VICE (2013) s04e08 Episode Script

1 This week on "VICE": The battle for women's rights in Afghanistan.
(shouting) Do you know if they've tried to find you? (speaking in foreign language) And then the private military contractors who are fighting pirates on the high seas.
It's a big deterrent if you're a pirate because these guys will kill you.
Conflict is money, and in some ways, the oceans are the next big battleground.
(theme music playing) Crowd (chanting): Hands up! Don't shoot! Hands up! When the United States invaded Afghanistan, we pledged to liberate women from the oppression and violence that they'd suffered under the Taliban.
For several years, the people of Afghanistan have suffered under one of the most brutal regimes in modern history, a regime allied with terrorists, and a regime at war with women.
Smith: But fully 14 years later, the war for women's rights is only just beginning.
You can hear the familiar chitter-chatter of a playground just in here.
It's because we're outside one of several private elementary schools that have been built in Kabul in the last few years.
These are mixed-gendered schools, which were completely impossible to have during Taliban times.
Salaam! Hi, I'm Isobel.
Nice to meet you.
Do you have class with boys and girls? Or is it just girls? Just girls? Is that good? Yeah.
You don't like boys? Yeung: A cornerstone of the American mission here has been to restore women's rights, which disappeared under Taliban rule.
(speaking foreign language) The US has spent almost a billion dollars here to build up schools and give women in Afghanistan a shot at equality.
The recovery of Afghanistan must entail the restoration of the rights of Afghan women.
Indeed, it will not be possible without them.
Yeung: But now that troops have largely withdrawn, leaders like Fawzia Koofi, one of the most prominent women in the Afghan parliament, say women's rights are receding at an alarming rate.
Afghanistan is consistently listed as one of the worst places in the world to be a woman.
How accurate do you think that still is? Yeung: Last March, 27-year-old Farkhunda Malikzada was falsely accused of burning the Quran and brutally murdered in the street.
She was beaten, thrown from a roof and stoned before being burned alive while a crowd of spectators, including police officers, looked on.
(Koofi speaking) Yeung: When Farkhunda was laid to rest, outraged women stepped forward to carry her body, breaking with Afghan tradition.
One of them was Nargis Azaryun, a 22-year-old women's rights activist.
Kabul traffic is freaking crazy.
Does it make you feel a bit rebellious? Yeung: Nargis took us to the Cactus Café, a popular gathering spot for activists that never would have been allowed under Taliban rule.
(playing rock music) Do you think Farkhunda's death was symbolic of where women's rights are at at the moment in Afghanistan? I definitely think so.
With that happening inside Kabul, it reminded us that we are still living in a society where a woman can be raped, can be killed, can be butchered on a street.
And people will still be thinking that she deserved to be killed like that because she did something that wasn't in accordance to the traditions.
Yeung: A full 87 percent of Afghan women are victims of physical, sexual, or emotional violence.
And if that weren't bad enough, often it's the women themselves who end up in jail, for what are labeled "moral crimes.
" Can you define what is termed as a moral crime in Afghanistan? Yeung: The number of women going into prison for these crimes has spiked recently and many end up here in Badam Bagh, Afghanistan's largest women's prison.
The prison's director gave us a frank assessment of the double standard at work here.
As a woman, do you have much much empathy for these women who are in here for so-called moral crimes? (speaking foreign language) So there's women who have been raped here and, as a consequence, are accused of adultery? Yeung: Often the only way for a woman to avoid jail time is to seek out one of the shelters hidden in the shadows of Afghan cities.
We're just heading towards a shelter, one of several which have been set up in the last few years specifically for women who are running away from abusive families and abusive husbands.
We've just been given the number of a woman who's running the shelter.
We've been told to meet her in a secret location, and then we're going to be shuffled in there.
How dangerous is this job of yours? We met with two sisters in-law who had just arrived at the shelter after fleeing from their abusive family.
They agreed to speak with us, but only if we concealed their identities.
And how old are both of you? Tell me about your story.
How did you end up in the shelter? What made you decide to leave? How did you get to that point where you thought "I just can't take anymore"? Do you know if they've tried to find you? Yeung: Six weeks after our meeting, the young women we interviewed were found by their families and taken from the facility.
But they might not have been here in the first place, if the government had better enforced a 2009 law called the Elimination of Violence Against Women Act, or EVAW.
Yeung: The law was passed by presidential decree in 2009, but parliament refused to ratify it, meaning that in many cases impunity prevails.
I mean, what you're asking for with the EVAW law and with other women's rights requirements seems like such basic things? Why is there such systematic resistance to those sorts of requests? Yeung: EVAW stalled in parliament when hardline supporters of sharia law attacked it as anti-Islamic.
No voice was louder in rallying opposition to the law than ultra-conservative lawmaker Nazir Ahmad Hanafi.
Well, firstly, thank you so much for agreeing to speak with us.
I know that you're an extremely busy man, so we really appreciate the time out of your schedule to do so.
(interpreter speaking) Um, so, I know that you're now entering your second term in parliament.
What particular involvement in parliament and what laws that you've helped pass or not pass are you particularly proud of? (interpreter speaking) Yeah.
I'm gonna ask them one by one.
Maybe you can answer first and then I can (interpreter speaking) How do you see the role of women here in Afghanistan? It's not so much that that's-- I do want to establish that several of the women we've spoken to are emphasizing the importance of things like the Elimination of Violence Against Women Act.
Why are you so opposed to that law? So, are you able to pinpoint for me exactly what those criticisms are? Some of the biggest clauses in the EVAW law are things like protecting women against things like rape and domestic violence.
Is that good for society or are you against that as well? What if a husband rapes his wife? Is that domestic abuse? Should the man be punished or should the woman be punished for that in your opinion? If he forces sex upon his wife.
I think we both know what rape is.
Do you think that women should be allowed-- Yeung: For Afghan women, threats like this are all too real.
In January, report of another barbaric attack surfaced.
After years of abuse, a young woman named Reza Gul had her nose cut off by her husband as punishment for running away from him.
To see how the country can protect its women from this kind of endemic violence, we spoke to Afghanistan's chief executive officer, Dr.
Abdullah Abdullah.
Do you think that the problems that Afghanistan faces when it comes to gender equality are an Islam issue or an Afghan culture issue? It is individuals, sometimes they use Islam as a pretext and sometimes they use culture as a pretext.
So do you think it's sometimes a misinterpretation of Islam? It is a misinterpretation of Islam.
It is also misinterpretation of tradition.
Yeung: But there are still many here who take tradition to extremes and they're making huge gains in their drive to take back the country.
Just days before we arrived, Taliban forces captured Kunduz City, their biggest victory in 15 years.
Immediately, reports emerged that they specifically targeted women across the city.
They came looking for us.
They looted everything, and just last night, we found out that they burned down our shelter.
Woman: The Taliban destroyed women-run radio stations and reportedly terrorized women in public positions, many of whom fled for their lives.
Yeung: And it isn't just Kunduz.
The Taliban strengthened their grip across the country, making 2015 the worst year for civilian casualties since the UN began keeping record.
With a recent surge in violent attacks, the international community has been pushing the Afghan government to restart political negotiations with the Taliban.
Negotiations that, to date, have excluded women.
You've said that women will be a part of the Taliban peace talks, but as I understand it, in none of the official peace talks women have actually been present.
Why is that? The first round of official talks was a small group of people from both sides.
And were women there? There, no.
So in the next official talks, there will be women present? Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Can you guarantee that? Absolutely, women will be represented.
Yeung: But in preliminary discussions early this year that were intended to revive negotiations, no Afghan women have been present.
Yeung: With the government deadlocked on women's rights, and the Taliban gaining strength, the women of Afghanistan are left with no choice but to take to the streets in a plea for the world's attention.
(women chanting) This is one of the first times I've seen so many women out in the streets all together.
Yeung: But it's going to take more than civil demonstrations to end the repression of Afghan women.
The instability spreading throughout the Middle East isn't just confined to land-based conflict, because some of the world's most lucrative and dangerous shipping lanes are sandwiched in between these war-torn states.
But as the threat of piracy continues, the shipping industry has adopted a new and controversial way to defend itself.
We are cruising through the Gulf of Oman right now.
Iran is over there, Oman is over there, and it's crazy out here.
There are just oil tankers and cargo ships as far as the eye can see.
Ninety percent of the goods that we consume, everything from phones to couches, pretty much everything you can think of, travels in cargo ships by sea.
Commerce needs to be protected.
How do they do that? Some very, very shrewd businessmen came up with this idea of basically having a weapons rental and sales depot in international waters.
Alvi: We followed as one of these floating armories carried out its business: delivering weapons and trained gunmen to a private vessel.
I see men jumping back and forth between the two ships.
These men are climbing from the cargo ship onto the armory and they lowered the big basket onto the armory.
We had to keep our distance, as most of the companies who run these ships don't want to talk about what th e y do, much less be filmed doing it.
It would be illegal for ships to arm up like this while in port, but they can get around these rules by doing it here in international waters.
The business itself is a response to a piracy crisis that began to devastate the shipping industry about 10 years ago.
At its height, there were hundreds of raids each year, and hundreds of sailors were killed or kidnapped.
Costs surged to as much as $18 billion per year.
But by 2012, the industry had embraced a new practice: hiring highly trained former soldiers known as PMCs, private military contractors, and piracy dropped almost to zero.
To find out more about how these hired guns operate, we spoke to Sean McFate, who worked as a PMC, and was an industry leader at one of largest private security firms in the world.
PMCs are changing warfare.
In 2003, in the invasion of Iraq, that's when the market exploded, literally.
Alvi: The business expanded so drastically that at one point there were more than 30,000 PMCs on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Because of the US's sort of lead in this industry, it's become a de facto reality of international relations.
It's looking for new clients.
It's looking for new opportunities.
It's looking for new conflict markets.
Is the ocean a conflict market? The ocean's a conflict market.
Conflict is money.
And in some ways, the oceans are the next big battleground for this.
Alvi: The industry may be evolving faster than it can be controlled, with leaked footage allegedly showing PMCs opening fire on pirates without proper warning.
We don't know where it's heading.
The US does not have control.
Nobody has control over its direction.
Alvi: Today, there are more than 80,000 commercial ships at sea.
And each year, two trillion dollars worth of goods pass through the lawless waters where most pirate attacks take place.
At the heart of this high risk area is the Gulf of Aden, between Yemen and the Horn of Africa.
Djibouti is one of the few countries in the region that's effectively fighting piracy.
While many countries are wary of PMCs and floating armories, the director of maritime affairs here told us why his country supports and regulates them.
How do you feel about the existence of these floating armories off the coast of Djibouti? (speaking French) Alvi: We boarded a ship that was bringing supplies to one of the floating armories that was protecting this area.
So we are sailing through one of the highest risk areas in the world.
We're surrounded by conflict, chaos, and failed states.
It's created a vacuum for piracy.
After two days at sea, we reached our destination: the MV Sultan.
I see it appearing on the horizon, the MV Sultan.
It is a floating armory, it has private security guys on it and a lot of guns.
Reporting this story we heard rumors of unregulated armories that basically function as black market trading posts.
But the Sultan does everything by the book, and is even licensed by the governments of Britain and Djibouti, who invited us aboard.
Alvi: The Sultan is essentially a floating hotel.
They don't rent or sell guns themselves, supplying only logistical services and accommodation to hundreds of PMCs and the military-grade weapons they use to do their job.
Alvi: We sat in on one of the ship's training sessions.
Bang, bang, bang, bang.
(gun clicks) Alvi: After the classroom session, they drill on the open water to simulate the conditions of a real attack.
Yann Gayout, a representative of the Djiboutian government, controls access to the ship's secure weapons hold.
(chuckles) Alvi: It wasn't long before an order was put in, and an armed PMC headed out with two of his guns.
Is a ship coming soon for this to go onto? Is there going to be a transfer? This goes onto the Zodiac.
The Zodiac goes to the ship, and delivers.
Alvi: Jordan Wylie, from the armory's parent company, explained the transfer process.
Alvi: So right now, the guns are being hoisted up.
There's two rifles inside of it, as we saw.
Inside the yellow box is the paperwork.
Those containers are full of all the goods that are in our house.
Three guys and two bags are protecting it and it's actually working.
While PMCs and armories have succeeded in reducing the number of attacks at sea, one contractor told us that the threat is still very real.
Pirates hijacked five ships in 2015, and more attacks are predicted this year.
These days, the instances have gone down.
So they've just gotten smarter about it because they know that there are gentlemen like yourself on board with guns.
How fragile is this growth and progress that's been made? Alvi: ISIS occupation of the Libyan coast has many worried that they may soon target the 280-mile stretch of sea between Libya and Italy.
I'm frankly surprised we have not seen more of this.
Alvi: Admiral James Stavridis, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, explained how likely this scenario might be.
Do you think the Islamic State has the ambition and means to attack in the Mediterranean? I think we should listen when people tell us what they're gonna do, and they have said exactly that.
Alvi: And it's not just the Islamic State.
In 2014, al-Qaeda published an article called, "On Targeting the Achilles Heel of Western Economies," which specifically called for attacks on oil tankers.
This would be the type of attack that is the hallmark of al-Qaeda.
The type of attack that was made on the USS Cole, which was a suicide attack.
Alvi: In 2000, an al-Qaeda attack on the destroyer USS Cole in Aden Harbor, Yemen, killed 17 American sailors and sent shockwaves through the global economy.
Picture that same kind of attack made against a big tanker.
When it happens, it's going to have a very startling and chilling effect.
Alvi: So while the international community focuses on the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, and security at home, the semi-illicit PMC industry is one of the only forces staving off crippling attacks on the ships that carry 90% of global trade.
I think that PMCs are going to be part of the solution, pretty much globally, because the job is bigger than the military force that nations are going to be able to apply to it.
Alvi: Still, Admiral Stavridis thinks our trade routes may not be sufficiently protected.
And you're surprised that it hasn't happened more? I am.
I am.
It would be a high-visibility event, and I think it's coming.