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3 Afghan women? Their place is
in the burqa By Ann Jones
the constitution, these essential
documents provide a foundation for realizing the
rights of women.
But building on that
paper foundation - amid poverty, illiteracy,
misogyny and ongoing warfare - is something else
again.
That's why, for the great majority
of Afghan women, life has scarcely changed at all.
That's why even an educated and
informed leader like my
colleague, on her way to a United Nations agency
to work on women's rights, is still unable to eat
an ice-cream cone.
More than just the
burqa For most Afghan women the
burqa is the least of their problems.
Afghanistan is just about the poorest
country in the world. Only Burkina Faso and Niger
sometimes get worse ratings. After nearly three
decades of warfare and another of drought,
millions of Afghans are without safe water or
sanitation or electricity, even in the capital
city. Millions are without adequate food and
nutrition. Millions have access only to the most
rudimentary health care, or none at all.
Diseases such as tuberculosis and polio,
long eradicated in most of the world, flourish
there. They hit women and children hard. One in
four children dies before the age of five, usually
from a preventable illness such as cholera or
diarrhea. Half of all women of childbearing age
who die do so in childbirth, giving Afghanistan
one of the highest maternal death rates in the
world. Average life expectancy hovers around 42
years.
Notice that we're still talking
women's rights here: the fundamental economic and
social rights that belong to all human beings.
There are other grim statistics. About 85%
of Afghan women are illiterate. About 95% are
routinely subjected to violence in the home. And
the home is where most Afghan women in rural
areas, and many in cities, are still customarily
confined. Public space and public life belong
almost exclusively to men. Karzai heads the
country while his wife, a qualified gynecologist
with needed skills, stays at home.
These
facts are well known. During more than five years
of Western occupation, they haven't changed.
Afghan women and girls are, by custom and
practice, the property of men. They may be traded
and sold like any commodity. Although Afghan law
sets the minimum marriageable age for girls at 16,
girls as young as eight or nine are commonly sold
into marriage. Female doctors in Kabul maternity
hospitals describe terrible life-threatening
"wedding night" injuries that husbands inflict on
child brides. In the countryside, far from medical
help, such girls die.
Under the tribal
code of the Pashtuns, the dominant ethnic group,
men customarily hand over women and girls -
surplus sisters or widows, daughters or nieces -
to other men to make amends for some offense or to
pay off some indebtedness, often to a drug lord.
To Pashtuns, the trade-off is a way of maintaining
"justice" and social harmony, but international
human-rights observers define what happens to the
women and girls used in such "conflict resolution"
as "slavery".
Given the rigid confinement
of women, a surprising number try to escape. But
any woman on her own outside the home is assumed
to be guilty of the crime of zina -
engaging in sexual activity. That's why "running
away" is itself a crime. One crime presupposes the
other.
When she is caught, as most
runaways are, she may be taken to jail for an
indefinite term or returned to her husband or
father or brothers, who may then murder her to
restore the family honor.
The same thing
happens to a rape victim, force being no excuse
for sexual contact - unless she is married to the
man who raped her. In that case, she can be raped
as often as he likes.
In Kabul, where
women and girls move about more freely, many are
snatched by traffickers and sold into sexual
slavery. The traffickers are seldom pursued or
punished because once a girl is abducted she is as
good as dead anyway, even to loving parents bound
by the code of honor. The weeping mother of a
kidnapped teenage girl once told me, "I pray she
does not come back because my husband will have to
kill her."
Many a girl kills herself. To
escape beatings or sexual abuse or forced
marriage. To escape prison or honor killing, if
she has been seduced or raped or falsely accused.
To escape life, if she has been forbidden to marry
the man she would choose for herself.
Suicide also brings dishonor, so families
cover it up. Only when city girls try to kill
themselves by setting themselves on fire do their
cases become known, for if they do not die at
once, they may be taken to hospital. In 2003,
scores of cases of self-immolation were reported
in the city of Herat; the following year, as many
were recorded in Kabul. Although such incidents
are notoriously underreported, during the past
year 150 cases were noted in western Afghanistan,
197 in Herat and at least 34 in the south.
The customary codes and traditional
practices that made life unbearable for these
burned girls predate the Taliban, and they
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