War swells the ranks of Afghan prostitutes

Associated Press

QUETTA, Pakistan – It’s not hard finding customers. Yasmeen simply walks slowly through a stretch of the bazaar that’s known as an area where women are bought and sold, just like the goods stacked in market stalls around her.

Yasmeen is an Afghan refugee, a mother of eight children, and knows of no way other than prostitution that she can feed her family. In Pakistan, the number of women like her is growing as the war in Afghanistan sends desperate refugees flooding across the border.

In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, prostitution is an offense punishable by death. Women convicted of selling sex have been publicly hanged by Taliban authorities, still clad in the all-enveloping burqas women are forced to wear.

Across the border, the price the women pay is more subtle: humiliation, fear, disease and the knowledge that once this life is embarked upon, there is no turning back.

“I can never be anything else now,” said Yasmeen, a plump, dark-eyed woman in her late 20s who stroked the hair of her year-old baby boy as she talked. “This is the only life I have.”

In Pakistan, a woman deemed to have dishonored her family – which could involve something as innocent as a perceived flirtation with a man – risks death at the hand of male relatives. That is particularly true in the country’s conservative tribal belt, in which Quetta lies.

“In this respect, you could say that I am lucky,” said Yasmeen with a short, bitter laugh. She is a war orphan, separated as a child from her parents in the chaos of the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan. She believes they are dead.

Yasmeen came to Pakistan as a child, but more recent refugees – some from the wave of those fleeing Afghanistan since American bombing began Oct. 7 – are providing fresh fodder for the sex trade, according to those who work in it.

A Pakistani madam said several newly arrived Afghan women had made contact with her in the last several days, looking for work as prostitutes.

Working as a midwife in the border town of Chaman, the madam spread the word among refugee women that she could help them establish themselves in Quetta, she said. Soon, they began turning up at her door.

Yasmeen has been in business long enough that she has a small pool of steady customers, and thus can bypass dealings with a pimp who would take a large share of her earnings. If she needs more work, she goes to the bazaar – although that is dangerous.

She could be picked up by the police or preyed upon by pimps who consider the area their territory. But finding a customer takes only moments: Even heavily veiled, she can signal her availability by loitering in a certain part of the bazaar.

Men swiftly approach and say in Urdu, the most widely spoken language in Pakistan, “Let’s go.”

Her customers – she generally takes four or five a week, she says – pay her $8. She spends an hour with them, and the customer must provide the place.

Arriving in Pakistan orphaned and unprotected, Yasmeen said she was sold into sexual servitude at age 12. She remembers her first experience with a man as violent and terrifying.

“I was very young, and very small,” she said. “I could not understand what was happening to me.”

Yasmeen lives as wife to a man who bought her 15 years ago from the one who first forced her into prostitution. He is jobless, disabled by a crippled right arm, and she supports the whole family. She believes all eight of her children are his, but she cannot be sure.

“My conscience bothers me,” she said with downcast eyes. “No one would choose this life. And someday my sons will grow up and perhaps guess what I am.”

The Pakistani madam takes a cooler view of things.

“She should be glad that she has work,” she said of Yasmeen. “Now there is lots of competition.”