Interesting editorial from today's NYT on the history of women under Taliban rule. (bolds mine):
October 19, 2001
The Rifle and the Veil
By JAN GOODWIN and JESSICA NEUWIRTH
Anyone who has paid attention to the situation of women in
Afghanistan should not have been surprised to learn that the Taliban
are complicit in terrorism. When radical Muslim movements are on the rise,
women are the canaries in the mines. The very visible repression of forced
veiling and loss of hard-won freedoms coexists naturally with a general
disrespect for human rights. This repression of women is not about religion; it
is a political tool for achieving and consolidating power.
Sher Abbas Stanakzai, then the Taliban regime's deputy foreign minister,
admitted as much in a 1997 interview. "Our current restrictions of women
are necessary in order to bring the Afghan people under control," he said.
"We need these restrictions until people learn to obey the Taliban."
In the same way that many Islamic extremist crusades use the oppression of
women to help them gain control over wider populations, the Taliban and
Osama bin Laden are now employing the tactics of terrorism to gain control.
The Taliban did not start the oppression of Afghan women, nor have they
been its only practitioners.
In 1989, Arab militants working with the Afghan resistance to the Soviet
Union based in Peshawar, Pakistan — and helping to finance the resistance
fighters — issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, stating that Afghan women
would be killed if they worked for humanitarian organizations. At that time, a
third of the Afghan population of 15 million were displaced from their homes,
and many were heavily dependent on humanitarian groups for food and other
necessities. Among the 3.5 million of these refugees who were then living in
Pakistan, many were war widows supporting their families by working for
the aid groups. After the fatwa, Afghan women going to work were shot at
and several were murdered. Some international aid groups promptly stopped
employing Afghan women, and though many women were infuriated, most
complied after being intimidated by the violent attacks. Soon afterward,
another edict in Peshawar forbade Afghan women to "walk with pride" or
walk in the middle of the street and said they must wear the hijab, the Arab
black head and body covering and half-face veil. Again, most women felt
they had no choice but to comply.
In 1990, a fatwa from Afghan leaders in Peshawar decreed that women
should not attend schools or become educated, and that if they did, the
Islamic movement would meet with failure. The document measured 2 feet
by 3 feet to accommodate the signatures of about 200 mullahs and political
leaders representing the majority of the seven main mujahedeen parties of
Afghanistan. The leading school for Afghan girls in Peshawar, where many
Afghan refugees still lived, was sprayed with Kalashnikov gunfire. It closed
for months, and its principal was forced into hiding.
When an alliance of mujahedeen groups took over in Kabul in 1992, it
forced women out of news broadcasting and government ministry jobs and
required them to wear veils. But it was the Taliban who institutionalized the
total oppression of women after Kabul fell to them four years later, and who
required the total coverage of the now familiar burqa.
Now, as Afghans, Pakistanis and Americans look to the future of
Afghanistan, most plans call for a broad-based new government giving
representation to all of Afghanistan's ethnic groups and major political
parties, including the Taliban. No one, however, has called for the
participation of women, even though women, after many years of war, now
almost certainly make up the majority of the adult Afghan population.
Afghan women gradually gained rights in the first decades of the 20th
century. Women helped write their country's Constitution in 1964. They
served in parliament and the cabinet and were diplomats, academics,
professionals, judges and even army generals. All of this happened well
before the Soviets arrived in 1979, with their much-touted claim of liberating
Afghan women.
Many of the forces now opposing the Taliban include signatories of the later
fatwas that deprived Afghan women of their rights. History is repeating itself.
Any political process that moves forward without the representation and
participation of women will undermine any chances that the principles of
democracy and human rights will take hold in Afghanistan. It will be the first
clue that little has changed. |
