The police came for us at 2 p.m. on April 21.
The nightmare that had followed me for a year and a half was no longer something to be feared from a distance. It was standing in front of me, dressed in a uniform. Unlike the officers who had previously come to my door, this policeman was polite. He tried to speak Farsi. When I said my son’s name, Orhan, he smiled as called out to him, too.
Across his chest were written the words: “Stay calm.”
The sentence did not comfort me. It mocked me. I wanted to ask: You are taking me by force to Haji Camp, and now you want me to stay calm? But there was no room for anger and no room for refusal. There was only the effort to breathe, to hold my child close, and to appear calm while my life was ripped out of my hands.
I am writing this letter for the women I saw in Haji Camp — for those who were there before me, for those who were there with me, for those who came after me, and for those who may still be trapped in that long corridor of locked doors, confiscated phones, unanswered pleas, and silent shame. I want to tell them, in the words of Hamasa Badakhshani, whose writing I later found on the wall of Room Three: “I, too, have endured this pain.”
A day after I was locked inside Haji Camp, I began reading the writing on the walls.
“Being a woman is not a crime.”
“Being Afghan is not a crime.”
“Bread, work, freedom.”
The walls were full of women’s handwriting — grief scratched into cement with pens and pencils. Some lines made me laugh. Some left a lump in my throat. One woman had drawn an eye and written beneath it, “I never thought I would draw this here, but this is life.”
Reading those words, I told myself, “Yes, this too is life — the kind of life that takes you to places you never imagined, locks the door behind you, and still expects you to remain calm.”
To be an Afghan refugee in Pakistan is to feel that control over your life has been taken from you. You cannot have a place where you can live in peace. You are fearful and anxious most days as you are afraid of a police raid; and, when they catch you, you live in terror of being deported to Afghanistan. Inside the camp, I felt a pain clawing at my throat when they locked the door from the outside or when the female police officers did not allow me to step out into the corridor.
On the first day I was at the camp, a girl sat beside me and said, “This is a bad place. They don’t give you your phone. It has been two days and they still haven’t given me mine. I need medicine. Where am I supposed to get it?” As she began to cry, I stared into her eyes, helpless and unable to do anything.
One of the Pakistani policewomen noticed her tears and said, “Who is not giving you your phone?” The girl pointed to a young man named Ali. Ali had the phones in his possession. He was writing the names of women and men on a piece of paper and saying, “I will give you your mobiles in turn.”
When he took our phones, he said he would return them so we could resolve our problems. But the police officer sitting beside him said, “Do not give them their phones until they have cried a 100 times!”
A young woman wearing a black face veil was bribing the policewomen so they would give her phone back for one hour in order to speak with her fiancé in Australia.
Another woman, who had come to Pakistan in search of refuge and a future for her three children, was about to be sent back to a country where there was no future. She said her husband had taken advantage of her absence and married a 20-year-old woman. She lost her breath for several minutes as she realized that a girl the same age as her daughters had taken over her husband and her home.
I, too, had several asthma attacks in the camp. Seeing that woman’s condition, I felt another attack coming over me. She said, “The first time they locked the door behind us, I had an attack. No matter how much we knocked on the door and asked for help, the police would not open it. They said I was lying.”
When I saw her again during another attack, her face had darkened and she was sitting on a chair beside a policewoman, staring blankly at the sky. The police called her son down from the men’s area on an upper floor so he could help his mother. When he approached her, she wrapped her arm around his waist and held him close.
Watching them, I thought that perhaps one day Orhan, too, would grow up, and I would cling to his waist out of fear of dying. Orhan was running around the courtyard, and the police kept warning me to get my son out of their yard.
The first night we had to spend in Haji Camp was difficult. After the other women had fallen asleep and the children had gone quiet, I got up and looked out of the room’s window. Outside, a young man was standing guard with a gun in his hand, making sure we would not escape. I looked at the women in that overcrowded room. They were exhausted and worn down, sleeping where they had fallen.
A young woman who claimed she was 25, though it was unlikely she had even turned 18, had been smuggled from Laghman to Islamabad to join her husband in France. She had spent six days running along a smuggling route while carrying her one-and-a-half-year-old child in her arms.
There were several other women who showed the camp police that they had email confirmations for interviews at embassies, while pleading to be allowed to attend them. The police told them that the International Organization for Migration had to send a vehicle to collect them and also guarantee that they would be returned to the camp after the interviews were over. Those who had no direct contact with the International Organization for Migration sat on one of the sides of the room, their faces full of tears and regret.
On my last day in the camp, a woman was crying so hard that the others gathered around her, urging her to calm down. “I cannot live in Afghanistan,” she said. “I cannot go back.”
When she had calmed down a little, she recounted her efforts to be referred by the UNHCR to an embassy to get a visa. “You know what the situation with UNHCR is like,” she said. “In four years, with thousands of difficulties, I managed to complete five interviews. Now, if I am deported, all my efforts will be wasted.”
Most women in the camp talked of how ashamed they felt about being arrested by the police. Personally, I felt ashamed that I had left my belongings behind at the hotel. I kept asking myself: What will people say when I return to Afghanistan empty-handed? Beyond the belongings, a voice inside my head taunted me: “So, in the end, you were deported?”
Every woman feared the judgment of relatives, family members, and neighbours. They were ashamed that three years earlier, four years earlier, four-and-a-half years earlier, they had sold everything they had and come to Pakistan, only now to be deported back to Afghanistan with nothing.
I thought of the Taliban, who felt no shame for reducing us to such a state. Across the border, most of us would be in danger. A Talib could have looked through the phone of one of the women protesters, activists, or journalists, and we could have ended up in their prisons for taking a photo with a protest slogan, for having contact with exiled media, or even for taking a selfie without a chador.
Most of the people in that camp had fled some form of danger and had been forced to seek refuge in Pakistan. I kept wondering where I would put my computer if I was deported.
In Pakistan, the peace, dignity, and self-respect of women would be sacrificed as they were forced across the border. Men were often treated even worse, as if the Pakistani authorities were taking revenge on refugees for the Taliban’s defiance of Pakistan’s policymakers.
When I was released from the camp, I wanted to say something to the women who were watching my departure with hopeless eyes.
I wanted to tell them my hopes for their future:
I hope you escape that captivity.
I hope you pass safely through the Taliban’s registration and counting process
I hope that, once on the soil of our homeland, you change your path in such a way that the Taliban’s agents cannot track you down.
I hope that when you enter your homes, there is someone who opens their arms to you with warmth and a smile.
I hope that someone finally places hot tea and warm bread before you.
I hope that, if you were released inside Pakistan, you move to a safer place.
I hope they never again lock a door behind you.
I hope no one laughs at your condition.
To that kind mother who saw me lost in thought and said, “Do not go to Kabul at all; go straight to Mazar!” — sending a spark through my eyes, and making me feel happy. I hope that compassionate woman reaches home safely.
If there is one woman for whom my heart truly burned, it is the young woman who had become the bride in a Pakistani family.
For you, who had been arrested several times with your infant daughter even while married to a Pakistani citizen and who was alone in that camp and was about to be sent back to Afghanistan where no one was waiting – what could I have done? What better wish could I have made for you? I do not know what would have been better for you. But I certainly wished that you would never again have to pick up your baby’s cradle and get into a police vehicle.
That young woman was angry but she did not want to cry in front of people.
I also hope the experiences are never repeated for all the men in that camp. That includes the men who had to pay the police three times the price of a bottle of mineral water and the young men who were slapped by the camp police but had to remain calm so they would not suffer an even worse fate.
Becoming a refugee is not a choice. It is a necessity. It took me more than three years to decide to migrate. My homeland was dear to me, but it had no bread for me. It had no work for me. Wherever I was hired after immense struggle, the funding would be cut, or a new policy would be introduced saying women could no longer work there. I had been displaced from house to house, and nothing remained for me in the beautiful streets of Kabul except depression and fear.
Out of desperation, I had sought refuge in Pakistan — a place that threw me into an even tighter cage. I, and all the women I saw in that camp, had taken refuge in Pakistan as a last resort. This was not a choice; it was our necessity. And even if we are deported to Afghanistan, we do not need to feel ashamed. We tried to give our children a better future. As women, we tried to have the right to work and study.
It is governments that should feel ashamed — governments that take ordinary life away from people. Instead of providing security and dignity, they control and suppress them through fear and terror.
