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[ Graphical: Channel4 Homepage ]
Programme summary by Danny Lee
An anonymous woman, covered from head to toe in a blue burka, is dragged across a football pitch and shot in front of 30,000 spectators. This haunting image of Taliban justice was filmed secretly in Channel 4's award-winning documentary Beneath the Veil broadcast in June 2001. The woman was Zarmina, 35-year-old mother of seven. In a new Dispatches film, Lifting the Veil, Carla Garapedian went to Afghanistan to discover her story and see whether women's lives have improved since the fall of the Taliban.
After a secret trial, Zarmina was jailed with her six-month-old twins. They were confined to one room for three years. She confessed that her husband, Alozai, had discovered she had committed adultery saying: 'He said, "Tomorrow I will go to the Taliban and they will stone you to death." That night I was afraid. I hit him over the head with a mallet.'
Money could have saved Zarmina's life. The final Supreme Court ruling stated that her life would have been spared if she paid 10,000 dirhams ($8,000 dollars) to her seven children for the loss of their father. But she had no money.
Under Taliban law, Zarmina was judged by her own children. Children often participated in Taliban justice and witnessed executions. Alozai's brother brought the couple's children to court. Zarmina's mother says: 'They were always beating the children to say their mother had killed.'
Her children denounced her and, though Zarmina confided to prison guards that her daughter had killed her husband and that she had taken the blame, she did not tell this to the court. And now she faced a new charge: prostitution.
The police produced a report on Zarmina from five years earlier, during the civil war. She had crossed the front lines to get food and been raped by Afghan soldiers, she said. The court concluded, in Zarmina's absence, that she was an 'immoral whore' who had murdered her husband. She must die.
With the help of courageous relatives, and wearing burkas to avoid arousing suspicion, the Dispatches team travels around the war torn country and finds Zarmina's children: Bibi, 10; Jawad and Silsula, the twins, aged 5; Hiwad, 13 and Milad, 11. Najiba was married off by her uncle when she was 15. He received $3,500 dollars for her – a sum it would have taken him five years to earn. Najiba courageously gives the filmmakers her version of the events of the night her father was murdered.
Finally, there is Baseera, sold into marriage before Zarmina's execution. She supports her mother's story, describing her father's brutality and his threats when told that his wife had committed adultery: 'Before my father could do anything, my mother killed him.'
Graphic version
Includes layout and images.