Oh Yeah, About Thier Women Being 'Better Off'...

Women pay a price in war

on Afghan drug trade
Poppy debts paid with daughters
By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff September 28, 2005
Link Here

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.

Continued...