Afghan doctor blames Iran for ‘romanticising’ suicides

By JEROME STARKEY in HERAT
Published on Saturday 10 December 2011 00:00

SHIVERING, moaning and delirious with pain, the woman was wrapped in a blanket and flanked by two relatives as the makeshift ambulance reversed up the hospital ramp.

Parts of her arms and face were blistered and bleeding, but the worst of her wounds remained hidden.

The two female relatives, both shrouded in burqas, lifted her off the flatbed of the motorbike pick-up and onto a hastily provided hospital trolley. Inside, she carried on screaming.

The doctors said 25 per cent of her body was burned and she was shivering because, paradoxically, burns victims often feel cold. From the nature of the injuries, they said her wounds were probably self inflicted: she was the second such case they had admitted that day.

The first was a teenager from Helmand. “She burned 68 per cent of her body surface,” said Dr Ghafar Bawar, the head of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Herat’s dedicated burns hospital. “When she arrived she didn’t want treatment,” he added. “She wanted to die.”

Herat bears the unwelcome mantle of being the self-immolation capital of Afghanistan. The burns unit admitted 69 cases in the last eight months, a 50 per cent increase compared to the same period last year, and 44 of those patients died. All but five of them were women.

Most, Dr Bawar said, were driven to this excruciating form of suicide by unspeakable acts of domestic abuse. For some it was a final act of revenge, in a conservative society where a family’s honour is linked to the behaviour of its women.

“When they first arrive they don’t say they committed self-immolation,” Dr Bawar said. “They say they were burned by a gas explosion, but they smell of petrol, or diesel.”

It is only later, once the patients come to trust their carers, that they reveal what led them to such drastic action.

“Some say their husbands fight them, or don’t take care of them,” Dr Bawar said. “Some say, ‘Everyday of my life, was like I was in hell, so I burned myself’.”

But by the time they confess they are often beyond saving. Patients suffering more than 60 per cent burns usually succumb to their wounds, Dr Bawar said, and most self-immolation cases arrive with 90-95 per cent of their body surface scorched.

Although self-immolation has been well documented as a form of protest the reasons for its appeal as a form of suicide remain anecdotal.

Dr Bawar and his colleagues believe the phenomena has been “imported from Iran,” and fuelled by the local customs of forced and underage marriages, which leaves legions of young girls miserably unhappy. His colleagues blame Iranian films for romanticising it.

He also thinks many patients may not mean to die. For some it is a protest or a cry for help. In particularly heinous cases, some women hurt their children as a way of avenging their husbands.

Two days after The Scotsman visited, the teenager from Helmand died, Dr Bawar said, but the woman with 25 per cent burns is expected to make a full recovery.