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3 Afghan women? Their place is
in the burqa By Ann Jones
Born
in Afghanistan but raised in the United States,
like many in the worldwide Afghan diaspora,
Manizha Naderi is devoted to helping her homeland.
For years she worked with Women for Afghan Women,
a New York-based organization serving Afghan women
wherever they may be. Last autumn, she returned to
Kabul, the capital, to try to create a Family
Guidance Center. Its goal is to rescue women - and
their families - from home-made violence. It's
tough work. After three decades of almost constant
warfare, most citizens are programmed to answer
the slightest
challenge with violence. In
Afghanistan it's the default response.
Manizha Naderi has been sizing up the
problem in the capital and last week she sent me a
copy of her report. A key passage went like this:
During the past year, a rash of
reports on the situation of women in Afghanistan
has been issued by Afghan governmental agencies
and by foreign and local non-governmental
organizations that claim a particular interest
in women's rights or in Afghanistan or both.
More reports are in the offing. What has sparked
them is the dire situation of women in the
country, the systematic violations of their
human rights, and the failure of concerned
parties to achieve significant improvements by
providing women with legal protections rooted in
a capable, honest and stable judiciary system,
education and employment opportunities, safety
from violence, much of it savage, and protection
from hidebound customs originating in the
conviction that women are the property of
men.
I'd hoped for better news.
Instead, her report brought back so many things
I'd seen for myself during the past five years
spent, off and on, in her country.
Last
year in Herat, as I was walking with an Afghan
colleague to a meeting on women's rights, I
spotted an ice-cream vendor in the hot, dusty
street. I rushed ahead and returned with two cones
of lemony ice. I held one out to my friend.
"Forgive me," she said. "I can't." She was wearing
a burqa.
It was a stupid mistake.
I'd been in Afghanistan a long time, in the
company every day of women encased from head to
toe in pleated polyester body bags. Occasionally I
put one on myself, just to get the feel of being
stifled in the sweaty sack, blind behind the mesh
eye mask. I'd watched women trip on their
burqas and fall. I'd watched women collide
with cars they couldn't see. I knew a woman badly
burned when her burqa caught fire. I knew
another who suffered a near-fatal skull fracture
when her burqa snagged in a taxi door and
slammed her to the pavement as the vehicle sped
away. But I'd never before noted this fact: it is
not possible for a woman wearing a burqa to
eat an ice-cream cone.
We gave the cones
away to passing children and laughed about it, but
to me it was the saddest thing.
Bold
boasts Ever since the United States invaded
Afghanistan in 2001, President George W Bush has
boasted of "liberating" Afghan women from the
Taliban and the burqa. His wife Laura,
after a publicity junket to Afghanistan in 2005,
appeared on a popular talk show to say that she
hadn't seen a single woman wearing a burqa.
But these are the sorts of wildly
optimistic self-delusions that have made Bush
notorious. His wife, whose visit to Afghanistan
lasted almost six hours, spent much of that time
at the US air base and none of it in the Afghan
streets where most women, to this day, go about in
big blue bags.
It's true that after the
fall of the Taliban lots of women in the capital
went back to work in schools, hospitals and
government ministries, while others found
better-paying jobs with international humanitarian
agencies. In 2005, thanks to a quota system
imposed by the international community, women took
27% of the seats in the lower house of Parliament,
a greater percentage than women enjoy in most
Western legislatures, including the United
States'. Yet these hopeful developments are
misleading.
The fact is that the
"liberation" of Afghan women is mostly
theoretical. The Afghan constitution adopted in
2004 declares, "The citizens of Afghanistan -
whether man or woman - have equal rights and
duties before the law." But what law? The judicial
system - ultra-conservative, inadequate,
incompetent and notoriously corrupt - usually
bases decisions on idiosyncratic interpretations
of Islamic sharia, tribal customary codes or
simple bribery. And legal "scholars" instruct
women that having "equal rights and duties" is not
the same as being equal to men.
Post-Taliban Afghanistan, under President
Hamid Karzai, also ratified key international
agreements on human rights: the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, the International
Treaty of Civil and Political Rights, and CEDAW:
the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women. Like
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