What would a truce with the Taliban mean for the liberation of the country's women?
By Miranda Simon
Afghanistan, Sunday, May 9, 2010.
http://www.salon.com/news/afghanistan/index.html?=mwt/broadsheet/2010/06/04/peacejirga_women
Mothers of slain teenage sons, men marred by mine blasts and tearful widows were among Afghans who spoke out Sunday at a conference billed as the first major gathering of victims of decades of war in their country.
As the third and final day of Afghanistan's three-day peace conference gets underway, it's worth asking what its implications are for the country's women. After all, the "jirga" is focused on a proposal to offer money and jobs to the Taliban -- a group not exactly known for valuing the rights of women -- if they give up their violent ways.
Soon after President Obama took office, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reaffirmed her commitment to Afghan women, and resistance to the Taliban. Now, President Obama is backing Karzai's proposal and, according to the Guardian's Jonathan Steele, many women in Afghanistan do too, despite potential setbacks to their freedoms. After interviewing a diverse sample of Afghan women, he came to the conclusion that their desire for peace trumps their desire for liberation.
Salon took these thorny issues to professor Robert Crews, an expert on Afghanistan at Stanford University, and co-editor of the book "The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan," in search of some much-needed clarity.
Why is President Karzai reaching out to the Taliban, and why do you think the U.S. has backed this decision?
Karzai came to power promising amnesty for Taliban fighters and has repeated various versions of an amnesty proclamation since. The international community has mostly pretended that they are not real political actors. Karzai doesn't have that luxury.
It's not clear that Washington is on board. The Pentagon still thinks it can fight its way to victory and that the Taliban can be defeated on the battlefield. It has given lip service to the idea of giving menial employment to the lowest-level Taliban fighters, but I'm not so sure they are even serious about that.
Women’s rights groups are worried about the prospect of the Taliban being permitted to hold jobs in Kabul. What do you think of this?
I think we need to look at the big picture. What is the position of women there today? How do they fare under Karzai? It's not pretty. The current government also has a judiciary that implements, in a haphazard way, a kind of Islamic law. Adulterers are imprisoned. Women are not stoned to death by state courts, but they are also not well protected from domestic and other forms of violence.
Support for Karzai's theft of the election took a lot of wind out of the sails of civil society feminists who had looked to Europe and the U.S. for help. Great power politics are the order of the day, and everyone seems to know that now. Laura Bush and Cherie Blair made much of liberating Afghan women in October 2001, but who seriously talks about that anymore? The failed follow-through has bred cynicism in all quarters.
The Guardian has reported that many women in Afghanistan welcome this policy change toward the Taliban. Why do you think that is?
I think one of the mistakes that our media have made post-2001 has been to act as if there is only one Afghan public opinion. There is more than one "Afghan woman."
What's clear is that more and more people are simply fed up with war. That doesn't make one "pro" or "anti" Taliban. It's just a survivalist stance of sorts. The U.S. and NATO can't beat them, a lot of Afghans back them, so, what I think a lot of Afghans are saying is that some kind of political compromise has to be reached. My fear is that this sentiment is not compatible with American great power interests. So while the U.S. may be talking about liberating women -- and protecting them from the Taliban -- we should be very cautious about their statements.
Do you think the Taliban movement has changed since it began in 1996? If so, is it a better or worse deal for women?
There have been many changes, regarding technology, organization and a host of other issues, but the critical transformation has come as a result of their loss of power: The principal Taliban leaders seem to have devoted some time to thinking about how they lost the support of the Afghan people. This is not "modernization" per se, but it speaks to a craving for popular legitimacy. This is also not "democratic politics," but it does reflect an interest on the part of Taliban elites in creating some popular assent for their rule.
But while the Taliban appear to have been studying the mistakes they made while in power, it's not yet clear how much their policies would change with respect to women. It's important to note that different gender policies prevailed in different regions, and, in many cases, some of the policies that we now associate with the Taliban were, in fact, introduced by the mujahedin before 1996, for example, removing women from public broadcasting. We should also recall the context of civil war that has prevailed in the country since 1978. This is not to give the Taliban a pass, but to note that the gender politics of Afghanistan have a history that predates 1996 or 2001.
Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Friday, June 4, 2010
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Openings for peace talks in Afghanistan?
The following article is reported on the Just Foreign Policy News website on May 5, 2010: http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/567. The source of the article is, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/04/afghanistan-taliban. Jonathan Steele wrote the article.
Steele finds from his interviews and various reports that there is serious consideration now being given from the Karzai government, Afghan woman leaders, overwhelmingly by the Afghan people as a whole, and even the British, a key US ally, for and end to the war and talks with the Taliban. The Taliban are reported to be willing to end hostilities in return for the opportunity to share power in the national government. The chief reason for this widespread change in views among the Afghan is the disillusion with the war and with the notion that the US-led occupation will lead to improvements in the material conditions of the Afghans and an increase in security.
Steele also reports that the Taliban have become less intolerant toward the idea of girls and women going to school and working in the larger economy (e.g., as doctors). While a harsh patriarchy is pervasive in the rural areas of Afghanistan, this is a cultural fact that has existed for generations. Afghan women overwhelmingly want talks to occur with the Taliban leaders.
In short, the Afghan people want an end to war and are willing to take risks that the Taliban is less rigid and intolerant of other beliefs than before. On an encouraging note, Steele also points out that the Taliban in Pakistan send their girls to school and accept them in professions and work outside the home.
Steele says nothing about whether the Taliban still insist that talks be preconditioned on the departure of foreign troops from the country.
The Obama administration has not yet shown a willinging to become a part of, initiate, or even encourage talks with the Taliban.
--------------------------------
From Just Foreign Policy: Excerpts from Jonathan Steele's article.
Afghanistan: is it time to talk to the Taliban?Until recently it seemed an absurd idea. But now, eight years after its overthrow, is negotiating with the Taliban the only realistic way forward?Jonathan Steele, Guardian, Tuesday 4 May 2010 21.00 Thttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/04/afghanistan-taliban
Eight years after they were overthrown by US air power, a drumbeat is starting to sound across Afghanistan in favour of talking to the Taliban, the country's once-hated former rulers. An idea that used to seem absurd, if not defeatist, is coming to be seen as the only credible way to end an ever-widening war. Moreover, the proposed agenda of negotiations is not a Taliban surrender, but an offer to share power in Kabul.President Hamid Karzai and other senior Afghan politicians support the idea. So too do a growing number of foreign governments, including Britain's - at least tentatively - now that British troops are being killed at twice the rate they were in early 2009.
Perhaps most surprisingly, even among Afghanistan's small but determined group of woman professionals, the notion of making a deal with the ultra-conservative men who forced them into burkas and denied them the right to work outside the home is no longer anathema. A desperate desire for peace is trumping concern over human rights.
[...]
I was one of the few journalists in Kabul as the Taliban swept up from Kandahar to take control of the Afghan capital in 1996, prompting the mujahideen warlords to abandon resistance and flee. The sudden shift left everyone stunned, but the crowds that came out to watch the Taliban's pick-up trucks roaring around the streets were mainly supportive. The bearded young Islamists with their promise of social justice seemed to offer an end to the fighting between rival mujahideen leaders that had devastated large parts of the city and forced hundreds of thousands into refugee camps abroad.
[...]
Young Taliban gunmen ran into hospitals, ordering male doctors to grow beards and female doctors to go home. Burkas, once worn only by poorer women in the bazaar, became compulsory for all women. Taliban thugs flayed the ankles of anyone who showed even an inch of bare skin below the regulation new hemlines. But even as repression grew women could still be heard saying that their family's new-found safety from the civil war's shells and rocket-fire made it worth it.A similar calculus of security-versus-rights is re-emerging now. Three years ago, when I was last in Kabul and the Taliban were only just starting their comeback on the battlefield, defeating them was the watchword of the day. There has been a tectonic shift in Afghanistan's public mood since then. It is prompted by a host of factors: growing disappointment with western governments and the ineffectiveness of billions of dollars in aid that seems to go nowhere except into the bank accounts of foreign consultants or local politicians; a sense that there can be no military solution to the new civil war and that outsiders are deliberately prolonging it; grief and despair over the mounting toll of civilian casualties, many caused by US airstrikes; rising nationalist anger and a feeling of humiliation; and a desire to return to an Afghan consensus in which Afghans create their own space and find their own solutions. Karzai's recent outbursts against the Americans and other foreigners are no aberration. They reflect a widely held mood.
[...]
Anders Fänge, the country director of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, a large aid agency, has spent around 20 years in the country, also working as a journalist and a UN official. The Taliban should never have been portrayed in the black-and-white terms that Bush and Blair used, he says. During their period in power they often turned a blind eye to the discreet "home schools" where teachers taught girls in people's flats or family compounds. "In 1998 the Taliban governor of [the central Afghan city] Ghazni told me, 'We know you have these girls' schools, but just don't tell me about them.' A Taliban minister even approached me and said, 'I have two daughters. Can you get them in?'" he recalls.
Similar attitudes exist today, he says. In Wardak, a province close to Kabul that is heavily contested by Taliban and Nato forces, "we don't have much problem with the Taliban," says Fänge. "They accept girls' schools and women doctors. They just ask for two hours of Islamic education in schools, that teachers grow beards and not spread propaganda against the Taliban."The difficulty comes from foreign Taliban, the Pakistanis and Arabs, or Taliban from other provinces. "At the local level, it's a patchwork, a mosaic of local commanders, who may recognise Mullah Omar as their spiritual leader but are not under his control," he adds.
Fänge's points support the case, rarely mentioned by western politicians, that Taliban conservatism differs from the rest of the country in degree, not in kind. Afghanistan is a largely rural society where the oppression of women runs deep. Even in villages populated by Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek, Afghan women are routinely banned by husbands or fathers from leaving the family compounds, and girls are kept out of school, according to Afghan women reporters.
[...]
Arsalan Rahmani was deputy minister of higher education and later minister of Islamic affairs in the Taliban government. Four years ago Karzai invited him back to Kabul and made him a senator. He accepts the Taliban made a string of mistakes. "They didn't have good management, they were young, they had no experts, doctors, and couldn't run ministries. My boss was a boy of 25, who couldn't even sign an official letter."He describes reports of restrictions on girls' education and women being denied the chance to work as false. "That wasn't their idea, then or now. We didn't let girls go to school because of lack of security. There was a war on. But now in Pakistan, Taliban girls go to school and university. My son is a doctor and I want him to marry a lady doctor. I've got three daughters. During the Taliban time they were in Pakistan and all studied there."He goes on to tell an incredible story. "When I was deputy minister of higher education, people came to me and said they had girls who had finished school and wanted to study medicine. I consulted Mullah Omar and he authorised us to set up rooms in a central Kabul hospital, now called Daoud Khan hospital, where women could study to become doctors. Around 1,200 graduated, and if you track them down you'll see my signature on their degree certificates," he says.
I have no time to follow his advice but I do locate Shukria Barakzai, an independent woman MP who stayed in Afghanistan throughout the Soviet occupation, the four-year rule by mujahideen warlords, and the Taliban period. She confirms the senator's story.
Like many educated Kabulis, she criticises the warlords as strongly as the Taliban (during the warlords' clashes she lost a son and daughter). She too favours talks with the Taliban. "I changed my view three years ago when I realised Afghanistan is on its own. It's not that the international community doesn't support us. They just don't understand us. Everybody has been trying to kill the Taliban but they're still there, stronger than ever. They are part of our population. They have different ideas but as democrats we have to accept that. Every war has to end with talks and negotiations. Afghans need peace like oxygen. People want to keep their villages free of violence and suicide bombers."Her relaxed attitude to the Taliban stems, in part, from confidence that they cannot win again. "They no longer have the support and reputation they had back then. Taliban is an ideology. It's no longer a united force," she says.
If Afghan women now overwhelmingly want talks with the Taliban, the same is true of many of the country's male politicians, particularly the Pashtun. They want "a rebalancing of forces" in Afghan society, as a former minister who wanted to remain anonymous put it. The US invasion in 2001 put the warlords of the so-called Northern Alliance in power, but failed to produce stability. "In October 2001 the Taliban controlled 90% of Afghanistan, while the Northern Alliance had 10%. After December 2001 the Northern Alliance had 70% and the country's majority group, the Pashtun, were marginalised. Now this needs to change. There's an Afghan consensus on that," he says.
[...]
The trouble, as diplomats see it, is that Obama has not even authorised the CIA to put out feelers to the Taliban leadership on a "deniable" basis, a common way of initiating contacts. Nor has he begun to prepare the American public for the notion that the Taliban may not be demons but necessary negotiating partners. It would be as massive a U-turn in US policy as it was for the British government to talk to the IRA.[...]
Steele finds from his interviews and various reports that there is serious consideration now being given from the Karzai government, Afghan woman leaders, overwhelmingly by the Afghan people as a whole, and even the British, a key US ally, for and end to the war and talks with the Taliban. The Taliban are reported to be willing to end hostilities in return for the opportunity to share power in the national government. The chief reason for this widespread change in views among the Afghan is the disillusion with the war and with the notion that the US-led occupation will lead to improvements in the material conditions of the Afghans and an increase in security.
Steele also reports that the Taliban have become less intolerant toward the idea of girls and women going to school and working in the larger economy (e.g., as doctors). While a harsh patriarchy is pervasive in the rural areas of Afghanistan, this is a cultural fact that has existed for generations. Afghan women overwhelmingly want talks to occur with the Taliban leaders.
In short, the Afghan people want an end to war and are willing to take risks that the Taliban is less rigid and intolerant of other beliefs than before. On an encouraging note, Steele also points out that the Taliban in Pakistan send their girls to school and accept them in professions and work outside the home.
Steele says nothing about whether the Taliban still insist that talks be preconditioned on the departure of foreign troops from the country.
The Obama administration has not yet shown a willinging to become a part of, initiate, or even encourage talks with the Taliban.
--------------------------------
From Just Foreign Policy: Excerpts from Jonathan Steele's article.
Afghanistan: is it time to talk to the Taliban?Until recently it seemed an absurd idea. But now, eight years after its overthrow, is negotiating with the Taliban the only realistic way forward?Jonathan Steele, Guardian, Tuesday 4 May 2010 21.00 Thttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/04/afghanistan-taliban
Eight years after they were overthrown by US air power, a drumbeat is starting to sound across Afghanistan in favour of talking to the Taliban, the country's once-hated former rulers. An idea that used to seem absurd, if not defeatist, is coming to be seen as the only credible way to end an ever-widening war. Moreover, the proposed agenda of negotiations is not a Taliban surrender, but an offer to share power in Kabul.President Hamid Karzai and other senior Afghan politicians support the idea. So too do a growing number of foreign governments, including Britain's - at least tentatively - now that British troops are being killed at twice the rate they were in early 2009.
Perhaps most surprisingly, even among Afghanistan's small but determined group of woman professionals, the notion of making a deal with the ultra-conservative men who forced them into burkas and denied them the right to work outside the home is no longer anathema. A desperate desire for peace is trumping concern over human rights.
[...]
I was one of the few journalists in Kabul as the Taliban swept up from Kandahar to take control of the Afghan capital in 1996, prompting the mujahideen warlords to abandon resistance and flee. The sudden shift left everyone stunned, but the crowds that came out to watch the Taliban's pick-up trucks roaring around the streets were mainly supportive. The bearded young Islamists with their promise of social justice seemed to offer an end to the fighting between rival mujahideen leaders that had devastated large parts of the city and forced hundreds of thousands into refugee camps abroad.
[...]
Young Taliban gunmen ran into hospitals, ordering male doctors to grow beards and female doctors to go home. Burkas, once worn only by poorer women in the bazaar, became compulsory for all women. Taliban thugs flayed the ankles of anyone who showed even an inch of bare skin below the regulation new hemlines. But even as repression grew women could still be heard saying that their family's new-found safety from the civil war's shells and rocket-fire made it worth it.A similar calculus of security-versus-rights is re-emerging now. Three years ago, when I was last in Kabul and the Taliban were only just starting their comeback on the battlefield, defeating them was the watchword of the day. There has been a tectonic shift in Afghanistan's public mood since then. It is prompted by a host of factors: growing disappointment with western governments and the ineffectiveness of billions of dollars in aid that seems to go nowhere except into the bank accounts of foreign consultants or local politicians; a sense that there can be no military solution to the new civil war and that outsiders are deliberately prolonging it; grief and despair over the mounting toll of civilian casualties, many caused by US airstrikes; rising nationalist anger and a feeling of humiliation; and a desire to return to an Afghan consensus in which Afghans create their own space and find their own solutions. Karzai's recent outbursts against the Americans and other foreigners are no aberration. They reflect a widely held mood.
[...]
Anders Fänge, the country director of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, a large aid agency, has spent around 20 years in the country, also working as a journalist and a UN official. The Taliban should never have been portrayed in the black-and-white terms that Bush and Blair used, he says. During their period in power they often turned a blind eye to the discreet "home schools" where teachers taught girls in people's flats or family compounds. "In 1998 the Taliban governor of [the central Afghan city] Ghazni told me, 'We know you have these girls' schools, but just don't tell me about them.' A Taliban minister even approached me and said, 'I have two daughters. Can you get them in?'" he recalls.
Similar attitudes exist today, he says. In Wardak, a province close to Kabul that is heavily contested by Taliban and Nato forces, "we don't have much problem with the Taliban," says Fänge. "They accept girls' schools and women doctors. They just ask for two hours of Islamic education in schools, that teachers grow beards and not spread propaganda against the Taliban."The difficulty comes from foreign Taliban, the Pakistanis and Arabs, or Taliban from other provinces. "At the local level, it's a patchwork, a mosaic of local commanders, who may recognise Mullah Omar as their spiritual leader but are not under his control," he adds.
Fänge's points support the case, rarely mentioned by western politicians, that Taliban conservatism differs from the rest of the country in degree, not in kind. Afghanistan is a largely rural society where the oppression of women runs deep. Even in villages populated by Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek, Afghan women are routinely banned by husbands or fathers from leaving the family compounds, and girls are kept out of school, according to Afghan women reporters.
[...]
Arsalan Rahmani was deputy minister of higher education and later minister of Islamic affairs in the Taliban government. Four years ago Karzai invited him back to Kabul and made him a senator. He accepts the Taliban made a string of mistakes. "They didn't have good management, they were young, they had no experts, doctors, and couldn't run ministries. My boss was a boy of 25, who couldn't even sign an official letter."He describes reports of restrictions on girls' education and women being denied the chance to work as false. "That wasn't their idea, then or now. We didn't let girls go to school because of lack of security. There was a war on. But now in Pakistan, Taliban girls go to school and university. My son is a doctor and I want him to marry a lady doctor. I've got three daughters. During the Taliban time they were in Pakistan and all studied there."He goes on to tell an incredible story. "When I was deputy minister of higher education, people came to me and said they had girls who had finished school and wanted to study medicine. I consulted Mullah Omar and he authorised us to set up rooms in a central Kabul hospital, now called Daoud Khan hospital, where women could study to become doctors. Around 1,200 graduated, and if you track them down you'll see my signature on their degree certificates," he says.
I have no time to follow his advice but I do locate Shukria Barakzai, an independent woman MP who stayed in Afghanistan throughout the Soviet occupation, the four-year rule by mujahideen warlords, and the Taliban period. She confirms the senator's story.
Like many educated Kabulis, she criticises the warlords as strongly as the Taliban (during the warlords' clashes she lost a son and daughter). She too favours talks with the Taliban. "I changed my view three years ago when I realised Afghanistan is on its own. It's not that the international community doesn't support us. They just don't understand us. Everybody has been trying to kill the Taliban but they're still there, stronger than ever. They are part of our population. They have different ideas but as democrats we have to accept that. Every war has to end with talks and negotiations. Afghans need peace like oxygen. People want to keep their villages free of violence and suicide bombers."Her relaxed attitude to the Taliban stems, in part, from confidence that they cannot win again. "They no longer have the support and reputation they had back then. Taliban is an ideology. It's no longer a united force," she says.
If Afghan women now overwhelmingly want talks with the Taliban, the same is true of many of the country's male politicians, particularly the Pashtun. They want "a rebalancing of forces" in Afghan society, as a former minister who wanted to remain anonymous put it. The US invasion in 2001 put the warlords of the so-called Northern Alliance in power, but failed to produce stability. "In October 2001 the Taliban controlled 90% of Afghanistan, while the Northern Alliance had 10%. After December 2001 the Northern Alliance had 70% and the country's majority group, the Pashtun, were marginalised. Now this needs to change. There's an Afghan consensus on that," he says.
[...]
The trouble, as diplomats see it, is that Obama has not even authorised the CIA to put out feelers to the Taliban leadership on a "deniable" basis, a common way of initiating contacts. Nor has he begun to prepare the American public for the notion that the Taliban may not be demons but necessary negotiating partners. It would be as massive a U-turn in US policy as it was for the British government to talk to the IRA.[...]
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Malalai Joya - more admiration for a courageous and democratic rebel
Afghanistan's soft-spoken rebel
January 13, 2010 By Andrew Oxford Source: LMD Andrew Oxford's ZSpace Page
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/23618
Malalai Joya is only 32, but she has been an exile, a refugee, a teacher of girls in the Taliban's Afghanistan, and now that country's youngest member of parliament. She's still on the run though, and still threatened with assassination
Afghanistan is a young nation ravaged by old conflicts. This does not refer to the new government created after the 2001 invasion (or the violent battles between different tribes that have carried on into the new millennium). Its youthfulness is a statistical fact buried in UN and World Bank reports: 60% of the country is under the age of 25, and many may not live much beyond that (1).
Nearly a decade has passed since Nato troops, led by the US, "liberated" Afghanistan. But there is little to show for the occupation, the billions of dollars of aid money, and the thousands of soldiers and civilians killed. Not much is heard from the young majority. The political discourse in Kabul neglects their future; it is dominated by the usual suspects, bearded bureaucrats and provocateurs of wars past.
"They are law brokers not law makers," says Malalai Joya. At 32, she is Afghanistan's youngest member of parliament (and has adopted the name Malalai after the Afghan nationalist hero Malalai Maiwand). She is an outspoken critic of the fundamentalists who subjugate the women of her country. Now she is internationally prominent as the voice for an independent Afghanistan. Her message - end the occupation and the Karzai government - is refreshing and daunting, a manifesto for what the West should really be fighting for.
Her parliamentary career began with the Loya Jirga, or grand assembly, of 2003, which sought to shape the "free" Afghanistan. As Afghan politicians fought for their place in the new government and hammered out a constitution, interest groups jockeyed for power. Malalai Joya lobbied just for a chance to speak, shouting "We kids can't get a word in!" from the back of the room. She's tiny and has a frustratingly soft voice, so it is hard to imagine that she is a formidable opponent of warlords. But when she takes to the microphone, it's clear how easily she makes enemies.
A tired chairman allowed her to speak for three minutes because she had "travelled far". Ninety seconds proved too much. Denouncing the "warlords and criminals" present at the Loya Jirga, she blamed them for the terrible state of their country and called for them to be jailed and prosecuted rather than given positions of power. "They might be forgiven by the Afghan people but not by history," she said before the microphone was cut. A small burst of applause was drowned by jeers of outrage as delegates leapt from their seats and charged towards her. The chairman demanded that security remove her for "crossing the lines of common courtesy".
We saw nothing but war
"We are the war generation," she recently told me after addressing supporters at the City University of New York. "We saw nothing in our lives but disaster, war, violence, and all these catastrophic situations." As the classroom began to empty and those who remained clustered around the refreshments table, she drifted between English and Persian, shaking hands, and posing for pictures as any good politician would. Her appearance does not betray the refugee camps, the safe houses and the five assassination attempts.
She is the daughter of a medical student who left school to fight the Soviets, and her life has been lived on the run. Four days after her birth, the Communist government took power and prepared for the Russian invasion. She has lived in exile in Iran, Pakistan and any number of refugee camps, and she grew up among the forgotten casualties of war who would later be her proudest constituency: the widows, the orphans, the displaced. After the Soviets fled, civil war engulfed Afghanistan, and the Taliban emerged victorious, a chauvinist and extremist government took hold of her homeland and turned Malalai Joya into a quiet rebel. At 15, she began work as an underground teacher for a women's rights group. Teaching girls how to read, she constantly dodged the watchful authorities; and in the austerity of her fugitive existence, among the illiterate and oppressed, she became a committed activist.
With the feminist Organisation for Promoting Afghan Women's Capabilities, Malalai became a prominent voice for women in the shadows of subversion. In 2001, when Nato ran the Taliban out of Kabul, she and her colleagues were poised to seize the opportunity of building a new nation. "After 9/11, they occupied my country under the banner of women's rights and human rights and democracy, but they bring into power this photocopy of the Taliban," she told supporters in New York. "That's why today, the situation in Afghanistan is a disaster." Malalai is quick to point out the reality of occupation for average Afghans. Poverty remains endemic (2), corruption is flourishing thanks to the billions of dollars foreign governments and NGOs have poured in, and the recent election was, she says, "a ridiculous drama ... just rubbing salt in the injured heart of my people"; for despite a few legal and political benefits, women are still treated like property.
"The situation of woman is a disaster and just as catastrophic as under the domination of the Taliban," she said. Having lived through the Taliban's rule as an underground teacher, Malalai has been an eyewitness to the terror of the fundamentalists. The liberation, she says, has brought little change. Considering the rise in self-immolation and rape in recent years, Malalai says: "Women are the most victimised because women are a big power, one wing of the bird. When one wing of the bird in society is injured, how can the bird fly?"
The burgeoning opium poppy trade has underscored what Malalai had always suspected about the occupation. "In the last eight years, they have turned my country into the centre of drugs." It was not unexpected. "They are saying to the poor farmers 'stop planting poppies' but the governors of these provinces are drug traffickers. Four persons who have high posts in Karzai's cabinet are famous drug traffickers." The US complicity in the multibillion dollar drug trade, as evidenced by Hamid Karzai's brother's close connections to both the CIA and the heroin underworld (3), have made it clear that poppies are not just a convenient cash crop for the struggling farmers. They are a new natural resource and the drug lords and their occasional allies in the occupation forces are the new colonialists who mean to prosper in the market that leaves most Afghans living in dire poverty.
Geopolitics have defined Afghanistan from the ancient trading routes through the mountains to the British, Soviet and US expeditions and occupations. Its location has been a blessing and a curse. "They invaded my country to have access to the gas and oil of the Asian republics," Malalai said. "And now the people of my country are crushed between three powerful enemies: the occupation forces bombing and killing innocent civilians, most of them women and children; and the Taliban and these warlords."
Truth is the first casualty
As a member of the parliament representing the rural Farah province, Malalai was suspended by her colleagues years ago for making remarks considered too critical. She says this suspension was a plot by the fundamentalists to silence her. So she travels widely, in her country and the world. "The first casualty in war in a country like Afghanistan is the truth," she says. "The truth itself is political." But it could be her best weapon.
"They say a civil war will happen in Afghanistan if the troops leave but nobody wants to talk about today's civil war. As long as these soldiers are in Afghanistan, there will be civil war." The US and Nato soldiers are seen as just another enemy in a nation that prides itself on ferocious independence. The British, the Soviets and the US and its cohorts cannot tame Kabul or the Khyber Pass; even the native forces of the Taliban and the Northern Alliance struggle to restrain a population historically inclined to buck occupation.
Malalai hopes democracy can replace decades of colonisation and strife. She is quick to acknowledge how naive she seems; yet she is an unwavering believer in the power of her own people, who are their only agents of action. "No nation can donate liberation to another nation. My people can liberate themselves if they let us live in peace. Over these 30 years, we lost almost everything. But we did gain one important thing and that is political knowledge. The resistance of my people is day by day increasing." "When the people stand up, they can defeat them."
January 13, 2010 By Andrew Oxford Source: LMD Andrew Oxford's ZSpace Page
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/23618
Malalai Joya is only 32, but she has been an exile, a refugee, a teacher of girls in the Taliban's Afghanistan, and now that country's youngest member of parliament. She's still on the run though, and still threatened with assassination
Afghanistan is a young nation ravaged by old conflicts. This does not refer to the new government created after the 2001 invasion (or the violent battles between different tribes that have carried on into the new millennium). Its youthfulness is a statistical fact buried in UN and World Bank reports: 60% of the country is under the age of 25, and many may not live much beyond that (1).
Nearly a decade has passed since Nato troops, led by the US, "liberated" Afghanistan. But there is little to show for the occupation, the billions of dollars of aid money, and the thousands of soldiers and civilians killed. Not much is heard from the young majority. The political discourse in Kabul neglects their future; it is dominated by the usual suspects, bearded bureaucrats and provocateurs of wars past.
"They are law brokers not law makers," says Malalai Joya. At 32, she is Afghanistan's youngest member of parliament (and has adopted the name Malalai after the Afghan nationalist hero Malalai Maiwand). She is an outspoken critic of the fundamentalists who subjugate the women of her country. Now she is internationally prominent as the voice for an independent Afghanistan. Her message - end the occupation and the Karzai government - is refreshing and daunting, a manifesto for what the West should really be fighting for.
Her parliamentary career began with the Loya Jirga, or grand assembly, of 2003, which sought to shape the "free" Afghanistan. As Afghan politicians fought for their place in the new government and hammered out a constitution, interest groups jockeyed for power. Malalai Joya lobbied just for a chance to speak, shouting "We kids can't get a word in!" from the back of the room. She's tiny and has a frustratingly soft voice, so it is hard to imagine that she is a formidable opponent of warlords. But when she takes to the microphone, it's clear how easily she makes enemies.
A tired chairman allowed her to speak for three minutes because she had "travelled far". Ninety seconds proved too much. Denouncing the "warlords and criminals" present at the Loya Jirga, she blamed them for the terrible state of their country and called for them to be jailed and prosecuted rather than given positions of power. "They might be forgiven by the Afghan people but not by history," she said before the microphone was cut. A small burst of applause was drowned by jeers of outrage as delegates leapt from their seats and charged towards her. The chairman demanded that security remove her for "crossing the lines of common courtesy".
We saw nothing but war
"We are the war generation," she recently told me after addressing supporters at the City University of New York. "We saw nothing in our lives but disaster, war, violence, and all these catastrophic situations." As the classroom began to empty and those who remained clustered around the refreshments table, she drifted between English and Persian, shaking hands, and posing for pictures as any good politician would. Her appearance does not betray the refugee camps, the safe houses and the five assassination attempts.
She is the daughter of a medical student who left school to fight the Soviets, and her life has been lived on the run. Four days after her birth, the Communist government took power and prepared for the Russian invasion. She has lived in exile in Iran, Pakistan and any number of refugee camps, and she grew up among the forgotten casualties of war who would later be her proudest constituency: the widows, the orphans, the displaced. After the Soviets fled, civil war engulfed Afghanistan, and the Taliban emerged victorious, a chauvinist and extremist government took hold of her homeland and turned Malalai Joya into a quiet rebel. At 15, she began work as an underground teacher for a women's rights group. Teaching girls how to read, she constantly dodged the watchful authorities; and in the austerity of her fugitive existence, among the illiterate and oppressed, she became a committed activist.
With the feminist Organisation for Promoting Afghan Women's Capabilities, Malalai became a prominent voice for women in the shadows of subversion. In 2001, when Nato ran the Taliban out of Kabul, she and her colleagues were poised to seize the opportunity of building a new nation. "After 9/11, they occupied my country under the banner of women's rights and human rights and democracy, but they bring into power this photocopy of the Taliban," she told supporters in New York. "That's why today, the situation in Afghanistan is a disaster." Malalai is quick to point out the reality of occupation for average Afghans. Poverty remains endemic (2), corruption is flourishing thanks to the billions of dollars foreign governments and NGOs have poured in, and the recent election was, she says, "a ridiculous drama ... just rubbing salt in the injured heart of my people"; for despite a few legal and political benefits, women are still treated like property.
"The situation of woman is a disaster and just as catastrophic as under the domination of the Taliban," she said. Having lived through the Taliban's rule as an underground teacher, Malalai has been an eyewitness to the terror of the fundamentalists. The liberation, she says, has brought little change. Considering the rise in self-immolation and rape in recent years, Malalai says: "Women are the most victimised because women are a big power, one wing of the bird. When one wing of the bird in society is injured, how can the bird fly?"
The burgeoning opium poppy trade has underscored what Malalai had always suspected about the occupation. "In the last eight years, they have turned my country into the centre of drugs." It was not unexpected. "They are saying to the poor farmers 'stop planting poppies' but the governors of these provinces are drug traffickers. Four persons who have high posts in Karzai's cabinet are famous drug traffickers." The US complicity in the multibillion dollar drug trade, as evidenced by Hamid Karzai's brother's close connections to both the CIA and the heroin underworld (3), have made it clear that poppies are not just a convenient cash crop for the struggling farmers. They are a new natural resource and the drug lords and their occasional allies in the occupation forces are the new colonialists who mean to prosper in the market that leaves most Afghans living in dire poverty.
Geopolitics have defined Afghanistan from the ancient trading routes through the mountains to the British, Soviet and US expeditions and occupations. Its location has been a blessing and a curse. "They invaded my country to have access to the gas and oil of the Asian republics," Malalai said. "And now the people of my country are crushed between three powerful enemies: the occupation forces bombing and killing innocent civilians, most of them women and children; and the Taliban and these warlords."
Truth is the first casualty
As a member of the parliament representing the rural Farah province, Malalai was suspended by her colleagues years ago for making remarks considered too critical. She says this suspension was a plot by the fundamentalists to silence her. So she travels widely, in her country and the world. "The first casualty in war in a country like Afghanistan is the truth," she says. "The truth itself is political." But it could be her best weapon.
"They say a civil war will happen in Afghanistan if the troops leave but nobody wants to talk about today's civil war. As long as these soldiers are in Afghanistan, there will be civil war." The US and Nato soldiers are seen as just another enemy in a nation that prides itself on ferocious independence. The British, the Soviets and the US and its cohorts cannot tame Kabul or the Khyber Pass; even the native forces of the Taliban and the Northern Alliance struggle to restrain a population historically inclined to buck occupation.
Malalai hopes democracy can replace decades of colonisation and strife. She is quick to acknowledge how naive she seems; yet she is an unwavering believer in the power of her own people, who are their only agents of action. "No nation can donate liberation to another nation. My people can liberate themselves if they let us live in peace. Over these 30 years, we lost almost everything. But we did gain one important thing and that is political knowledge. The resistance of my people is day by day increasing." "When the people stand up, they can defeat them."
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Poll of Afghan political attitudes
Juan Cole reviews some of the principal findings of a poll of Afghan attitudes by the Asia Foundation (http://asiafoundation.org/). On this blog, we have been influenced by the writing of Malalai Joya, her book, A Woman Among Warlords, and the presentations she has given in various parts of the US and Canada on a recent tour promoting her ideas. Joya makes the point that many Afghan people hold democratic values, perhaps often repressed but nonetheless present. She contends, given propitious conditions, democratic values will surface at the grassroots, in village after village, and serve to transform the country. The poll by the Asia Foundation provides some empirical support for her optimism about the potential for democracy in Afghanistan.
Bob
-----------------------------------
Juan Cole, Informed Comment, January 5, 2009
A survey of the Afghan People by the Asia Foundation
Afghans supported Personal Freedoms, Women's Education in Asia Society Poll
Surprises in the Asia Society poll done in June, 2009, of attitudes of Afghans.
It was a big poll, with some 6400 respondents from all over the country. It reveals a society increasingly connected by new communications technology, where devotion to democratic values is deepening and commitment to women's rights is rapidly growing. The stereotype of Afghan traditionalism and rigidity, and the stagnation of a traditional society, is powerfully challenged here. So too is the idea that Talibanism is coming back as an appealing ideology.
Here are some things I didn't expect:
Afghans were more optimistic than before about the direction of their country.
They also had, in June, a touching confidence that the August presidential election would be carried out in a fair way.
Afghans said in unprecedentedly high numbers that that freedom (54%) and peace (41%) were among the greatest benefits they expected from democracy. They are more realistic, though, that it won't end corruption and may not lead to prosperity. But it seems that a sense of personal liberty is growing in most of the country, to which people are becoming attached. They also seem to have reached a conclusion that democracy leads to social peace because conflicts are reworked into politics.
On the other hand, they are not sure they have liberty. Some 40% said that people are now free to express their opinions publicly, while 39% disagreed, complaining that speech is restricted. Fewer (29%) cited security concerns as a limit on free speech than ever before (in 2007 it was 40%). One in five specifically name the Taliban as part of that threat to freedom of expression.
Some 61% said it is unacceptable to speak ill of the government, a pretty authoritarian, pro-Karzai stance. But that was down from 69% in 2007.Some 78% say democracy is the best form of government in 2009 (down slightly from 2008, but still the overwhelming majority). Last summer, 69% said that they were satisfied with how it is working in Afghanistan, unchanged from the previous year.
Half of Afghans believe that illiteracy is the major problem bedeviling Afghan women. There is also growing support for their right to work outside the house. The report says: "over the same period there has been a consistent rise in the proportion of respondents who identify the lack of employment opportunities for women as a significant issue, from two percent in 2006 to 19 percent in 2007, 24 percent in 2008 and 28 percent in 2009."A quarter of Afghans now think there are too few jobs outside the home for women up from 2% three years ago! Some 67 percent think women should be allowed to work. (This employment for women outside her own house had been forbidden by the Taliban, even though the country is awash in widows)
Afghans, aside from a small Taliban fringe, strongly support education for women and equal rights for them under the law. Some 87% support equal opportunity for education for both sexes, and 83% favor women continuing to have the right to vote.
On the other hand, Afghans' enthusiasm for women serving at all levels of political life has declined. Most get their news from transistor radio, although radio ownership is declining.
A majority of Afghans (52%) now use cell phones--a big increase over previous years. The ubiquity of cell phones would have implications for political mobilization, since people can now network more easily. We've seen it in neghboring Pakistan.It is clear from these responses that the hard line ideology of the Taliban is rejected by the vast majority of Afghans, for whom it has no appeal. Indeed, openness to new thinking-- the importance of personal liberty, freedom of speech, employment opportunities and education for women-- has been rapidly increasing.
One rather fears that Karzai's alleged stealing of the presidential election may have weakened faith in democracy. We'll know more the next time such a survey is done. One thing is clear: ideas and values are in enormous flux, and the idea of a return of the Taliban to power in a country that thinks like this is highly unlikely.
Bob
-----------------------------------
Juan Cole, Informed Comment, January 5, 2009
A survey of the Afghan People by the Asia Foundation
Afghans supported Personal Freedoms, Women's Education in Asia Society Poll
Surprises in the Asia Society poll done in June, 2009, of attitudes of Afghans.
It was a big poll, with some 6400 respondents from all over the country. It reveals a society increasingly connected by new communications technology, where devotion to democratic values is deepening and commitment to women's rights is rapidly growing. The stereotype of Afghan traditionalism and rigidity, and the stagnation of a traditional society, is powerfully challenged here. So too is the idea that Talibanism is coming back as an appealing ideology.
Here are some things I didn't expect:
Afghans were more optimistic than before about the direction of their country.
They also had, in June, a touching confidence that the August presidential election would be carried out in a fair way.
Afghans said in unprecedentedly high numbers that that freedom (54%) and peace (41%) were among the greatest benefits they expected from democracy. They are more realistic, though, that it won't end corruption and may not lead to prosperity. But it seems that a sense of personal liberty is growing in most of the country, to which people are becoming attached. They also seem to have reached a conclusion that democracy leads to social peace because conflicts are reworked into politics.
On the other hand, they are not sure they have liberty. Some 40% said that people are now free to express their opinions publicly, while 39% disagreed, complaining that speech is restricted. Fewer (29%) cited security concerns as a limit on free speech than ever before (in 2007 it was 40%). One in five specifically name the Taliban as part of that threat to freedom of expression.
Some 61% said it is unacceptable to speak ill of the government, a pretty authoritarian, pro-Karzai stance. But that was down from 69% in 2007.Some 78% say democracy is the best form of government in 2009 (down slightly from 2008, but still the overwhelming majority). Last summer, 69% said that they were satisfied with how it is working in Afghanistan, unchanged from the previous year.
Half of Afghans believe that illiteracy is the major problem bedeviling Afghan women. There is also growing support for their right to work outside the house. The report says: "over the same period there has been a consistent rise in the proportion of respondents who identify the lack of employment opportunities for women as a significant issue, from two percent in 2006 to 19 percent in 2007, 24 percent in 2008 and 28 percent in 2009."A quarter of Afghans now think there are too few jobs outside the home for women up from 2% three years ago! Some 67 percent think women should be allowed to work. (This employment for women outside her own house had been forbidden by the Taliban, even though the country is awash in widows)
Afghans, aside from a small Taliban fringe, strongly support education for women and equal rights for them under the law. Some 87% support equal opportunity for education for both sexes, and 83% favor women continuing to have the right to vote.
On the other hand, Afghans' enthusiasm for women serving at all levels of political life has declined. Most get their news from transistor radio, although radio ownership is declining.
A majority of Afghans (52%) now use cell phones--a big increase over previous years. The ubiquity of cell phones would have implications for political mobilization, since people can now network more easily. We've seen it in neghboring Pakistan.It is clear from these responses that the hard line ideology of the Taliban is rejected by the vast majority of Afghans, for whom it has no appeal. Indeed, openness to new thinking-- the importance of personal liberty, freedom of speech, employment opportunities and education for women-- has been rapidly increasing.
One rather fears that Karzai's alleged stealing of the presidential election may have weakened faith in democracy. We'll know more the next time such a survey is done. One thing is clear: ideas and values are in enormous flux, and the idea of a return of the Taliban to power in a country that thinks like this is highly unlikely.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Afghan Women: US intervention in Afghanistan has never been a force for humanitarianism
Listening to Afghanistan
The U.S. intervention has never been and won't become a force for humanitarianism.
Ann Friedman December 22, 2009)
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article+listening_to_afghanistan
In the spring of 2008 I wrote a column, "Listening to Iraq," in which I lamented the lack of access that most Americans had to the voices and opinions of the people most affected by the ongoing war. This made it difficult, I wrote, "for even the best-intentioned anti-war American to see Iraqis as partners, rather than as a political project."
I was reminded of that column after Obama's speech announcing his Afghanistan strategy, In it, he declared, "For the Afghan people, a return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance, international isolation, a paralyzed economy, and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan people -- especially women and girls." But he made very clear that he does not see our involvement in Afghanistan as a humanitarian mission. As the American left debates, I'm struck by a desire to know what Afghan women, who have been living under the U.S. occupation for roughly eight years now, think would be best for their country.
The Afghan politician and activist Malalai Joya has warned that "Obama's military buildup will only bring more suffering and death to innocent civilians." Another woman, who goes by the pseudonym Zoya, has appeared in various U.S. media calling for "withdrawal of the troops immediately." She is a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a Kabul-based political group that has fought for human rights and social justice since 1977. And Sakena Yacoobi, who founded a network of underground schools for Afghan women and girls, says "most foreign troops are not primarily focused on protecting women and children. Their focus is on beating the enemy, which is very different, and ordinary citizens become collateral damage in the process." At least Obama and Yacoobi are in agreement: This mission is not about human rights and democracy. It's about defeating an enemy.
Admittedly, three women do not make for a comprehensive survey of Afghan civilians' attitudes. Still, I can't help but notice how the opinions of these activists, who are all based in Afghanistan, diverge from those of U.S.?based advocates who are clamoring for continued military involvement on behalf of Afghan women. Rather than focusing on Obama's own words on the subject or examining the lessons learned during the past eight years of occupation (namely that women's rights are not a priority for the U.S. military or the Afghan government it supports), they seem to believe activists can convince the president to make this war about human rights.
"When I think of why the U.S. and the world have a moral obligation to the reconstruction of Afghanistan, women are the central issue," Sunita Viswanath, who founded Women for Afghan Women in New York in 2001, recently told my former colleague Dana Goldstein at The Daily Beast. Other non-Afghan leaders, such as Feminist Majority Foundation president Eleanor Smeal, also support continued U.S. involvement.
This debate among people committed to women's rights is as old as the war. Two months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, first lady Laura Bush used the president's weekly radio address to cite the rights of Afghan women as a primary reason for invasion. While this was roundly derided as rank hypocrisy from an administration that only paid lip service to women's rights when there was a war to sell, many feminists were happy to see light shed on the plight of women living under the Taliban. Some remained staunchly anti-war, where others went so far as to cheer the invasion.
Eight years later, the consensus is that the current regime has not been markedly better for women than the former Taliban rulers were -- especially outside of Kabul. President Hamid Karzai signed a law this summer that legalized marital rape and required women to get permission from their husbands to work. In November UNICEF declared Afghanistan the worst country in the world in which to be born. Women and girls still face daily oppression and epidemic levels of violence.
The difference between the pro-intervention feminists like Viswanath and Smeal and the pro-withdrawal Afghan women like Joya, Zoya, and Yacoobi is not their level of commitment to women's rights. It's their faith in military intervention as a means of securing them. As Prospect senior correspondent Michelle Goldberg put it recently, one's view of whether a continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan will improve the situation for women "depends on whether one believes that the American military can be a force for humanitarianism."
To me, the answer is tragically apparent: It doesn't matter whether U.S. military intervention can be a force for humanitarianism because, in Afghanistan, it never has been and won't become one.
(c)2009 by the American Prospect
The U.S. intervention has never been and won't become a force for humanitarianism.
Ann Friedman December 22, 2009)
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article+listening_to_afghanistan
In the spring of 2008 I wrote a column, "Listening to Iraq," in which I lamented the lack of access that most Americans had to the voices and opinions of the people most affected by the ongoing war. This made it difficult, I wrote, "for even the best-intentioned anti-war American to see Iraqis as partners, rather than as a political project."
I was reminded of that column after Obama's speech announcing his Afghanistan strategy, In it, he declared, "For the Afghan people, a return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance, international isolation, a paralyzed economy, and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan people -- especially women and girls." But he made very clear that he does not see our involvement in Afghanistan as a humanitarian mission. As the American left debates, I'm struck by a desire to know what Afghan women, who have been living under the U.S. occupation for roughly eight years now, think would be best for their country.
The Afghan politician and activist Malalai Joya has warned that "Obama's military buildup will only bring more suffering and death to innocent civilians." Another woman, who goes by the pseudonym Zoya, has appeared in various U.S. media calling for "withdrawal of the troops immediately." She is a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a Kabul-based political group that has fought for human rights and social justice since 1977. And Sakena Yacoobi, who founded a network of underground schools for Afghan women and girls, says "most foreign troops are not primarily focused on protecting women and children. Their focus is on beating the enemy, which is very different, and ordinary citizens become collateral damage in the process." At least Obama and Yacoobi are in agreement: This mission is not about human rights and democracy. It's about defeating an enemy.
Admittedly, three women do not make for a comprehensive survey of Afghan civilians' attitudes. Still, I can't help but notice how the opinions of these activists, who are all based in Afghanistan, diverge from those of U.S.?based advocates who are clamoring for continued military involvement on behalf of Afghan women. Rather than focusing on Obama's own words on the subject or examining the lessons learned during the past eight years of occupation (namely that women's rights are not a priority for the U.S. military or the Afghan government it supports), they seem to believe activists can convince the president to make this war about human rights.
"When I think of why the U.S. and the world have a moral obligation to the reconstruction of Afghanistan, women are the central issue," Sunita Viswanath, who founded Women for Afghan Women in New York in 2001, recently told my former colleague Dana Goldstein at The Daily Beast. Other non-Afghan leaders, such as Feminist Majority Foundation president Eleanor Smeal, also support continued U.S. involvement.
This debate among people committed to women's rights is as old as the war. Two months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, first lady Laura Bush used the president's weekly radio address to cite the rights of Afghan women as a primary reason for invasion. While this was roundly derided as rank hypocrisy from an administration that only paid lip service to women's rights when there was a war to sell, many feminists were happy to see light shed on the plight of women living under the Taliban. Some remained staunchly anti-war, where others went so far as to cheer the invasion.
Eight years later, the consensus is that the current regime has not been markedly better for women than the former Taliban rulers were -- especially outside of Kabul. President Hamid Karzai signed a law this summer that legalized marital rape and required women to get permission from their husbands to work. In November UNICEF declared Afghanistan the worst country in the world in which to be born. Women and girls still face daily oppression and epidemic levels of violence.
The difference between the pro-intervention feminists like Viswanath and Smeal and the pro-withdrawal Afghan women like Joya, Zoya, and Yacoobi is not their level of commitment to women's rights. It's their faith in military intervention as a means of securing them. As Prospect senior correspondent Michelle Goldberg put it recently, one's view of whether a continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan will improve the situation for women "depends on whether one believes that the American military can be a force for humanitarianism."
To me, the answer is tragically apparent: It doesn't matter whether U.S. military intervention can be a force for humanitarianism because, in Afghanistan, it never has been and won't become one.
(c)2009 by the American Prospect
Monday, December 14, 2009
Women's Rights Groups differ on Afghan policy
The view expressed consistently on this blog is that the US-led occupation of Afghanistan is bad for the Afghan people, and that Afghan women and children are among the greatest victims. We think it is also about larger structural dynamics that are rooted in an imperialistic agenda that gives priority to US geo-political interests in the region. Therefore, out of ethical and analytical reasons, we have supported an end to the occupation.
The following article by Alison Cross for the Vancouver Sun newspaper identifies both some women's rights group who favor a continuation of the occupation out of fear that the Talibon will take over the country again, as well as Afghan women who want the occupation to end. We have been much influenced by Malalai Joya, who wants foreign troops out of Afghanistan. Joya maintains that much of the country, outside of southern provinces that are dominated by Taliban groups, are dominated by warlords. With support from US funds, often from drug money and various corrupt activities, the non-Taliban warlords are just as mysoginistic and authoritarian as the Taliban.
This is a worrisome debate, but the evidence that we have compiled indicates that the occupation has done more harm than good and has been largely ignorant of innovative options that would promote Afghan development, human rights, and democracy. Malalai Joya makes a point that sways us, namely, that it will be easier for women to join and help marshal democratic forces within the country when the US-led occupation is ended and the warlords have one less major source of support.
Bob
---------------------------------
Published on Monday, December 14, 2009 by Vancouver Sun
Women's Rights Advocates Square Off over Status of Afghan Women
by Allison Cross
Women's rights groups in Canada and the United States are butting heads over the planned withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, and whether it will benefit the women of the war-torn country or will simply intensify their pain and suffering.
An Afghan woman worker watches as she sorts pomegranates at a juice factory in Kabul on December 7. A leading rights group Monday accused the Afghan government of failing to protect women from endemic violence such as rape and murder and from discrimination, warning that their plight risks getting worse. (AFP/Shah Marai)Some advocates have come forward to express their support for a continued military presence - a departure from the anti-war stance often expressed by feminist groups.
``This is not an issue of security for the United States and Canada. We have 15 million women in (Afghanistan). If they are not secured, there will be a humanitarian catastrophe of immense proportions. It will be a terrible mistake and these countries will live to regret it,'' said Esther Hyneman, a board member for the New York-based group Women for Afghan Women.
The group, which runs guidance and children's centres in three regions of Afghanistan, has previously called for an increase in the number of U.S. troops and an extension of their mission. Without it, Hyneman says, she believes the country will fall easily back into the hands of the Taliban, which will destroy any progress made in improving the lives of women.
The planned withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan is set for 2011. U.S. President Barack Obama announced earlier this month he would inject 300, 000 more troops into the country before also initiating a pullout at the same time as Canada.
``We would have to pull out (of the country) too,'' Hyneman said. ``Our local staff, about 100 local Afghans, will be in serious danger. I don't know how they'll protect themselves if these cities and provinces fall to the Taliban.''
A Canadian military presence helps maintain a level of security that gives organizations the freedom to operate schools and increase access to health care, said Lauryn Oates.
``In essence, we think the military should definitely be there,'' said Oates, a program director for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan. ``If there are no international troops, there would be a civil war on a much bloodier scale than what we're seeing now.''
A toppling of the Afghan government could see women return to the conditions they experienced under the Taliban in the 1990s, Oates said, which included a ban on women working outside the home, a ban on education for girls and forced marriages.
She said she is confident conditions have improved for some women in Afghanistan.
But Judy Rebick, a Ryerson University professor and social justice advocate, said life couldn't get much worse for women in Afghanistan and it's time for the troops to leave.
``Even though women have more access to school and there are women in parliament, the level of violence against women is much higher and the unpredictability of it is much worse,'' Rebick said. ``Women are just as oppressed now by the warlords in some places. My view is that you don't liberate people by occupation.''
Rebick said she listens most to Malalai Joya, a female Afghan MP who was exiled from the country and recently visited Canada on a book tour.
Joya co-wrote a book about Afghanistan with Derrick O'Keefe, a Canadian activist and co-founder of StopWar.ca, and in it calls for the end of the military presence in Afghanistan.
``The war was always waged under false pretences,'' O'Keefe said. ``It's never been about women's rights. The longer we stay in Afghanistan, the worse the eventual situation is going to be for women and people . . . in general.''
The NATO-backed government led by Afghan President Hamid Karzai is misogynist, he said.
``Karzai himself signed a law legalizing marital rape and denying rights to Shia women in Afghanistan,'' he said.
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, established in 1977, is also strongly opposed to the occupation by foreign troops.
© 2009 Canwest News Service
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/14-1
The following article by Alison Cross for the Vancouver Sun newspaper identifies both some women's rights group who favor a continuation of the occupation out of fear that the Talibon will take over the country again, as well as Afghan women who want the occupation to end. We have been much influenced by Malalai Joya, who wants foreign troops out of Afghanistan. Joya maintains that much of the country, outside of southern provinces that are dominated by Taliban groups, are dominated by warlords. With support from US funds, often from drug money and various corrupt activities, the non-Taliban warlords are just as mysoginistic and authoritarian as the Taliban.
This is a worrisome debate, but the evidence that we have compiled indicates that the occupation has done more harm than good and has been largely ignorant of innovative options that would promote Afghan development, human rights, and democracy. Malalai Joya makes a point that sways us, namely, that it will be easier for women to join and help marshal democratic forces within the country when the US-led occupation is ended and the warlords have one less major source of support.
Bob
---------------------------------
Published on Monday, December 14, 2009 by Vancouver Sun
Women's Rights Advocates Square Off over Status of Afghan Women
by Allison Cross
Women's rights groups in Canada and the United States are butting heads over the planned withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, and whether it will benefit the women of the war-torn country or will simply intensify their pain and suffering.
An Afghan woman worker watches as she sorts pomegranates at a juice factory in Kabul on December 7. A leading rights group Monday accused the Afghan government of failing to protect women from endemic violence such as rape and murder and from discrimination, warning that their plight risks getting worse. (AFP/Shah Marai)Some advocates have come forward to express their support for a continued military presence - a departure from the anti-war stance often expressed by feminist groups.
``This is not an issue of security for the United States and Canada. We have 15 million women in (Afghanistan). If they are not secured, there will be a humanitarian catastrophe of immense proportions. It will be a terrible mistake and these countries will live to regret it,'' said Esther Hyneman, a board member for the New York-based group Women for Afghan Women.
The group, which runs guidance and children's centres in three regions of Afghanistan, has previously called for an increase in the number of U.S. troops and an extension of their mission. Without it, Hyneman says, she believes the country will fall easily back into the hands of the Taliban, which will destroy any progress made in improving the lives of women.
The planned withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan is set for 2011. U.S. President Barack Obama announced earlier this month he would inject 300, 000 more troops into the country before also initiating a pullout at the same time as Canada.
``We would have to pull out (of the country) too,'' Hyneman said. ``Our local staff, about 100 local Afghans, will be in serious danger. I don't know how they'll protect themselves if these cities and provinces fall to the Taliban.''
A Canadian military presence helps maintain a level of security that gives organizations the freedom to operate schools and increase access to health care, said Lauryn Oates.
``In essence, we think the military should definitely be there,'' said Oates, a program director for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan. ``If there are no international troops, there would be a civil war on a much bloodier scale than what we're seeing now.''
A toppling of the Afghan government could see women return to the conditions they experienced under the Taliban in the 1990s, Oates said, which included a ban on women working outside the home, a ban on education for girls and forced marriages.
She said she is confident conditions have improved for some women in Afghanistan.
But Judy Rebick, a Ryerson University professor and social justice advocate, said life couldn't get much worse for women in Afghanistan and it's time for the troops to leave.
``Even though women have more access to school and there are women in parliament, the level of violence against women is much higher and the unpredictability of it is much worse,'' Rebick said. ``Women are just as oppressed now by the warlords in some places. My view is that you don't liberate people by occupation.''
Rebick said she listens most to Malalai Joya, a female Afghan MP who was exiled from the country and recently visited Canada on a book tour.
Joya co-wrote a book about Afghanistan with Derrick O'Keefe, a Canadian activist and co-founder of StopWar.ca, and in it calls for the end of the military presence in Afghanistan.
``The war was always waged under false pretences,'' O'Keefe said. ``It's never been about women's rights. The longer we stay in Afghanistan, the worse the eventual situation is going to be for women and people . . . in general.''
The NATO-backed government led by Afghan President Hamid Karzai is misogynist, he said.
``Karzai himself signed a law legalizing marital rape and denying rights to Shia women in Afghanistan,'' he said.
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, established in 1977, is also strongly opposed to the occupation by foreign troops.
© 2009 Canwest News Service
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/14-1
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Malalai Joya continues speaking out against the occupation
Afghanistan’s ‘Bravest Woman’ Pins Hopes on USA, not Obama
Posted By Aaron Glantz On December 9, 2009 @ 11:00 pm
A Woman Among Warlords from New America Media on Vimeo.
Malalai Joya has been called “Afghanistan’s bravest woman.” When the Taliban ruled her country, she braved death, running an underground girls school. When the US military overthrew the Taliban she ran for parliament.
But that doesn’t mean she’s a supporter of the U.S. military, or President Obama’s decision to double the number of American troops in her country.
“Unfortunately, President Obama’s foreign policy is a lot like [the] criminal Bush,” she said in a sit-down in interview during a recent visit to San Francisco. “He follows war in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Pakistan.”Joya’s opposition to the U.S.-NATO occupation of Afghanistan began shortly after foreign troops arrived in 2001.
Immediately “after the 9/11 tragedy, my people thought maybe this time the US government will be helpful for our people,” she said. “They were hopeful that Taliban domination has been destroyed maybe this time they will give a chance to justice-loving, democrat-minded people of my country. At least to people who don’t have bloody hands!”
But Joya found that hope dashed quickly – as early as December 2003 – in the first meeting of Afghanistan’s newly-elected constitutional assembly. She looked around the room and saw the United States and NATO had invited a who’s who of the warlords who had destroyed her country to form a new government.
She was 24. And she couldn’t stay silent.
“I wish to criticize my compatriots in this room,” she said amid boos, catcalls and scattered cheers. “Why would you allow criminals to be present at this Loya Jirga, warlords responsible for our country’s situation? Afghanistan is the center for national and international conflicts. They oppress women and have ruined our country. They should be prosecuted. They might be forgiven by the Afghan people, but not by history.”
The chairman responded by throwing her out.
“The sister has crossed the line of what is considered common courtesy,” he said, banging his gavel. “She is banished from this assembly and cannot return. Send her out! Guards, throw her out! She doesn’t deserve to be here.”
But Joya did not give up. She ran for Parliament again in 2005 and was elected a second time.In 2006, she was physically attacked on the floor of the Parliament, when she said:“There are two types of Mujahidin” – freedom fighters – “one who were really Mujahidin, the second who killed tens of thousands of innocent people and who are criminals."
Joya was again expelled from Parliament. One law-maker Jebel Chelgari said that wasn’t enough. She should be punished with a gun, he said. Like many members of post-Taliban Parliament, Joya says Chelgari has a reputation for brutality.
“This cruel man, this non-educated, ignorant man,” she says, “is famous in his province as a head eater. Because he has killed so many people they do not even mention his name. They call him ‘head eater.’”
All together, Joya has survived five assassination attempts. But at least she’s still alive. Other women’s rights advocates have not been so lucky.
She breathlessly rattles off a half dozen prominent women who have been killed by the U.S. and NATO, U.S.-backed warlords, the Taliban and general lawlessness since September 2001.
There is Malalai Kakar, Afghanistan’s most prominent policewoman, who headed up Kandahar Province’s department for crimes against women, who was shot and killed while driving her car on September 28, 2008.
Also among the dead is Sitara Achakzai, who spent the years of Taliban rule in Germany and returned to Afghanistan in 2004 to join women working to promote their human rights and struggling to secure peace. For International Women’s Day on March 8, 2009, she played a major role in organizing a national sit-in of more than 11,000 women in seven Afghan provinces. On April 12, 2009, she was gunned down in broad daylight in front of her home.
“This list can be prolonged,” she says. “When these brave activist women get killed mainstream only reports like a bird has been killed. That is it.”
That these war-lords remain in power is not an accident, she said. They thrive on the drug trade and are actively supported by the United States and other regional powers.
And that arrangement has gotten worse under Obama than Bush, she said, because certain warlords deemed too brutal to take part in the Afghan government under Bush have been invited to the bargaining table under Obama.
One example she cites, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is a 61-year-old veteran of Afghanistan’s three decades of war who gained infamy for rocketing his own capital during a brief stint as prime minister in the 1990s.
Bush had put a $25 million “price on his head” for participating in terrorist actions with Al-Qaeda, she notes, and in 2003 the State Department designated Hekmatyar a "Specially Designated Global International Terrorist".
This April, however, U.S. officials began meeting with Hekmatyar’s representatives in hope that he would join the government.
So Joya has taken her fight directly to the occupiers. She’s written a book – A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Woman Who Dared to Speak Out – and is touring the very countries that occupy Afghanistan – England, Germany, Canada, and the United States.
Joya says she has hope for the future. If the NATO and the US military leave Afghanistan, she says life will gradually improve.
If “these occupation forces leave Afghanistan and their governments leave us alone then we’ll know what to do with our destiny – if they leave us a little bread and peace, because these war lords and the Taliban have no fruit among the heart of my people. My people hate them."
In this way, she sees the weakness of Hamid Karzai’s government as a strength, not a cause for concern.
“Resistance of my people is a big hope for my people of Afghanistan. That’s why my message to the great people of the U.S. and the around the world is that your government must leave our country, but you are the ones that must join your hands with us: human rights organizations, justice-loving people and intellectuals, feminist organizations—they are the ones that must not leave us alone. As much as we can, we need your support.”
Copyright © 2009 Antiwar.com Original
Posted By Aaron Glantz On December 9, 2009 @ 11:00 pm
A Woman Among Warlords from New America Media on Vimeo.
Malalai Joya has been called “Afghanistan’s bravest woman.” When the Taliban ruled her country, she braved death, running an underground girls school. When the US military overthrew the Taliban she ran for parliament.
But that doesn’t mean she’s a supporter of the U.S. military, or President Obama’s decision to double the number of American troops in her country.
“Unfortunately, President Obama’s foreign policy is a lot like [the] criminal Bush,” she said in a sit-down in interview during a recent visit to San Francisco. “He follows war in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Pakistan.”Joya’s opposition to the U.S.-NATO occupation of Afghanistan began shortly after foreign troops arrived in 2001.
Immediately “after the 9/11 tragedy, my people thought maybe this time the US government will be helpful for our people,” she said. “They were hopeful that Taliban domination has been destroyed maybe this time they will give a chance to justice-loving, democrat-minded people of my country. At least to people who don’t have bloody hands!”
But Joya found that hope dashed quickly – as early as December 2003 – in the first meeting of Afghanistan’s newly-elected constitutional assembly. She looked around the room and saw the United States and NATO had invited a who’s who of the warlords who had destroyed her country to form a new government.
She was 24. And she couldn’t stay silent.
“I wish to criticize my compatriots in this room,” she said amid boos, catcalls and scattered cheers. “Why would you allow criminals to be present at this Loya Jirga, warlords responsible for our country’s situation? Afghanistan is the center for national and international conflicts. They oppress women and have ruined our country. They should be prosecuted. They might be forgiven by the Afghan people, but not by history.”
The chairman responded by throwing her out.
“The sister has crossed the line of what is considered common courtesy,” he said, banging his gavel. “She is banished from this assembly and cannot return. Send her out! Guards, throw her out! She doesn’t deserve to be here.”
But Joya did not give up. She ran for Parliament again in 2005 and was elected a second time.In 2006, she was physically attacked on the floor of the Parliament, when she said:“There are two types of Mujahidin” – freedom fighters – “one who were really Mujahidin, the second who killed tens of thousands of innocent people and who are criminals."
Joya was again expelled from Parliament. One law-maker Jebel Chelgari said that wasn’t enough. She should be punished with a gun, he said. Like many members of post-Taliban Parliament, Joya says Chelgari has a reputation for brutality.
“This cruel man, this non-educated, ignorant man,” she says, “is famous in his province as a head eater. Because he has killed so many people they do not even mention his name. They call him ‘head eater.’”
All together, Joya has survived five assassination attempts. But at least she’s still alive. Other women’s rights advocates have not been so lucky.
She breathlessly rattles off a half dozen prominent women who have been killed by the U.S. and NATO, U.S.-backed warlords, the Taliban and general lawlessness since September 2001.
There is Malalai Kakar, Afghanistan’s most prominent policewoman, who headed up Kandahar Province’s department for crimes against women, who was shot and killed while driving her car on September 28, 2008.
Also among the dead is Sitara Achakzai, who spent the years of Taliban rule in Germany and returned to Afghanistan in 2004 to join women working to promote their human rights and struggling to secure peace. For International Women’s Day on March 8, 2009, she played a major role in organizing a national sit-in of more than 11,000 women in seven Afghan provinces. On April 12, 2009, she was gunned down in broad daylight in front of her home.
“This list can be prolonged,” she says. “When these brave activist women get killed mainstream only reports like a bird has been killed. That is it.”
That these war-lords remain in power is not an accident, she said. They thrive on the drug trade and are actively supported by the United States and other regional powers.
And that arrangement has gotten worse under Obama than Bush, she said, because certain warlords deemed too brutal to take part in the Afghan government under Bush have been invited to the bargaining table under Obama.
One example she cites, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is a 61-year-old veteran of Afghanistan’s three decades of war who gained infamy for rocketing his own capital during a brief stint as prime minister in the 1990s.
Bush had put a $25 million “price on his head” for participating in terrorist actions with Al-Qaeda, she notes, and in 2003 the State Department designated Hekmatyar a "Specially Designated Global International Terrorist".
This April, however, U.S. officials began meeting with Hekmatyar’s representatives in hope that he would join the government.
So Joya has taken her fight directly to the occupiers. She’s written a book – A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Woman Who Dared to Speak Out – and is touring the very countries that occupy Afghanistan – England, Germany, Canada, and the United States.
Joya says she has hope for the future. If the NATO and the US military leave Afghanistan, she says life will gradually improve.
If “these occupation forces leave Afghanistan and their governments leave us alone then we’ll know what to do with our destiny – if they leave us a little bread and peace, because these war lords and the Taliban have no fruit among the heart of my people. My people hate them."
In this way, she sees the weakness of Hamid Karzai’s government as a strength, not a cause for concern.
“Resistance of my people is a big hope for my people of Afghanistan. That’s why my message to the great people of the U.S. and the around the world is that your government must leave our country, but you are the ones that must join your hands with us: human rights organizations, justice-loving people and intellectuals, feminist organizations—they are the ones that must not leave us alone. As much as we can, we need your support.”
Copyright © 2009 Antiwar.com Original
Monday, December 7, 2009
The following article from the Guardian/UK appeared on Common Dreams.org today, the URL for which is located at the end of the article. In the article, Jon Boone reviews the evidence on the dire conditions and treatment of Afghan women. The thrust of his report is that little has been accomplished under the Karzai government or the US/UK occupation to change these trends. Sadly, the surge in US troops may do little to revese the deteriorating situation for Afghan women. When President Obama announced his support of a "surge" in US troops to Afghanistan last week, he did not address the issue.
Bob
------------------------------
Published on Monday, December 7, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
Plight of Afghan Women May Worsen as War Effort is Stepped Up, Warns Report
by Jon Boone in Kabul
The already dire plight of women in Afghanistan [1] risks deteriorating further as the US and its allies take steps to turn around the war against the Taliban, according to a report by Human Rights [2] Watch today.
A human rights group has highlighted a catalogue of abuse of women in Afghanistan. (Photo: AFP)Eight years after the Taliban were ousted from power, rapists are often protected from prosecution, women can still be arrested for running away from home, and girls have far less access to schools than boys, the report says.
With the insurgency strengthening in the south and making inroads into the north, the few gains made for women's rights since the US-led invasion of 2001 could be further eroded if Hamid Karzai [3]'s government and the international community push for peace talks with factions of the fundamentalist movement.
Among the examples of abuses against women collected by the organisation was the case of a woman who was gang raped by a group that included a powerful local militia commander.
Although she fought to have her rapists prosecuted, they were subsequently pardoned by Karzai. Later, her husband was assassinated.
Rape was put on the statute books as a criminal offence this year but it is still not widely regarded by the police or the courts as a serious crime, with the attackers often receiving greater legal protection than the victims.
One survey found that 52% of women had experience physical violence, while 17% reported sexual violence.
"Police and judges see violence against women as legitimate, so they do not prosecute cases," said Soraya Sobhrang, a commissioner at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.
Human Rights Watch said that more than half the women and girls in Afghan prisons were held for "moral crimes", such as adultery or running away from home - although the latter is not a crime under Afghan or Islamic law.
"Whether it is a high-profile woman under threat, a young woman who wants to escape a child marriage, or a victim of rape who wants to see the perpetrator punished, the response from the police or courts is often hostile," the group said.
Rachel Reid, of Human Rights Watch, said the situation "could deteriorate".
She added: "While the world focuses on the Obama administration's new security strategy, it's critical to make sure that women's and girls' rights don't just get lip service while being pushed to the bottom of the list by the government and donors."
The report also warns that wives in half of all marriages are younger than 16, and up to 80% take place without consent.
A 13-year old girl said that after she escaped marriage she was pursued by her husband's family. Years later she still has not succeeded in getting a legal separation from her illegal marriage and women's activists have been denounced in parliament for giving her shelter.
Campaigners have also been angered by the murders of high-profile women, including Sitara Achakzai, an activist and member of Kandahar's provincial council, who was shot dead in April.
A female member of parliament, who cannot be named, said: "I've had so many threats. I report them sometimes, but the authorities tell me not to make enemies, to keep quiet. But how can I stop talking about women's rights and human rights?"
In August, Afghanistan quietly passed a law [4] permitting Shia men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands' sexual demands, despite international outrage following a report in the Guardian about an earlier version of the legislation, which
Karzai had promised to review.
Although western and Afghan politicians like to hail the increase in school building since 2001 as a major success story, the Human Rights Watch report says the participation of girls remains very low, with just 11% of secondary school-aged children in education.
Karzai, who was reappointed as president after a fraud-marred election regarded by most legal experts as unconstitutional, is due to announce his new cabinet in the coming days.
Human Rights Watch called on Karzai to release all women detained for running away from home and offer them compensation.
© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/07-0
Bob
------------------------------
Published on Monday, December 7, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
Plight of Afghan Women May Worsen as War Effort is Stepped Up, Warns Report
by Jon Boone in Kabul
The already dire plight of women in Afghanistan [1] risks deteriorating further as the US and its allies take steps to turn around the war against the Taliban, according to a report by Human Rights [2] Watch today.
A human rights group has highlighted a catalogue of abuse of women in Afghanistan. (Photo: AFP)Eight years after the Taliban were ousted from power, rapists are often protected from prosecution, women can still be arrested for running away from home, and girls have far less access to schools than boys, the report says.
With the insurgency strengthening in the south and making inroads into the north, the few gains made for women's rights since the US-led invasion of 2001 could be further eroded if Hamid Karzai [3]'s government and the international community push for peace talks with factions of the fundamentalist movement.
Among the examples of abuses against women collected by the organisation was the case of a woman who was gang raped by a group that included a powerful local militia commander.
Although she fought to have her rapists prosecuted, they were subsequently pardoned by Karzai. Later, her husband was assassinated.
Rape was put on the statute books as a criminal offence this year but it is still not widely regarded by the police or the courts as a serious crime, with the attackers often receiving greater legal protection than the victims.
One survey found that 52% of women had experience physical violence, while 17% reported sexual violence.
"Police and judges see violence against women as legitimate, so they do not prosecute cases," said Soraya Sobhrang, a commissioner at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.
Human Rights Watch said that more than half the women and girls in Afghan prisons were held for "moral crimes", such as adultery or running away from home - although the latter is not a crime under Afghan or Islamic law.
"Whether it is a high-profile woman under threat, a young woman who wants to escape a child marriage, or a victim of rape who wants to see the perpetrator punished, the response from the police or courts is often hostile," the group said.
Rachel Reid, of Human Rights Watch, said the situation "could deteriorate".
She added: "While the world focuses on the Obama administration's new security strategy, it's critical to make sure that women's and girls' rights don't just get lip service while being pushed to the bottom of the list by the government and donors."
The report also warns that wives in half of all marriages are younger than 16, and up to 80% take place without consent.
A 13-year old girl said that after she escaped marriage she was pursued by her husband's family. Years later she still has not succeeded in getting a legal separation from her illegal marriage and women's activists have been denounced in parliament for giving her shelter.
Campaigners have also been angered by the murders of high-profile women, including Sitara Achakzai, an activist and member of Kandahar's provincial council, who was shot dead in April.
A female member of parliament, who cannot be named, said: "I've had so many threats. I report them sometimes, but the authorities tell me not to make enemies, to keep quiet. But how can I stop talking about women's rights and human rights?"
In August, Afghanistan quietly passed a law [4] permitting Shia men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands' sexual demands, despite international outrage following a report in the Guardian about an earlier version of the legislation, which
Karzai had promised to review.
Although western and Afghan politicians like to hail the increase in school building since 2001 as a major success story, the Human Rights Watch report says the participation of girls remains very low, with just 11% of secondary school-aged children in education.
Karzai, who was reappointed as president after a fraud-marred election regarded by most legal experts as unconstitutional, is due to announce his new cabinet in the coming days.
Human Rights Watch called on Karzai to release all women detained for running away from home and offer them compensation.
© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/07-0
Afghan women writing for change project
Andrew Wander, "Afghan women writing for change," Aljazeera, December 6, 2009
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/12/2009126756888150.html
"The man sitting in front of me was my country's president, but the only thing I could feel towards him was anger," writes Meena, describing a meeting with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president.
"I lost respect for him because of his policies towards women's rights, his stance on negotiating with the Taliban, and his alliance with Dostum, a warlord and criminal."
In a country where women's voices are rarely heard, Meena's publications on a pioneering blog, the Afghan Women's Writing Project (AWWP), represent a tentative step forward in addressing the lack of female voices in the public sphere in Afghanistan.
Meena and her fellow contributors take enormous risks in writing - publishing anonymously to avoid being identified.
Many of their own families do not know what they are doing, and if found, they could face serious reprisals from those who believe that Afghan women should be neither seen nor heard.
One contributor, Roya, explains the constraints under which she works. "No one knows I am writing for this project and it stays a secret," she says. "I can't tell my family I am writing. There are security risks for us."
Worth the risk
In the volatile political and security climate of Afghanistan, no-one is taking any chances."Recently I received a death threat from Taliban," one anonymous poster writes, in a piece entitled Being a Woman: My Only Sin.
But for the contributors, having their voices heard is worth the risk.
"I grew up being told by the society that I was mentally unequal to men and incapable of doing anything but giving birth and raising children," Meena says. "Writing for the blog has enabled me to take the tears, the pain and the horror of Afghan women to my Afghan brothers and to the world."
The project was set up by American novelist Masha Hamilton as a way for Afghan women to share their experiences directly with the rest of the world, rather than being spoken for by men.
"There are many cases of women feeling that this is a lifeline for them"
Masha Hamilton, the founder of the Afghan Women's Writing Project "It's about developing their voices," Hamilton says. "We don't just put anything up. It's a dialogue and a communication. We want to help them express their stories, and their writing often becomes more personal as time goes on."
The project has been an enormous success. It attracts submissions on topics ranging from contemporary politics to considerations of the burqa, offering a unique insight into a world ordinarily kept hidden from public gaze.
A network of volunteer teachers in the US use secure online classrooms to set writing prompts for the 36 women who participate from across Afghanistan.
"We have some women writing from the most conservative provinces of Afghanistan," Hamilton says. "There are many cases of women feeling that this is a lifeline for them."
Catalyst for change
As well as giving English language readers a chance to understand more about the lives of Afghan women, the project also represents an educational opportunity for the women who take part.
For some, it is the only opportunity they have to practice their English, although organisers say that the development of creative skills is prioritised over improving the technical aspects of their language.
Either way, the women clearly enjoy the interactive nature of the project.Elay has been taking part for the past two months. "I have wonderful teachers," she says."They correct my essays and I learn from my mistakes, and the way they explain the mistakes."
But with Afghanistan rocked by spreading instability and large swathes of the country falling under Taliban control, the writers are well aware that the relative freedom that allows them to take part in the project is not guaranteed to last.
Hamilton says that the deteriorating security situation has had an impact on the way the women see their futures.
"In 2004, I went to Afghanistan for the first time," she says. "I could see that there was a long way for women to go, but there was hope. When I went back in November 2008, a lot of that had gone."
The prospect of the government cutting a deal with the Taliban is of particular concern and the organisers are making contingency plans in case conservative elements are politically empowered by any potential deal.
"We want to get them all laptops, in case things get worse again," Hamilton says. "Then they could write at home."
Meanwhile, the women who risk everything to make their voices heard hope their writing can be a catalyst for positive change."I believe words are stronger than guns," Meena says. "It is words that start revolutions and changes."
To read the work of the Afghan Women's Writing Project, visit http://awwproject.wordpress.com/
Source: Al Jazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/12/2009126756888150.html
"The man sitting in front of me was my country's president, but the only thing I could feel towards him was anger," writes Meena, describing a meeting with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president.
"I lost respect for him because of his policies towards women's rights, his stance on negotiating with the Taliban, and his alliance with Dostum, a warlord and criminal."
In a country where women's voices are rarely heard, Meena's publications on a pioneering blog, the Afghan Women's Writing Project (AWWP), represent a tentative step forward in addressing the lack of female voices in the public sphere in Afghanistan.
Meena and her fellow contributors take enormous risks in writing - publishing anonymously to avoid being identified.
Many of their own families do not know what they are doing, and if found, they could face serious reprisals from those who believe that Afghan women should be neither seen nor heard.
One contributor, Roya, explains the constraints under which she works. "No one knows I am writing for this project and it stays a secret," she says. "I can't tell my family I am writing. There are security risks for us."
Worth the risk
In the volatile political and security climate of Afghanistan, no-one is taking any chances."Recently I received a death threat from Taliban," one anonymous poster writes, in a piece entitled Being a Woman: My Only Sin.
But for the contributors, having their voices heard is worth the risk.
"I grew up being told by the society that I was mentally unequal to men and incapable of doing anything but giving birth and raising children," Meena says. "Writing for the blog has enabled me to take the tears, the pain and the horror of Afghan women to my Afghan brothers and to the world."
The project was set up by American novelist Masha Hamilton as a way for Afghan women to share their experiences directly with the rest of the world, rather than being spoken for by men.
"There are many cases of women feeling that this is a lifeline for them"
Masha Hamilton, the founder of the Afghan Women's Writing Project "It's about developing their voices," Hamilton says. "We don't just put anything up. It's a dialogue and a communication. We want to help them express their stories, and their writing often becomes more personal as time goes on."
The project has been an enormous success. It attracts submissions on topics ranging from contemporary politics to considerations of the burqa, offering a unique insight into a world ordinarily kept hidden from public gaze.
A network of volunteer teachers in the US use secure online classrooms to set writing prompts for the 36 women who participate from across Afghanistan.
"We have some women writing from the most conservative provinces of Afghanistan," Hamilton says. "There are many cases of women feeling that this is a lifeline for them."
Catalyst for change
As well as giving English language readers a chance to understand more about the lives of Afghan women, the project also represents an educational opportunity for the women who take part.
For some, it is the only opportunity they have to practice their English, although organisers say that the development of creative skills is prioritised over improving the technical aspects of their language.
Either way, the women clearly enjoy the interactive nature of the project.Elay has been taking part for the past two months. "I have wonderful teachers," she says."They correct my essays and I learn from my mistakes, and the way they explain the mistakes."
But with Afghanistan rocked by spreading instability and large swathes of the country falling under Taliban control, the writers are well aware that the relative freedom that allows them to take part in the project is not guaranteed to last.
Hamilton says that the deteriorating security situation has had an impact on the way the women see their futures.
"In 2004, I went to Afghanistan for the first time," she says. "I could see that there was a long way for women to go, but there was hope. When I went back in November 2008, a lot of that had gone."
The prospect of the government cutting a deal with the Taliban is of particular concern and the organisers are making contingency plans in case conservative elements are politically empowered by any potential deal.
"We want to get them all laptops, in case things get worse again," Hamilton says. "Then they could write at home."
Meanwhile, the women who risk everything to make their voices heard hope their writing can be a catalyst for positive change."I believe words are stronger than guns," Meena says. "It is words that start revolutions and changes."
To read the work of the Afghan Women's Writing Project, visit http://awwproject.wordpress.com/
Source: Al Jazeera
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others
Ethics Forum: September 11 and Ethnographic Responsibility
American Anthropologist Vol. 104, No. 3 • September 2002
[p. 783] ABSTRACT This article explores the ethics of the current “War on Terrorism,” asking whether anthropology, the discipline devoted to understanding and dealing with cultural difference, can provide us with critical purchase on the justifications made for American intervention in Afghanistan in terms of liberating, or saving, Afghan women. I look first at the dangers of reifying culture, apparent in the tendencies to plaster neat cultural icons like the Muslim woman over messy historical and political dynamics. Then, calling attention to the resonances of contemporary discourses on equality, freedom, and rights with earlier colonial and missionary rhetoric on Muslim women, I argue that we need to develop, instead, a serious appreciation of differences among women in the world—as products of different histories, expressions of different circumstances, and manifestations of differently structured desires. Further, I argue that rather than seeking to “save” others (with the superiority it implies and the violences it would entail) we might better think in terms of (1) working with them in situations that we recognize as always subject to historical transformation and (2) considering our own larger responsibilities to address the forms of global injustice that are powerful shapers of the worlds in which they find themselves. I develop many of these arguments about the limits of “cultural relativism” through a consideration of the burqa and the many meanings of veiling in the Muslim world. [Keywords: cultural relativism, Muslim women, Afghanistan war, freedom, global injustice, colonialism]
WHAT ARE THE ETHICS of the current “War on Terrorism,” a war that justifies itself by purporting t o liberate, or save, Afghan women? Does anthropology have anything to offer in our search for a viable position to take regarding this rationale for war?
I was led to pose the question of my title in part because of the way I personally experienced the response to the U.S.war in Afghanistan. Like many colleagues whose work has focused on women and gender in the Middle East, I was deluged with invitations to speak—not just on news programs but also to various departments at colleges and universities, especially women’s studies programs. Why did this not please me, a scholar who has devoted more than 20 years of her life to this subject and who has some complicated personal connection to this identity? Here was an opportunity to spread the word, disseminate my knowledge, and correct misunderstandings. The urgent search for knowledge about our sister “women of cover” (as President George Bush so marvelously called them) is laudable and when it comes from women’s studies programs where “transnational feminism” is now being taken seriously, it has a certain integrity (see Safire 2001), My discomfort led me to reflect on why, as feminists in or from the West, or simply as people who have concerns about women’s lives, we need to be wary of this response to the events and aftermath of September 11, 2001, I want to point out the minefields—a metaphor that is sadly too apt for a country like Afghanistan, with the world’s highest number of mines per capita—of this obsession with th e plight of Muslim women, I hope to show some way through them using insights from anthropology, the discipline whose charge has been to understand and manage cultural difference, At the same time, I want to remain critical of anthropology’s complicity in the reification of cultural difference.
CULTURAL EXPLANATIONS AND THE MOBILIZATION OF WOMEN
It is easier to see why one should be skeptical about the focus on the “Muslim woman” if one begins with the U.S. [784] public response. I will analyze two manifestations of this response: some conversations I had with a reporter from the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer and First Lady Laura Bush’s radio address to the nation on November 17, 2001, The presenter from the NewsHour show first contacted me in October to see if I was willing to give some background fora segment on Women and Islam, I mischievously asked whether she had done segments on the women of Guatemala, Ireland, Palestine, or Bosnia when the show covered wars in those regions; but I finally agreed to look at the questions she was going to pose to panelists, The questions were hopelessly general. Do Muslim women believe “x”? Are Muslim women “y”? Does Islam allow “z” for women? I asked her: If you were to substitute Christian or Jewish wherever you have Muslim, would these questions make sense? I did not imagine she would call me back, But she did, twice, once with an idea for a segment on the meaning of Ramadan and another time on Muslim women in politics. One was in response to the bombing and the other to the speeches by Laura Bush and Cherie Blair, wife of the British Prime Minister.
What is striking about these three ideas for news programs is that there was a consistent resort to the cultural, as if knowing something about women and Islam or the meaning of a religious ritual would help one understand the tragic attack on New York’s World Trade Center and the U.S. Pentagon, or how Afghanistan had come to be ruled by the Taliban, or what interests might have fueled US, and other interventions in the region over the past 25 years, or what the history of American support for conservative groups funded to undermine the Soviets might have been, or why the caves and bunkers out of which Bin Laden was to be smoked “dead or alive, as President Bush announced on television, were paid for and built by the CIA.
In other words, the question is why knowing about the “culture” of the region, and particularly its religious beliefs and treatment of women, was more urgent than exploring the history of the development of repressive regimes in the region and the U.S. role in this history, Such cultural framing, it seemed to me, prevented the serious exploration of the roots and nature of human suffering in this part of the world, Instead of political and historical explanations, experts were being asked to give religiocultural ones, Instead of questions that might lead to the exploration of global interconnections, we were offered ones that worked to artificially divide the world into separate spheres—recreating an imaginative geography of West versus East, us versus Muslims, cultures in which First Ladies give speeches versus others where women shuffle around silently in burqas.
Most pressing for me was why the Muslim woman in general, and the Afghan woman in particular, were so crucial to this cultural mode of explanation, which ignored the complex entanglements in which we are all implicated, in sometimes surprising alignments, Why were these female symbols being mobilized in this “War against Terrorism” in a way they were not in other conflicts? Laura Bush’s radio address on November 17 reveals the political work such mobilization accomplishes, On the one hand, her address collapsed important distinctions that should have been maintained, There was a constant slippage between the Taliban and the terrorists, so that they became almost one word—a kind of hyphenated monster identity: the Taliban-and-the-terrorists. Then there was the blurring of the very separate causes in Afghanistan of women’s continuing malnutrition, poverty, and ill health, and their more recent exclusion under the Taliban from employment, schooling, and the joys of wearing nail polish, On the other hand, her speech reinforced chasmic divides, primarily between the “civilized people throughout the world” whose hearts break for the women and children of Afghanistan and the Taliban-and-the-terrorists, the cultural monsters who want to, as she put it, “impose their world on the rest of us.”
Most revealingly, the speech enlisted women to justify American bombing and intervention in Afghanistan and to make a case for the “War on Terrorism” of which it was allegedly a part, As Laura Bush said, “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes, They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment, The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” (U.S. Government 2002).
These words have haunting resonances for anyone who has studied colonial history, Many who have worked on British colonialism in South Asia have noted the use of the woman question in colonial policies where intervention into sati (the practice of widows immolating themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres), child marriage, and other practices was used to justify rule, As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) has cynically put it: white men saving brown women from brown men, The historical record is full of similar cases, including in the Middle East, In Turn of the Century Egypt, what Leila Ahmed (1992) has called “colonial feminism” was hard at work, This was a selective concern about the plight of Egyptian women that focused on the veil as a sign of oppression but gave no support to women’s education and was professed loudly by the same Englishman, Lord Cromer, who opposed women’s suffrage back home.
Sociologist Marnia Lazreg (1994) has offered some vivid examples of how French colonialism enlisted women to its cause in Algeria, She writes:
Perhaps the most spectacular example of the colonial appropriation of women’s voices, and the silencing of those among them who had begun to take women revolutionaries ... as role models by not donning the veil, was the event of May 16, 1958 [just four years before Algeria finally gained its independence from France after a long bloody struggle and 130 years of French control—L,A.], On that day a demonstration was organized by rebellious French generals in Algiers to show their determination to keep Algeria French, To give the government of France evidence that Algerians were in agreement with them, the [785] generals had a few thousand native men bused in from nearby villages, along with a few women who were solemnly unveiled by French women. .. Rounding up Algerians and bringing them to demonstrations of loyalty to France was not in itself an unusual act during the colonial era, But to unveil women at a well-choreographed ceremony added to the event a symbolic dimension that dramatized the one constant feature of the Algerian occupation by France: its obsession with women. [Lazreg 1994:135]
Lazreg (1994) also gives memorable examples of the way in which the French had earlier sought to transform Arab women and girls, She describes skits at awards ceremonies at the Muslim Girls’ School in Algiers in 1851 and
1852, In the first skit, written by “a French lady from Algiers,’ two Algerian Arab girls reminisced about their trip to France with woids including the following:
Oh! Protective France: Oh! Hospitable France! . . .
Noble land, where I felt free
Under Christian skies to pray to our God: . . .
God bless you for the happiness you bring us!
And you, adoptive mother, who taught us
That we have a share of this world,
We will cherish you forever! [Lazreg 1994:68-69]
These girls are made to invoke the gift of a share of this world, a world where freedom reigns under Christian skies. This is not the world the Taliban-and-the-terrorists would “like to impose on the Test of us.”
Just as I argued above that we need to be suspicious when neat cultural icons aie plastered over messier historical and political narratives, so we need to be wary when Lord Cromer in British-ruled Egypt, French ladies in Algeria, and Laura Bush, all with military troops behind them, claim to be saving or liberating Muslim women.
POLITICS OF THE VEIL
I want now to look more closely at those Afghan women Lama Bush claimed were “rejoicing” at their liberation by the Americans. This necessitates a discussion of the veil, or the burqa, because it is so central to contemporary concerns about Muslim women, This will set the stage for a discussion of how anthropologists, feminist anthropologists in particular, contend with the problem of difference in a global world. In the conclusion, I will return to the rhetoric of saving Muslim women and offer an alternative.
It is common popular knowledge that the ultimate sign of the oppression of Afghan women under the Taliban-and-the-terrorists is that they were forced to wear the burqa. Liberals sometimes confess their surprise that even though Afghanistan has been liberated from the Taliban, women do not seem to be throwing off their burqas. Someone who has worked in Muslim regions must ask why this is so surprising, Did we expect that once “free” from the Taliban they would go “back” to belly shirts and blue jeans, or dust off their Chanel suits? We need to be more sensible about the clothing of “women of cover,” and so there is perhaps a need to make some basic points about veiling.
First, it should be recalled that the Taliban did not invent the burqa. It was the local form of covering that Pashtun women in one region wore when they went out. The Pashtun are one of several ethnic groups in Afghanistan and the burqa was one of many forms of covering in the subcontinent and Southwest Asia that has developed as a convention for symbolizing women’s modesty or respectability. The burqa, like some other forms of “cover” has, in many settings, marked the symbolic separation of men’s and women’s spheres, as part of the general association of women with family and home, not with public space where strangers mingled.
Twenty years ago the anthropologist Hanna Papanek (1982), who worked in Pakistan, described the burqa as “portable seclusion.’ She noted that many saw it as a liberating invention because it enabled women to move out of segregated living spaces while still observing the basic moral requirements of separating and protecting women from unrelated men. Ever since I came across her phrase portable seclusion, I have thought of these enveloping robes as “mobile homes,” Everywhere, such veiling signifies belonging to a particular community and participating in a moral way of life in which families are paramount in the organization of communities and the home is associated with the sanctity of women.
The obvious question that follows is this: If this were the case, why would women suddenly become immodest? Why would they suddenly throw off the markers of their respectability, markers, whether burqas or other forms of cover, which were supposed to assure their protection in the public sphere from the harassment of strange men by symbolically signaling to all that they were still in the inviolable space of their homes, even though moving in the public realm? Especially when these are forms of dress that had become so conventional that most women gave little thought to their meaning.
To draw some analogies, none of them perfect, why are we surprised that Afghan women do not throw off their burqas when we know perfectly well that it would not be appropriate to wear shorts to the opera? At the time these discussions of Afghan women’s burqas were raging, a friend of mine was chided by her husband for suggesting she wanted to wear a pantsuit to a fancy wedding; “You know you don’t wear pants to a WASP wedding,’ he reminded her. New Yorkers know that the beautifully coiffed Hasidic women, who look so fashionable next to their dour husbands in black coats and hats, are wearing wigs, This is because religious belief and community standards of propriety require the covering of the hair, They also alter boutique fashions to include high necks and long sleeves, As anthropologists know perfectly well, people wear the appropriate form of dress for their social communities and are guided by socially shared standards, religious beliefs, and moral ideals, unless they deliberately transgress to make a point or are unable to afford proper cover. If we think that U.S. women live in a world of [786] choice regarding clothing, all we need to do is remind ourselves of the expression, “the tyranny of fashion.”
What had happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban is that one regional style of covering or veiling, associated with a certain respectable but not elite class, was imposed on everyone as “religiously” appropriate, even though previously there had been many different styles, popular or traditional with different groups and classes—different ways to mark women’s propriety, or, in more recent times, religious piety. Although I am not an expert on Afghanistan, I imagine that the majority of women left in Afghanistan by the time the Taliban took control were the rural or less educated, from nonelite families, since they were the only ones who could not emigrate to escape the hardship and violence that has marked Afghanistan’s recent history. If liberated from the enforced wearing of burqas, most of these women would choose some other form of modest headcovering, like all those living nearby who were not under the Taliban—their rural Hindu counterparts in the North of India (who cover their heads and veil their faces from affines) or their Muslim sisters in Pakistan.
Even The New York Times carried an article about Afghan women refugees in Pakistan that attempted to educate readers about this local variety (Fremson 2001), The article describes and pictures everything from the now-iconic burqa with the embroidered eyeholes, which a Pashtun woman explains is the proper dress for her community, to large scarves they call chadors, to the new Islamic modest dress that wearers refer to as hijab, Those in the new Islamic dress are characteristically students heading for professional careers, especially in medicine, just like their counterparts from Egypt to Malaysia, One wearing the large scarf was a school principal; the other was a poor street vendor, The telling quote from the young street vendor is, “If I did [wear the burqa] the refugees would tease me because the burqa is for ‘good women’ who stay inside the home” (Fremson 2001:14), Here you can see the local status associated with the burqa—it is for good respectable women from strong families who are not forced to make a living selling on the street.
The British newspaper The Guardian published an interview in January 2002 with Dr. Suheila Siddiqi, a respected surgeon in Afghanistan who holds the rank of lieutenant general in the Afghan medical corps (Goldenberg 2002). A woman in her sixties, she comes from an elite family and, like her sisters, was educated. Unlike most women of her class, she chose not to go into exile, She is presented in the article as “the woman who stood up to the Taliban” because she refused to wear the burqa. She had made it a condition of returning to her post as head of a major hospital when the Taliban came begging in 1996, just eight months after firing her along with other women, Siddiqi is described as thin, glamorous, and confident, But further into the article it is noted that her graying bouffant hair is covered in a gauzy veil, This is a reminder that though she refused the burqa, she had no question about wearing the chador or scarf.
Finally, I need to make a crucial point about veiling, Not only are there many forms of covering, which themselves have different meanings in the communities in which they are used, but also veiling itself must not be confused with, or made to stand for, lack of agency. As I have argued in my ethnography of a Bedouin community in Egypt in the late 1970s and 1980s (1986), pulling the black head cloth over the face in front of older respected men is considered a voluntary act by women who are deeply committed to being moral and have a sense of honor tied to family. One of the ways they show their standing is by covering their faces in certain contexts, They decide for whom they feel it is appropriate to veil.
To take a very different case, the modern Islamic modest dress that many educated women across the Muslim world have taken on since the mid-1970s now both publicly marks piety and can be read as a sign of educated urban sophistication, a sort of modernity (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1995, 1998; Brenner 1996; El Guindi 1999; MacLeod 1991; Ong 1990), As Saba Mahmood (2001) has so brilliantly shown in her ethnography of women in the mosque movement in Egypt, this new form of dress is also perceived by many of the women who adopt it as part of a bodily means to cultivate virtue, the outcome of their professed desire to be close to God.
Two points emerge from this fairly basic discussion of the meanings of veiling in the contemporary Muslim world, First, we need to work against the reductive interpretation of veiling as the quintessential sign of women’s unfreedom, even if we object to state imposition of this form, as in Iran or with the Taliban, (It must be recalled that the modernizing states of Turkey and Iran had earlier in the century banned veiling and required men, except religious clerics, to adopt Western dress.) What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, always raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world? Is it not a gross violation of women’s own understandings of what they are doing to simply denounce the burqa as a medieval imposition? Second, we must take care not to reduce the diverse situations and attitudes of millions of Muslim women to a single item of clothing. Perhaps it is time to give up the Western obsession with the veil and focus on some serious issues with which feminists and others should indeed be concerned.
Ultimately, the significant political-ethical problem the burqa raises is how to deal with cultural “others,” How are we to deal with difference without accepting the passivity implied by the cultural relativism for which anthropologists are justly famous—a relativism that says it’s their culture and it’s not my business to judge or interfere, only to try to understand, Cultural relativism is certainly an improvement on ethnocentrism and the racism, cultural imperialism, and imperiousness that underlie it; the problem is that it is too late not to interfere, The forms of lives we [787] find around the world are already products of long histories of interactions.
I want to explore the issues of women, cultural relativism, and the problems of “difference” from three angles, First, I want to consider what feminist anthropologists (those stuck in that awkward relationship, as Strathern [1987] has claimed) are to do with strange political bedfellows, I used to feel torn when I received the e-mail petitions circulating for the last few years in defense of Afghan women under the Taliban, I was not sympathetic to the dogmatism of the Taliban; I do not support the oppression of women, But the provenance of the campaign worried me, I do not usually find myself in political company with the likes of Hollywood celebrities (see Hirschkind and Mahmood 2002), I had never received a petition from such women defending the right of Palestinian women to safety from Israeli bombing or daily harassment at checkpoints, asking the United States to reconsider its support for a government that had dispossessed them, closed them out from work and citizenship rights, refused them the most basic freedoms. Maybe some of these same people might be signing petitions to save African women from genital cutting, or Indian women from dowry deaths, However, I do not think that it would be as easy to mobilize so many of these American and European women if it were not a case of Muslim men oppressing Muslim women— women of cover for whom they can feel sorry and in relation to whom they can feel smugly superior, Would television diva Oprah Winfrey host the Women in Black, the women’s peace group from Israel, as she did RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan, who were also granted the Glamour Magazine Women of the Year Award? What are we to make of post-Taliban “Reality Tours” such as the one advertised on the internet by Global Exchange for March 2002 under the title “Courage and Tenacity: A Women’s Delegation to Afghanistan”? The rationale for the $1,400 tour is that “with the removal of the Taliban government, Afghan women, for the first time in the past decade, have the opportunity to reclaim their basic human rights and establish their role as equal citizens by participating in the rebuilding of their nation.” The tour’s objective, to celebrate International Women’s Week, is “to develop awareness of the concerns and issues the Afghan women are facing as well as to witness the changing political, economic, and social conditions which have created new opportunities for the women of Afghanistan” (Global Exchange 2002).
To be critical of this celebration of women’s rights in Afghanistan is not to pass judgment on any local women’s organizations, such as RAWA, whose members have courageously worked since 1977 for a democratic secular Afghanistan in which women’s human rights are respected, against Soviet-backed regimes or U.S.-, Saudi-, and Pakistani supported conservatives. Their documentation of abuse and their work through clinics and schools have been enormously important.
It is also not to fault the campaigns that exposed the dreadful conditions under which the Taliban placed women. The Feminist Majority campaign helped put a stop to a secret oil pipeline deal between the Taliban and the U.S. multinational Unocal that was going forward with U.S. administration support, Western feminist campaigns must not be confused with the hypocrisies of the new colonial feminism of a Republican president who was not elected for his progressive stance on feminist issues or of administrations that played down the terrible record of violations of women by the United State’s allies in the Northern Alliance, as documented by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, among others, Rapes and assaults were widespread in the period of infighting that devastated Afghanistan before the Taliban came in to restore order.
It is, however, to suggest that we need to look closely at what we are supporting (and what we are not) and to think carefully about why. How should we manage the complicated politics and ethics of finding ourselves in agreement with those with whom we normally disagree? I do not know how many feminists who felt good about saving Afghan women from the Taliban are also asking for a global redistribution of wealth or contemplating sacrificing their own consumption radically so that African or Afghan women could have some chance of having what I do believe should be a universal human right—the right to freedom from the structural violence of global inequality and from the ravages of war, the everyday rights of having enough to eat, having homes for their families in which to live and thrive, having ways to make decent livings so their children can grow, and having the strength and security to work out, within their communities and with whatever alliances they want, how to live a good life, which might very well include changing the ways those communities are organized.
Suspicion about bedfellows is only a first step; it will not give us a way to think more positively about what to do or where to stand, For that, we need to confront two more big issues. First is the acceptance of the possibility of difference, Can we only free Afghan women to be like us or might we have to recognize that even after “liberation” from the Taliban, they might want different things than we would want for them? What do we do about that? Second, we need to be vigilant about the rhetoric of saving people because of what it implies about our attitudes.
Again, when I talk about accepting difference, I am not implying that we should resign ourselves to being cultural relativists who respect whatever goes on elsewhere as “just their culture,” I have already discussed the dangers of “cultural” explanations; “their” cultures are just as much part of history and an interconnected world as ours are. What I am advocating is the hard work involved in recognizing and respecting differences—precisely as products of different histories, as expressions of different circumstances, and as manifestations of differently structured desires, We may want justice for women, but can we accept [788] that there might be different ideas about justice and that different women might want, or choose, different futures from what we envision as best (see Ong 1988)? We must consider that they might be called to personhood, so to speak, in a different language.
Reports from the Bonn peace conference held in late November to discuss the rebuilding of Afghanistan revealed significant differences among the few Afghan women feminists and activists present. RAWA’s position was to reject any conciliatory approach to Islamic governance, According to one report I read, most women activists, especially those based in Afghanistan who are aware of the realities on the ground, agreed that Islam had to be the starting point for reform. Fatima Gailani, a U.S.-based advisor to one of the delegations, is quoted as saying, “If I go to Afghanistan today and ask women for votes on the promise to bring them secularism, they are going to tell me to go to hell.’ Instead, according to one report, most of these women looked for inspiration on how to fight for equality to a place that might seem surprising. They looked to Iran as a country in which they saw women making significant gains within an Islamic framework—in part through an Islamically oriented feminist movement that is challenging injustices and reinterpreting the religious tradition.
The situation in Iran is itself the subject of heated debate within feminist circles, especially among Iranian feminists in the West (e.g., Mir-Hosseini 1999; Moghissi 1999; Najmabadi 1998, 2000), It is not clear whether and in what ways women have made gains and whether the great increases in literacy, decreases in birthrates, presence of women in the professions and government, and a feminist flourishing in cultural fields like writing and filmmaking are because of or despite the establishment of a socalled Islamic Republic, The concept of an Islamic feminism itself is also controversial, Is it an oxymoron or does it refer to a viable movement forged by brave women who want a third way?
One of the things we have to be most careful about in thinking about Third World feminisms, and feminism in different parts of the Muslim world, is how not to fall into polarizations that place feminism on the side of the West, I have written about the dilemmas faced by Arab feminists when Western feminists initiate campaigns that make them vulnerable to local denunciations by conservatives of various sorts, whether Islamist or nationalist, of being traitors (Abu-Lughod 2001), As some like Afsaneh Najmabadi are now arguing, not only is it wrong to see history simplistically in terms of a putative opposition between Islam and the West (as is happening in the United States now and has happened in parallel in the Muslim world), but it is also strategically dangerous to accept this cultural opposition between Islam and the West, between fundamentalism and feminism, because those many people within Muslim countries who are trying to find alternatives to present injustices, those who might want to refuse the divide and take from different histories and cultures, who do not accept that being feminist means being Western, will be under pressure to choose, just as we are: Are you with us or against us?
My point is to remind us to be aware of differences, respectful of other paths toward social change that might give women better lives, Can there be a liberation that is Islamic? And, beyond this, is liberation even a goal for which all women or people strive? Are emancipation, equality, and rights part of a universal language we must use? To quote Saba Mahmood, writing about the women in Egypt who are seeking to become pious Muslims, “The desire for freedom and liberation is a historically situated desire whose motivational force cannot be assumed a priori, but needs to be reconsidered in light of other desires, aspirations, and capacities that inhere in a culturally and historically located subject” (2001:223), In other words, might other desires be more meaningful for different groups of people? Living in close families? Living in a godly way? Living without war? I have done fieldwork in Egypt over more than 20 years and I cannot think of a single woman I know, from the poorest rural to the most educated cosmopolitan, who has ever expressed envy of U.S. women, women they tend to perceive as bereft of community, vulnerable to sexual violence and social anomie, driven by individual success rather than morality, or strangely disrespectful of God.
Mahmood (2001) has pointed out a disturbing thing that happens when one argues for a respect for other traditions, She notes that there seems to be a difference in the political demands made on those who work on or are trying to understand Muslims and Islamists and those who work on secular-humanist projects, She, who studies the piety movement in Egypt, is consistently pressed to denounce all the harm done by Islamic movements around the world—otherwise she is accused of being an apologist, But there never seems to be a parallel demand for those who study secular humanism and its projects, despite the terrible violences that have been associated with it over the last couple of centuries, from world wars to colonialism, from genocides to slavery. We need to have as little dogmatic faith in secular humanism as in Islamism, and as open a mind to the complex possibilities of human projects undertaken in one tradition as the other.
BEYOND THE RHETORIC OF SALVATION
Let us return, finally, to my title, “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” The discussion of culture, veiling, and how one can navigate the shoals of cultural difference should put Laura Bush’s self-congratulation about the rejoicing of Afghan women liberated by American troops in a different light, It is deeply problematic to construct the Afghan woman as someone in need of saving. When you save someone, you imply that you are saving her from something, You are also saving her to something, What violences are entailed in this transformation, and what presumptions are being made about the superiority of that to [789] which you are saving her? Projects of saving other women depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners, a form of arrogance that deserves to be challenged. All one needs to do to appreciate the patronizing quality of the rhetoric of saving women is to imagine using it today in the United States about disadvantaged groups such as African American women or working-class women, We now understand them as suffering from structural violence, We have become politicized about race and class, but not culture.
As anthropologists, feminists, OT concerned citizens, we should be wary of taking on the mantles of those 19th century Christian missionary women who devoted their lives to saving their Muslim sisters, One of my favorite documents from that period is a collection called Our Moslem Sisters, the proceedings of a conference of women missionaries held in Cairo in 1906 (Van Sommer and Zwemmer 1907), The subtitle of the book is A Cry of Need from the Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It, Speaking of the ignorance, seclusion, polygamy, and veiling that blighted women’s lives across the Muslim world, the missionary women spoke of their responsibility to make these women’s voices heard. As the introduction states, “They will never cry for themselves, for they are down under the yoke of centuries of oppression” (Van Sommer and Zwemer 1907:15), “This book,” it begins, “with its sad, reiterated story of wrong and oppression is an indictment and an appeal. It is an appeal to Christian womanhood to right these wrongs and enlighten this darkness by sacrifice and service” (Van Sommer and Zwemer 1907:5).
One can hear uncanny echoes of their virtuous goals today, even though the language is secular, the appeals not to Jesus but to human rights or the liberal West. The continuing currency of such imagery and sentiments can be seen in their deployment for perfectly good humanitarian causes. In February 2002, I received an invitation to a reception honoring an international medical humanitarian network called Medecins du Monde/Doctors of the World (MdM). Under the sponsorship of the French Ambassador to the United States, the Head of the delegation of the European Commission to the United Nations, and a member of the European Parliament, the cocktail reception was to feature an exhibition of photographs under the cliched title “Afghan Women: Behind the Veil.” The invitation was remarkable not just for the colorful photograph of women in flowing burqas walking across the barren mountains of Afghanistan but also for the text, a portion of which I quote:
For 20 years MdM has been ceaselessly struggling to help those who are most vulnerable. But increasingly, thick veils cover the victims of the war. When the Taliban came to power in 1996, Afghan Women became faceless. To unveil one’s face while receiving medical care was to achieve a sort of intimacy, find a brief space for secret freedom and recover a little of one’s dignity. In a country where women had no access to basic medical care because they did not have the right to appear in public, where women had no right to practice medicine, MdM’s program stood as a stubborn reminder of human rights. . . . Please join us in helping to lift the veil.
Although I cannot take up here the fantasies of intimacy associated with unveiling, fantasies reminiscent of the French colonial obsessions so brilliantly unmasked by Alloula in The Colonial Harem (1986), 1 can ask why humanitarian projects and human rights discourse in the 21st century need rely on such constructions of Muslim women.
Could we not leave veils and vocations of saving others behind and instead train our sights on ways to make the world a more just place? The reason respect for difference should not be confused with cultural relativism is that it does not preclude asking how we, living in this privileged and powerful part of the world, might examine our own responsibilities for the situations in which others in distant places have found themselves. We do not stand outside the world, looking out over this sea of poor benighted people, living under the shadow—or veil—of oppressive cultures; we are part of that world, Islamic movements themselves have arisen in a world shaped by the intense engagements of Western powers in Middle Eastern lives.
A more productive approach, it seems to me, is to ask how we might contribute to making the world a more just place. A world not organized around strategic military and economic demands; a place where certain kinds of forces and values that we may still consider important could have an appeal and where there is the peace necessary for discussions, debates, and transformations to occur within communities, We need to ask ourselves what kinds of world conditions we could contribute to making such that popular desires will not be overdetermined by an overwhelming sense of helplessness in the face of forms of global injustice, Where we seek to be active in the affairs of distant places, can we do so in the spirit of support for those within those communities whose goals are to make women’s (and men’s) lives better (as Walley has argued in relation to practices of genital cutting in Africa, [1997])? Can we use a more egalitarian language of alliances, coalitions, and solidarity, instead of salvation?
Even RAWA, the now celebrated Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which was so instrumental in bringing to U.S. women’s attention the excesses of the Taliban, has opposed the U.S. bombing from the beginning. They do not see in it Afghan women’s salvation but increased hardship and loss. They have long called for disarmament and for peacekeeping forces, Spokespersons point out the dangers of confusing governments with people, the Taliban with innocent Afghans who will be most harmed. They consistently remind audiences to take a close look at the ways policies are being organized around oil interests, the arms industry, and the international drug trade. They are not obsessed with the veil, even though they are the most radical feminists working for a secular democratic Afghanistan. Unfortunately, [790] only their messages about the excesses of the Taliban have been heard, even though their criticisms of those in power in Afghanistan have included previous regimes. A first step in hearing their wider message is to break with the language of alien cultures, whether to understand or eliminate them. Missionary work and colonial feminism belong in the past. Our task is to critically explore what we might do to help create a world in which those poor Afghan women, for whom “the hearts of those in the civilized world break,” can have safety and decent lives.
LILA ABU-LUGHOD Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027
NOTES
Acknowledgments. I want to thank Page Jackson, Fran Mascia-Lees, Tim Mitchell, Rosalind Morris, Anupama Rao, and members of the audience at the symposium “Responding to War,” sponsored by Columbia University’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender (where I presented an earlier version), for helpful comments, references, clippings, and encouragement.
REFERENCES CITED
Abu-Lughod, Lila
1986 Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
1995 Movie Stars and Islamic Moralism in Egypt. Social Text
42:53-67.
1998 Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East. Princeton; Princeton University Press.
2001 Orientalism and Middle East Feminist Studies. Feminist Studies 27(l):101-ll3.
Ahmed, Leila
1992 Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Alloula, Malek
1986 The Colonial Harem, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Brenner, Suzanne
1996 Reconstructing Self and Society: Javanese Muslim Women and “the Veil.” American Ethnologist 23(4):673-697.
El Guindi, Fadwa
1999 Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance. Oxford: Berg.
Fremson, Ruth
2001 Allure Must Be Covered. Individuality Peeks Through. New York Times, November 4:14. Global Exchange
2002 Courage and Tenacity: A Women’s Delegation to Afghanistan. Electronic document, http://www.globalexchange.org/tours/auto/2002-03-05_CourageandTenacityAWomensDele.html. Accessed February 11.
Goldenberg, Suzanne
2002 The Woman Who Stood Up to the Taliban, The Guardian, January 24, Electronic document, http://222guardian.co.uk/ afghanis tan/story/0,1284,63840.
Hirschkind, Charles, and Saba Mahmood
2002 Feminism, the Taliban, and the Politics of Counter-Insurgency. Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 75(2): 107-122.
Lazreg, Marnia
1994 The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question, New York: Routledge.
MacLeod, Arlene
1991 Accommodating Protest. New York; Columbia University Press.
Mahmood, Saba
2001 Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival, Cultural Anthropology 16(2):202-235.
Mir-Hosseini, Ziba
1999 Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Moghissi, Haideh
1999 Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism, London: Zed Books.
Najmabadi, Afsaneh.
1998 Feminism in an Islamic Republic. In Islam, Gender and Social Change. Yvonne Haddad and John Esposito, eds. Pp. 59-84. New York: Oxford University Press.
2000 (Un)Veiling Feminism. Social Text 64:29-15.
Ong, Aihwa
1988 Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-Presentations of Women in Non-Western Societies. Inscriptions 3-4:79-93.
1990 State Versus Islam; Malay Families, Women’s Bodies, and the Body Politic in Malaysia. American Ethnologist 17(2): 258-276.
Papanek, Hanna
1982 Purdah in Pakistan: Seclusion and Modern Occupations for Women. In Separate Worlds. Hanna Papanek and Gail Minault, eds. Pp. 190-216. Columbus, MO: South Asia Books.
Safire, William
2001 “On Language.” New York Times Magazine, October 28; 22.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty
1988 Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Pp. 271-313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Strathern, Marilyn
1987 An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism and Anthropology. Signs 12:276-292.
U.S. Government
1907 Our Moslem Sisters: A Cry of Need from Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It. New York: Fleming H, Reveil Co.
2002 Electronic document, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011117, Accessed January 10.
Walley, Christine
1997 Searching for “Voices”: Feminism, Anthropology, and the
Global Debate over Female Genital Operations. Cultural Anthropology 12(3):405-438.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
