Self-Immolation Seen as Only Escape

Five months after being married at age 12, Lila poured petrol over herself and set herself ablaze. She whispered from her hospital bed that she had wanted to kill herself because her 17-year-old husband constantly beat her.

"My husband hates me and is always beating me. I ran to my mother's place but my brother forced me to go back to my husband's home," she said. With burns covering 35 per cent of her body, she tried to remain immobile as she spoke.

Her 45-year-old mother, who asked not to be named, said she could not prevent her daughter being sent back to the young but violent husband. But she tearfully told IWPR, "I will never again allow any of my daughters to be married under-age."

According to the new constitution, the legal age for marriage is 16 for women and 18 for men. But the law is frequently ignored and there are reports that 57 per cent of marriages in Afghanistan involve girls under 16.

Lila was just one of three teenagers being treated for burns after setting themselves fire, when IWPR visited the overcrowded Howzawi Hospital in the western city of Herat on one day in September.

Her marriage had been contracted when she was only six, as part of an exchange arrangement that allowed her older brother to marry a girl even though he could not afford the bride price demanded by her father. As part of the deal, Lila had to marry the girl's younger brother.

It was her elder brother who forced her to return to her abusive husband.

Outside the ward, in a bed in the second floor corridor, 17-year-old Fatima moaned quietly in agony from her burns. A year earlier, she too had been the "bride price" in a swap for the girl her brother wanted to marry.

From the first few months of her marriage, she was constantly beaten by her husband who, she said, was in love with someone else. "I burned myself so that I could relax for ever," she said, before crying out suddenly, "My stomach is burning."

Her long, disheveled black hair frames a face painted over with a dark blue solution to ease the pain. Burns cover almost 40 per cent of her body, according to a doctor.

"I did this because I had no other alternative," she told IWPR.

Herat has one of the highest incidences of self-immolation in Afghanistan, and many doctors here think it is a common method of suicide here because of the influence of practices in nearby Iran.

Dr Mohammad Hamyon Azizi, who heads the burns unit in the hospital, said around 400 people in the province - mostly young women - had attempted suicide by setting themselves on fire since 2002. Some 60 per cent had died.

Many of the patients come from families who had spent time in Iran as refugees, he said.

"There are many factors why they try to kill themselves - low levels of education, desperate economic conditions, compulsory marriages, and from watching films and then comparing them with their own living conditions in Afghanistan."

Sima Shir Mohammadi, head of the provincial women's affairs department, pointed to forced marriages as another cause of teenage girls setting themselves on fire.

But there were other reasons as well. "In one family, a 14-year-old girl just wanted to wear a short-sleeve dress at a wedding party and also dress like that at home. Her family would not let her, so she set herself on fire," said Shir Mohammadi.

"Frustration in teenage marriages, where the husband can't meet the wishes of a young wife, low levels of education, and forced marriages which are a form of oppression by parents, leave some girls seeing self-immolation as the only answer."

There are no precise figures nationally on how many girls kill themselves this way, partly because many families see it as a source of shame and try to hide the reason for the burns, attributing them to cooking accidents. Suicide is also frowned upon for religious reasons.

Judge Ghulam Nabi Hakak, chairman of the human rights commission for western Afghanistan, said they had tried to counter the increase in self-immolation cases.

"We set up some workshops for men and women in towns and districts and promoted women's rights from the point of view of Islam, with the help of some mullahs in the mosques. We also published a book called ‘Why self-immolation?’ and held several academic seminars," he said.

Shir Mohammadi said her women’s affairs office had also tried to use the media and had asked preachers to speak out against forcing teenagers into marriage, but more needed to be done.

The department had produced a report on the problems faced by women and their reasons for self-immolation, and this had gone to the ministry for women's affairs. "I am waiting for a reply," she said.

Fouzia Amini, an official at the ministry, said she was unaware of the report and claimed that the number of women setting themselves of fire had "decreased from the past". However, she added that nationwide there were reports of 57 cases of self- immolation within the same number of days, "We have obtained these numbers from the internet, and they are accurate." She refused to comment further.

It was not possible to speak with the minister, Massouda Jalal, who was quoted in the Kabul newspaper Outlook in August as saying that 700 women had tried to burn themselves to death in 2004.

Sajia Behgam, an official with the German aid agency Medica Mondiale, said her organisation’s figures showed around 500 cases of self-immolation and other forms of suicide each year in Afghanistan - but she said most cases were concealed by the families because of the shame involved. Around half the known cases involved women setting fire to themselves, and between 60 and 70 per cent of them died. The other half involved women killing themselves by other methods.

In Kabul's Istiqlal hospital – the main burns treatment centre - director Sayed Hassan Kamel said 40 per cent of the hospital was dedicated to burn victims. In August they had received 558 such casualties, of which five per cent - 28 patients - were women who had attempted suicide by setting themselves on fire.

One such case was an 18-year-old girl, Zarsanga, from Maidan Wardak province, who was admitted in late September.

Her grandmother said the girl had complained earlier about being oppressed by her mother-in-law and sister-in-law – another common cause of misery for young wives.

"When I came home, Zarsanga was badly burnt, about 50 per cent, so I brought her to the hospital," said the grandmother, who did not want to be named.

Mohammad Jawad Sharifzada and Abdul Baseer Saeed are IWPR staff reporters in Kabul.