power became an international obsession; human life lost its value to economical triumph more than before, the cold war got to its climax and finally ended in favour of America. Every war has its casualties and I was happened to be one of the million victims who paid for it.

My life time clashed with the time when super powers particularly USA and USSR d created political movements to use as tools of victory, causing a dreadful ground for Afghans to flee in desperation scattering around the world and I was one of them…with shattered dreams… who left her country and her identity behind. I came to England in 1996 starting from the beginning; a new life with a new identity as an ‘asylum seeker’.

When I watched Kandahar I realized that it wasn’t about me; an energetic young girl who was planning her future as a successful journalist behind the wooden inky desk of her secondary school. It certainly portrayed an image of desperation, a struggle to gain security but it wasn’t about me and millions of other Afghans who left the country not because of the Taliban but from those warlords who were favoured by Americans and Russians since 1979. So what was Kandahar about?

Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar pur­ports to tell the story of the desperate plight of Afghan refugees escaping from the disaster caused by the Taliban.
Its storyline is based on the experience of a Canadian journalist Nafas (Nelofer Pazeera), originally an Afghani. She and her family fled from Afghanistan and during the escape her sister lost her legs in a landmine explo­sion and was left behind.

Nafas attempts to return to Afghanistan to rescue her sister who has been driven suicidal by her con­dition and on the way encounters many problems, particularly as she witnesses dreadful scenes among the refugees in the desert areas of the bor­ders.

Yet despite portraying some of the terrible reali­ties of Afghanistan, the film unfairly allows the Taliban to shoulder the entire burden of blame. The 25 years of war and the flight of millions of refugees are caused by a wider range of reasons than purely and simply Taliban fundamentalism.

Such reasons are deliberately or unintentionally ignored in this film and in other media in general. The Taliban and other forces grouped under the heading of 'Mojahiden' didn't appear out of thin air. They would have fought bare handed if western countries, notably America, hadn't supported them.

And the Cold War between the US and the USSR is one of the main foundations of the tragedy which is Afghanistan today.
The reality is that Afghanistan has been a land of disaster for generations. Afghans have suffered for years in deadly silence, not because they didn't want to scream but because they knew the world wouldn't want to listen. The population doesn't live, it just breathes. Children are born to die.

According to Makhmalbaf and Pazeera, the pur­pose of the film is to focus the world's attention on Afghanistan and its people. But if blatant and painful realities can't awaken the global conscience, can a film like Kandahar do the job?