Getting a taste of Olympic glory will prove more daunting. When she was chosen in 1982 at 15, Baraki was one of the youngest women ever to play on the national team. Now she is a 35-year-old mother of three, and has picked up a basketball three times in the past 10 years–including during a recent shoot-around with a NEWSWEEK correspondent. (She had to remove her burqa first.) Baraki is 20 pounds heavier than during her playing days and has lower-back problems. But any worries that she might be past her prime vanished last month when her old coach called asking her to return. “I’m going to test my strength to see if I still have it,” Baraki says. “I just hope to get another shot.”
The same goes for Afghanistan’s entire sports program. No Afghan athlete has competed internationally since the 1996 Atlanta Games, shortly before the Taliban seized power. And Afghan women have been absent since the mujahedin banned them from playing sports in 1992. Baraki, who had been playing basketball almost daily since she was 7, was devastated. “I was very nervous all the time because I feel that sports are the best thing a human can do,” she says. Life got even worse four years later when the Taliban banned her from her job as a teacher, boarded up gymnasiums and closed soccer fields.
Today, Afghanistan’s Olympic Committee has no training facilities other than a dilapidated sports stadium–which, until last November, was used for executing alleged criminals. Training for sports such as basketball and wrestling cannot begin until spring, since those athletes must practice outside. But Olympic Committee director Said Mahmod Zia Dashti remains undeterred. “This is a new era, and there will be athletics for women,” he says. “We’re going to prepare the women’s teams and they’re going to be competitive.”
That will no doubt take a while. Afghan women have not yet come to terms with the most basic of their newfound freedoms, including working, going to school and even leaving their homes. Most women in Kabul still wear burqas in public; in the provinces, women rarely venture onto the streets. The concept of women playing competitive sports or even girls kicking around a soccer ball is completely alien. “It’s almost impossible for girls to even get out to play because of all the limitations against them,” says Abdul Saboor Azizi, the Olympic Committee’s chief technical trainer. “Their parents often forbid them from leaving the house.”
Olympic Committee officials are beginning to confront social taboos by pushing the Ministry of Education to establish sports teams for schoolgirls in Kabul that they hope will produce future national-team athletes. If all goes well, girls in rural villages could also one day be playing soccer and volleyball. But it will be a long haul; Afghanistan is dependent on foreign aid just to open public schools, and it’s not clear that there is enough money for both desks and sports equipment. Officials say they need at least $10 million to begin rebuilding their national sports programs. “Sports is about the economy,” Azizi says. “If the economy gets going, it will help us rebuild our female teams.”
In the meantime, Afghanistan has recently been reinstated to the International Olympic Committee. (It was suspended in 1999 after the IOC concluded that its national Olympic Committee had no real control over athletics.). A few male athletes living abroad as refugees have answered public appeals to return home, including basketball star Obhidulla, who has spent the past few years playing for Pakistan’s national team on a fake identity card. Baraki is the only female ex-athlete who has agreed to play so far, although officials say several teenagers have called to ask about tryouts for various sports teams. Moving with ease around a Kabul high-school basketball court, Baraki is no longer the aging wife and mother whose dreams of leading Afghanistan’s team to an Olympics were shattered by civil war and poverty. She moves gracefully, dribbling toward the basket and launching a shot–which clangs off the cracked, faded backboard. She shrugs her shoulders and smiles. At least she’s playing basketball again.
