Suicide by fire a way out for many Afghan women

Saya's agony was nearly over. Cheeks charred, fingers blackened and with 70 percent of her body burned, the 18-year-old woman lay prone on the hospital bed, racked with unimaginable pain.

Whimpering her mother's name, she jerked her bandaged arms in small, staccato movements, desperately seeking relief. There was none. Her eyes fluttered open, then closed. "Another day, maybe two," predicted the doctor.

A stony-faced relative stood over Saya, whisking away flies with a black shawl. It was all a terrible mistake, she said, an unfortunate cooking accident. No it wasn't, said nurse Afifa Hariar, standing behind.

"It's another suicide case," she muttered quietly, arms folded. "They always try to keep it a secret."

Self-immolation is the terrible choice of hundreds of Afghan women every year. Trapped in unhappy marriages or hemmed in by a conservative Islamic society, they take an appalling escape route: dousing themselves in household fuel, closing their eyes, and striking a match. Most are between 16 and 20 years old, say doctors. The gruesome consequences are to be found in the burns unit at Herat hospital, a severely under-equipped facility in one of Afghanistan's most prosperous provinces.

Last Saturday 15 bandage-swaddled women lay on beds crammed into the tiny ward, groaning softly. Many were genuine accidents but at least four had attempted suicide, staff estimated -- about the average for a city that registered 80 self-immolations in the first seven months of this year.

"When we see the depth of the burns, or smell the fuel on their clothes, we know it is no accident," said the unit's head, Homayon Azizi.

The reasons behind the suicides are complex but closely intertwined with women's subordinate position in Afghan society.

Forced marriage is the predominant factor, say medics and human rights workers.

Parents marry their daughter off to older men, sometimes in exchange for a dowry as high as US$7,000. The unions are intolerable to some women, because of either a violent husband or an interfering mother-in-law.

Zarah, 19, set herself on fire at the climax of an argument with her husband, just three months into their marriage. After she moved to his rural home, he started to beat her for "disobedience."

"I believed I would die. I wanted to prove to my husband that I didn't want to live with him," said Zarah, who has now returned to her parents' home.

She has divorced her 22-year-old husband, but will pay a high price for the rest of her life. The blaze melted the skin on the upper half of her body, in effect welding her chin to her chest and webbing her arms to her torso. Disfigured and disabled, she cannot work and may never remarry.

"Every day we take her to hospital for treatment, and every night she is suffering and crying," said her mother, Sharifa.

Although self-immolation occurs across Afghanistan, its incidence is highest in Herat, a western province where a degree of sophistication clashes with social conservatism.

The idea of death by burning may come from Iranian television, which can be received in Herat and sometimes broadcasts images of female suicides. Or it may be simply that household fuel is the only available weapon of self-destruction.