The Times Magazine 67In early October, the first evacuated group
of 26 female judges and their immediate
family members arrived in Athens. Among
them was Homa Alizoy, 56, who is living in a
two-bedroom apartment in the city with four
generations of her family: her mother, who is
in a wheelchair, her two nephews and their
wives, and her two-year-old great-niece.
A judge with 37 years’ experience, rising
to become chief of the family court in Kabul,
Homa vividly remembers the Taliban’s first
brutal regime. “I was flogged many times”, she
says. Her family left for Pakistan for a year to
escape the brutality.
After the Taliban were defeated, Homa
wrote legislation on domestic violence. A little
over a decade ago, almost 90 per cent of
Afghan women experienced some form of
domestic abuse in their lifetime. And, in a
system that favoured husbands, few were ever
granted divorces. Post-2001, special courts
with female judges were set up to handle
cases of violence against women, along with
special police units and prosecution offices;
Afghanistan’s female judges helped reform
not merely its court systems but its culture.
“Women had come to the realisation
that they could raise their voice and defend
themselves and there were a lot of bright
people within the society that were embracing
the new legislation,” says Homa.
“But Afghanistan is very conservative
and there are a lot of people who took this
legislation as being against the teachings of
Islam,” she adds. With every new law, as with
every sentence against a perpetrator, “We
were threatened, and challenged – it was not
an easy environment to work in.”
Like Halimah, when Kabul fell to the
Taliban again it was not just the insurgents
Homa feared. “After the prisons were
emptied, I was equally concerned about those
perpetrators who had committed domestic
violence – they were very dangerous and
I was very fearful of being found out and
dealt with.”
Telephone numbers of judges were
circulated and Homa received constant threats
via phone, text and WhatsApp. She left her
home and moved in with her brother for six
weeks until, in late September, she got the
call that she was to be evacuated, with her
wheelchair-bound mother whom she cares for.
Their escape route was perilous: the trip
to Mazar-i-Sharif, a northern province a ten-
hour bus journey from Kabul, involved eight
Taliban checkpoints and, in order to stand a
chance of passing through them, they had to
dress “as Taliban”, the women in burqas, the
men dressed scrupulously modestly. “It was
like a film,” says Homa.
There, they spent four days in a safe house
arranged by the IBA, before a flight took them
to Georgia and, eventually, to Athens.
In the two-bedroom apartment in urban
Athens, Homa now shares one bedroom with
her mother, while her nephew, Farhad Alizoy,
30, his wife, Zainab, 31, both also judges, and
their daughter, Yusra, 2, share the second.
Another nephew and his wife, both prosecutors
in Afghanistan, sleep in the hallway.
Zainab has vague memories of the previous
Taliban regime (“Stories from my older sister
and my relatives, of all the women who were
deprived of their basic rights”) and remembers
mostly a free society. “During school and
university, opportunities were available for
females in particular – equal opportunities- and human rights issues were taken
seriously.” There was, she says, “a sense of
pride, because we were feeling equal to citizens
in other parts of the world, and Afghanistan
had made progress in science and education - there had been a lot of advancement”.
After qualifying as judges four years ago,
she and her husband were posted to Bagram
court, where she sentenced cases relating to
internal and external security, “many of them
involving warlords and their families, and
terrorist affiliates or sympathisers”, she says.
Zainab was not only the first female judge at
the court, but its first female employee.
Owing to the nature of the crimes they
were prosecuting, living in the same province
as the court and as the people they were
sentencing was, says Zainab, too much of a
security risk – “If we had been identified and
located, then we would have been killed” – so
they commuted daily, a three-hour round trip.
They were still commuting on August 15
when, en route, they heard that Parwan, the
province that covers Bagram, had fallen to the
Taliban, “and that there was anarchy”. As they
turned back towards Kabul, they heard that
Ghani had left the country. “Nobody was
thinking that Kabul, and the country, would
fall so quickly,” she says.
At home, they gathered essentials and
sensitive documents and left. “Everybody
knew that my husband and I were judges.
We were already receiving calls telling us
our life was in danger, and our vehicle had
been identified.” The family, including two-
year-old Yusra, spent weeks travelling between
the houses of relatives and friends, never
staying longer than two nights. “We left our
house, we lost our jobs, we lost our security,”
she says. “We felt this is not the country
that we can continue our lives in.” Two
days after Homa and her mother, Zainab and
her family were also evacuated to Mazar-i-
Sharif, from where the families travelled
together to Greece.
So, for now, their lives are continuing in
Athens, in a sparsely furnished but spacious
and modern apartment funded by the IBA
and its partners, with security downstairs
and a large terrace. But the family have no
money or resources, and rely entirely on food
donated by aid groups and charities. Homa’s
elderly mother is suffering from a painful and
debilitating skin condition and spends her
days lying under a sheet; the family have been
told that only in cases of emergency can they
call an ambulance, but otherwise they must
pay for all healthcare. That they have been
granted short-stay visas is a double-edged
sword; they have legal status but no access to
the same resources – such as free healthcare- that asylum seekers would.
Homa is also not entirely sure they are
safe. In the street last week, she spotted a man
she believes she sentenced shortly before the
Taliban regained power. He had murdered
his wife and, on receiving a 25-year sentence,
vowed to kill Homa too, repeating the threat
in calls from inside prison. “He did not
recognise me because I was wearing a mask
and glasses, but I recognised him,” she says.
The idea that the very Afghan criminals
they left the country to escape could be
living close by in their supposed sanctuary
is chilling, and extraordinary. But, Homa
explains, when the Taliban emptied the
prisons, prisoners were given two “choices”:
join their liberators or run. Those who did
not want to join the Taliban will have taken
the same route the family took, via Georgia.
Homa it calls the “criminals’ route”.
For numerous reasons, therefore, the
family see Athens only as a stopgap.
Zainab, who came top of her law-school
class and is only four years into her career,
wants a future in which she can take up her
profession again. “We cannot pursue a career
here in Greece, where we don’t speak the
language, so we would like to go to the UK,”
she says. Her husband has offers to study
at several UK universities, with bursaries.
“We were very grateful to be evacuated,
but my objective is to get to the UK, where
my sister lives, so I can join her and she can
help me in looking after our mother,” says
Homa, who is also eager to get back to her
own legislative work. “It’s very difficult to
be away from this field, because I have spent
most of my life in it – making legislation
and implementing laws, even in the field of
immigration.” And, she says, “any way in which
I could contribute, because of the extensive
experience that I have, I would be delighted”. n
‘We encouraged these
women to step into
these roles. We can’t
do this to them’