OPINION:Last week's murder of Gayle Williams in Kabul has numerous sickening precedents, writes Anne Marie Hourihane
STRANGE THOUGH it may be to accept, there are countries which are having a tougher time of it than Ireland. Afghanistan would be a fairly striking example. Gayle Williams (34) was murdered in Kabul last week. The Taliban, in a statement issued after her killing, said that she had been murdered because she was attempting to spread Christianity. Her boss at the charity she worked for, Serve Afghanistan, says that this is nonsense.
It is natural that the death of Williams, a South African who had made her home in the UK, should be widely reported. In August, three female aid workers, including a British woman, were killed by the Taliban outside Kabul. The fate of Afghanistan's native Christians - no one seems to know how many there are, and their services are often held in secret - seems very uncertain indeed.
But there has been another death which, if not exactly unreported, did not receive the attention it deserved: a single article in this newspaper, for example, and no subsequent obituary. This was the death of Lieut-Col Malalai Kakar, assassinated on her way to work on September 28th in Kandahar. Gayle Williams had recently moved from conservative Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, for reasons of personal safety.
Kakar was the first woman detective to be appointed in the area, which has a population of about 900,000. Yet it seems that as Afghanistan's highest-ranking female police officer, her death has been overtaken by the crisis in the western economies.
This is a shame. First, because the story of Malalai Kakar and her work is an extraordinary and inspirational one.
Second, because it would suit the Taliban very well if the existence of Afghani women like Kakar and another female police officer who was killed in the province of Herat in June, were wiped from history. They want women excised from public life. They want to pretend that Afghani women always had to live this way. The life of Malalai Kakar gives the lie to this.
Kakar was not a rebel. In fact she seems to have been a pretty conventional police officer. She was a traditional Muslim, the mother of six children. But the Taliban left death threats - their dreaded so called "night letters" - on the door of her home each night. She used to get up early in the morning to remove the notes before her children could see them.
Afghanistan needs female police officers because it is regarded as dishonourable for a woman to talk to a man who is not her husband. Malalai Kakar and her few female colleagues would attend female victims of accidents and enter houses ahead of male officers, in order to bring the women and children into other rooms before the houses were searched.
They worked also with Afghanistan's innumerable female victims of domestic violence. The practice of "blood price", whereby a woman or girl is handed over to another family to settle a monetary debt or social slight, also kept Kakar busy. She had been known to physically attack men she believed to have abused their wives. She was only five feet tall.
In a stunningly good piece of reporting by Dinah Temple-Raston for Marie Claire magazine, it was apparent that Kakar and her female subordinates were very much like police officers around the world.
In the office they would sit around and smoke cigarettes and laugh together, former housewives and beauticians now working in drugs investigations and airport security.
Temple-Raston noted that the burkhas the women had to wear to work were thrown on a coat stand, any old how. Only the woman who cleaned their office, a toothless refugee from domestic violence for whom Kakar had found a job, provided a clue that all was not as it was in police stations around the world. That, and the fact that, as Temple-Raston noted, the trousers of Malalai Kakar's police uniform had to be rolled up several times at the waist.
Kakar's father, Gul Mohammed Kakar, is a police officer. He recruited Malalai's five brothers into the force, and expected his daughter to take the job just as they had.
In 1982, seven years before the Taliban came to power, she was the first female to graduate from Kandahar's police academy. She killed three Taliban in a shoot-out.
The Taliban had put her on a hit list. Malalai fled to Pakistan and it was here that she met her husband who worked with the UN, and who she called "a modern man". After 10 years, when the Taliban appeared to be defeated, the family returned to Afghanistan.
Malalai Kakar was not a martyr. She lived within an army compound. Every morning she cooked her children's breakfast and she took a different route to work. But still the Taliban managed to kill her and her eldest son, who was going to drive her to work. She is survived by her husband and their five other children and also, presumably, by her female colleagues who, hopefully, are still smoking at the police station with their burkhas thrown on the coat rack. What the civilian women of Afghanistan think of Malalai Kakar's murder is, of course, unknown.