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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Win Smith who wrote (152009)	11/18/2004 11:31:17 PM
From: steve dietrich	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Maybe Bush will will work out an "Arms for Drugs" exchange, the Repubs. are pretty handy at that sort of thing.

To: Win Smith who wrote (152009)	11/19/2004 1:16:16 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 281500

Lest we forget.........The Taliban versus the poppy... The Taliban's bravest opponents An underground resistance of Afghan women risks torture and execution to alert the world to the regime's atrocities. One freedom fighter tells Salon her story. By Janelle Brown - - - - - - - - - - October 02, 2001 \| The film footage is wobbly and blurry but stunning: A soccer stadium in Afghanistan is packed with people, but there is no match today. Instead, a pickup truck drives into the stadium with three women, shrouded in burqas, cowering in the back. Armed men in turbans force a woman from the truck, and make her kneel at the penalty line on the field. Confused and unable to see, the woman tries to look behind just as a rifle is pointed against the back of her head. With no fanfare whatsoever, she is shot dead. The shaky video camera captures the cheering crowd as people rise to their feet, hoping to get a better view of the corpse on the ground. The blue folds of the burqa begin to stain red with blood. This public execution is some of the most shocking film ever seen on television; it is perhaps the best document that the West has of atrocities committed by the Taliban. It is just one part of an astonishing hour-long documentary called "Beneath the Veil," currently in heavy rotation on CNN. Filmed by the half-Afghan British reporter Saira Shah, who traveled undercover to Afghanistan last year, "Beneath the Veil" neatly captures the horror of life under the Taliban -- the public executions for infractions as minor as prostitution or adultery, the brutality of fundamentalist police, the slaughter of civilians unlucky enough to live on the front line of the civil war with the Northern Alliance. In documenting life under the Taliban, Shah went into the homes of the Afghan people and onto the battlefields, cleverly evading the Department of Vice and Virtue, which would have thrown her in jail for filming illegally (all unsanctioned filming is forbidden). She visited territory occupied by the Northern Alliance, and visited a village where the Taliban had brutally murdered dozens of civilians just weeks earlier -- a local wedding photographer had filmed the scene as villagers buried rotting bodies that had been scalped and mutilated. There, Shah also interviewed three teenage girls whose mother had been shot dead by the Taliban. They were so traumatized by the atrocities that the Taliban subsequently inflicted upon them that two of them would no longer speak. But some of the most heartstopping footage in "Beneath the Veil," including film of the execution of the women in the soccer stadium, was captured not by Shah but by an Afghan underground organization which assisted her in her work. Indeed, Shah's documentary would not have been possible were it not for the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), an underground organization whose members risk their lives every day in attempts to undermine the Taliban and publicize its brutality. RAWA was originally founded in 1977 as an Afghan feminist group focused on women's rights, but its mandate broadened when fundamentalists rose to power. Determined to expose the frightening abuses of the Taliban, women in the group began to hide video cameras under their burqa and document the executions and public floggings which take place every day under the Taliban. They also smuggle female journalists like Shaila Shah and Eve Ensler, writer/director of "The Vagina Monologues," into the country, in hopes of bringing attention to their cause. In defiance of the Taliban's law forbidding education for women, RAWA also runs clandestine home-based schools for girls; for women, who are forbidden to work, RAWA teaches handicrafts and sells them online. In the refugee camps in Pakistan, RAWA also provides medical assistance, housing and education for impoverished and terrified fugitives of Taliban rule. RAWA, the most prominent Afghan-run organization to oppose the Taliban, has become one of the fundamentalists' greatest enemies. Perhaps the aspect of the group most infuriating to its opponents -- and a surprising key to its effectiveness -- is that it consists entirely of women, nearly 2,000 in Afghanistan and Pakistan, who use the cover of their burqas and the seeming powerlessness of their status to strategic advantage. By traveling with RAWA, Shah got a first-hand view of what it's like to be a woman living under the Taliban, and she was invited into RAWA's secret schools and illegal meetings. She also got access to its library of video footage -- which includes not just the film of the execution of the women, but footage of the public hanging of three men in the same soccer stadium. (The soccer stadium was funded by international aid groups who wanted to raise the spirits of the Afghan people; instead, the Taliban is using it only for executions. One Taliban official told Shah that if the aid groups felt that the stadium should be used for soccer, they should build the Taliban an extra stadium for executions.) Next page \| A lot of young girls commit suicide because they are helpless and hopeless dir.salon.com