# Girls and women traded for opium debts



## GAP (23 Jan 2007)

AFGHANISTAN: Girls and women traded for opium debts
23 Jan 2007 15:46:19 GMT Source: IRIN
Article Link

HELMAND PROVINCE, 23 January 2007 (IRIN) – On 4 November 2006, Nasima, 25, a member of a local women's council, grabbed the AK-47 from the policeman guarding the council meeting in the Grishk district of southern Helmand province and killed herself. 

She had had enough of the daily beatings by her husband. Like many other women in Helmand, Nasima was given away by her family in 2005. Her father owed a huge amount to an opium dealer and, unable to return the money or provide the quantity of opium he had promised, he offered his daughter to the smuggler, who already had a wife and four children. Under Islamic law and in many Muslim countries a man is allowed up to four wives.

"Nasima was enduring a bitter life in the family. The family members and her husband considered her as an extra burden," Gulalai, head of the local women's council in Grishk district, told IRIN. 

Nasima's case is just one of hundreds of such incidents where women are traded for debts. Most go unreported in the troubled southern provinces, where most of the opium in Afghanistan is produced. The practice is also reported in other provinces, particularly the east and the north, but the stakes are higher in the south, the heartland for drug trading.

In another case in the Marja district of Helmand, 18-year-old Saliha considers herself lucky to be living a relatively peaceful life. "I was 13 when my father married me off to a 20-year-old man, whose father had given a loan to my parents and they were unable to return the amount or the quantity of opium," Saliha said. 

She says she is fortunate to be the first wife and only wife for her husband, who is only seven years older and not double her age, which is common in this part of the country.

Qais Bawari, acting head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) for the southern region, based in Kandahar, said they received 69 cases of self-immolation and murders from Helmand and Kandahar provinces in 2006 alone. He said several were related to marriages in exchange for drugs. "Unfortunately many of the cases of violence against women go unreported and a very small proportion is reported to us," Bawari said.

He said people were reluctant to report cases regarding domestic violence against women for fear of reprisals. 
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## Bruce Monkhouse (23 Jan 2007)

If only I had the power to blink and make every living person who would think that this is appropriate human behavior disappear into a pile of dust.........


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## Yrys (23 Jan 2007)

Bruce Monkhouse said:
			
		

> If only I had the power to blink and make every living person who would think that this is appropriate human behavior disappear into a pile of dust.........



+ 1


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## Danjanou (23 Jan 2007)

The next mouth breathing Birkenstock wearing left wing shitpump who yells out that the only reason we’re in Afghanistan is so Harper can support GW’s oil war is getting a copy of this article shoved in their self righteous smug pie hole.

With any luck I'll forget to print it our first and then can get that new monitor I've been eying. >


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## Colin Parkinson (23 Jan 2007)

To bad she didn't shot him! Of course that would be a crime now wouldn't it?  :


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## RHFC_piper (23 Jan 2007)

This article is now going in my collection of articles advocating Canada's (among others) involvement in Afghanistan, along with the 20 or so articles I have about the intense poverty, other human rights violations, beheading of teachers (and others), beating of wives and children and forced labour under the Taliban regime and control.

The more these horrific acts are brought to light, the more people may stop and consider their inactions or advocation of inaction.  And the more I read articles like this, the more I long to be back over there doing my job to help bring even the smallest change to that country.


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