The Opium Brides of Afghanistan: farmers forced to sell daughters to pay loans (Newsweek)

[Amerigo Vespucci]

The Opium Brides of Afghanistan
In the country's poppy-growing provinces, farmers are being forced to sell their daughters to pay loans.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/129577



Flowers of War: Afghan soldiers during an attack on Taliban fighters guarding a field (left); a once-prosperous family, struggling after losing its poppy income, was forced to give away their daughter, pictured

By Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau | NEWSWEEK
Apr 7, 2008 Issue

Khalida's father says she's 9—or maybe 10. As much as Sayed Shah loves his 10 children, the functionally illiterate Afghan farmer can't keep track of all their birth dates. Khalida huddles at his side, trying to hide beneath her chador and headscarf. They both know the family can't keep her much longer. Khalida's father has spent much of his life raising opium, as men like him have been doing for decades in the stony hillsides of eastern Afghanistan and on the dusty southern plains. It's the only reliable cash crop most of those farmers ever had. Even so, Shah and his family barely got by: traffickers may prosper, but poor farmers like him only subsist. Now he's losing far more than money. "I never imagined I'd have to pay for growing opium by giving up my daughter," says Shah.

The family's heartbreak began when Shah borrowed $2,000 from a local trafficker, promising to repay the loan with 24 kilos of opium at harvest time. Late last spring, just before harvest, a government crop-eradication team appeared at the family's little plot of land in Laghman province and destroyed Shah's entire two and a half acres of poppies. Unable to meet his debt, Shah fled with his family to Jalalabad, the capital of neighboring Nangarhar province. The trafficker found them anyway and demanded his opium. So Shah took his case before a tribal council in Laghman and begged for leniency. Instead, the elders unanimously ruled that Shah would have to reimburse the trafficker by giving Khalida to him in marriage. Now the family can only wait for the 45-year-old drugrunner to come back for his prize. Khalida wanted to be a teacher someday, but that has become impossible. "It's my fate," the child says.

Afghans disparagingly call them "loan brides"—daughters given in marriage by fathers who have no other way out of debt. The practice began with the dowry a bridegroom's family traditionally pays to the bride's father in tribal Pashtun society. These days the amount ranges from $3,000 or so in poorer places like Laghman and Nangarhar to $8,000 or more in Helmand, Afghanistan's No. 1 opium-growing province. For a desperate farmer, that bride price can be salvation—but at a cruel cost. Among the Pashtun, debt marriage puts a lasting stain on the honor of the bride and her family. It brings shame on the country, too. President Hamid Karzai recently told the nation: "I call on the people give their daughters for money; they shouldn't give them to old men, and they shouldn't give them in forced marriages."

All the same, local farmers say a man can get killed for failing to repay a loan. No one knows how many debt weddings take place in Afghanistan, where 93 percent of the world's heroin and other opiates originate. But Afghans say the number of loan brides keeps rising as poppy-eradication efforts push more farmers into default. "This will be our darkest year since 2000," says Baz Mohammad, 65, a white-bearded former opium farmer in Nangarhar. "Even more daughters will be sold this year." The old man lives with the anguish of selling his own 13-year-old daughter in 2000, after Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar banned poppy growing. "Lenders never show any mercy," the old man says. Local farmers say more than one debtor has been bound hand and foot, then locked into a small windowless room with a smoldering fire, slowly choking to death.

[pitohui]

1. yeah if you're a bad person doing bad things, it tends to snowball

sorry i have no sympathy for the man growing opium (which he must know is made into a drug that kills) and who loves his children so much that he can't even keep track of when they were born

this article is insanity, we are asked to sympathize with a piece of shit who grows drugs and sells his children for money

i'm afraid i have better things to do

as long as we're over there, why are we not putting a stop to the growing of drugs and the selling of women and children? this is bullshit that it's 2008 and this crap is still going on

[ensho]

3. feel sorry for the 9 yr. old

nt

[pitohui]

5. absolutely, it's the women and children i pity not the "father"

shithead can't even be bothered to remember when his kid was born

he's angling for a handout, couldn't be more obvious, "gimme gimme or i'll sell this child too"

horrible

[High Plains]

11. You are a hateful, bitter, ignorant person.

You don't have a clue about the realities of life in Afghanistan.

[wuushew]

6. Opiates have legitimate medical uses

Why is it moral to destroy a man's source of income rather than treat drug addition here at home? All the drug war does is destroy lives, the environment and the economy.

Afghanistan is a marginal country with marginal economic prospects. Drugs have a real potential to bring foreign currency into the country.

[Kitty Herder]

10. Despite a recent family tragedy involving heroin, I can't hold this man's attempt

to make a living off his land against him. (Selling his daughter is another story. There are some lines that can't be crossed. Selling your family is one of them to me. Although I do sympathize with his desperation.)

The nature of our global economy is such that people are desperate and will do anything in order to make a living. Unless we can change things so that everyone is secure enough that they don't have to grow drugs, they will continue to do so.

I'm angry about the increased spread of heroin in this country, but I'm not angry at the farmers who grow it. They're poor and they're just trying to get by.

I'm angry as hell about our drug policies in this nation. My nineteen-year-old cousin came to his family in December and told them he was addicted to heroin. He tried to quit on his own, but couldn't do it. He ended up in drug court. They made him pay a fine, but didn't order any treatment. Had he been destitute and not living in his parents home, the state would have payed for treatment. He tried to quit on his own. Three weeks ago, he was found dead in his bed of a heroin overdose.

We have got to start treating drug addiction as the disease that it is, and providing free treatment for it rather than treating it like any other crime and giving fines and prison time.

[ensho]

2. things, property, a vagina and womb for sale, hands and back to do work

Laura Bush where are you?

men of the world, where are you? buying or selling?

[seabeyond]

4. i am told, no worse than working mcdonalds n/t

[ensho]

7. who ever told you that is wrong

nt

[seabeyond]

8. more than one. of course they are. so stupid, i will probably

be sittin in awe of it years to come.

[lovuian]

9. basicly this isn't marriage its slavery

read a Thousands Suns its the saddest tale

[varelse]

12. Problem is

if they don't comply with the lenders' demands, the father dies and then all the rest of that family are at their mercy... this is a mess that can not and should not be blamed on a group of poor, illiterate farmers. I'd look higher up the chain for the true masterminds of this distaster, and perhaps a few decades back in history...