The Naked Truth » Women’s Right’s In Afghanistan Almost As Bad Now As Under The Taliban

March 3rd, 2006

Women’s Right’s In Afghanistan Almost As Bad Now As Under The Taliban

Posted in The World, Featured, Iraq & Afghanistan, Women's Rights, The Middle East by n. mallory | .

Three years ago, President George Bush told us, “The mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school – today women are free.”But very little has changed. Most women still wear the burqu, not because it’s all the rage, but because they fear they have to. A third of Afghan women in Kabul are forbidden from leaving the house by the male members of the family. It is still next to impossible for a woman to get a divorce in Afghanistan, even from an abusive husband.

Just because we swept in and knocked back the Taliban, doesn’t mean that we instantly changed social attitudes and traditions that have been around probably since before there was tea in Boston Harbor.

Sharifa Daadekhoda’s two-year-old daughter, Krishma, has never seen the outside world. She was born in prison and she’ll be at least three when she is released. Her mother’s crime? Running away from home.

Sharifa was 12 years old when she was forced to marry a 30-year-old man. He immediately began prostituting her, but Sharifa was too ashamed to tell her family and he would beat her if she complained.

After three years she gained enough confidence to run away but was caught 15 minutes from her parent’s house by the Taliban. As a woman travelling on her own, unaccompanied by a male family member, she was committing a crime.

When the Taliban realised she was also fleeing her husband she was instantly imprisoned. She was released after six months but forced to return to her husband.

A year later she fled and was caught again, receiving a longer sentence – only this time her captors had been installed by the American-led coalition. In President Hamid Karzai’s Afghanistan, women are still imprisoned for running away from home.

[…]

“The Taliban were awful but it is also just our way. In the villages a woman will be stoned to death if it is thought she is friendly with a man – this has been happening with or without the Taliban,” says Sharifa’s cellmate, 24-year-old Nouria.

[…]

But there are a few signs of change. For the first time in the country’s history there is a Ministry for Women’s Affairs, Kabul’s first women-run radio station was launched this week and there is even a women’s fitness club.

Last month saw the opening of Afghanistan’s first job centre for women. Business has been slow. Since the fall of the Taliban, only 2-3% of women have returned to work.

“You can rebuild the city but you can’t change attitudes,” says Alischah Paenda, deputy head of a mission for AGEF, a German non-governmental organisation (NGO) partly funded by Britain, which is involved in setting up the job centre with the Ministry for Women’s Affairs.

“Jobs for women are very limited. Most women are not allowed to leave the house. And if they are allowed out, they can’t work in fields dominated by men as their families don’t want them mixing with the opposite sex.”

As most sectors in Afghanistan are male dominated, it’s a catch-22 situation. “Even if you work for an NGO you’re not considered very pure. It gives you a bad reputation,” Paenda says.

Another obstacle for the job centre is finding qualified women – after years of being banned from education, 90% of Afghan women are illiterate. Even today, centuries-old marriage traditions mean that 60% of Afghan girls are forced into marriage before they reach their 16th birthday and few husbands will allow their wives to go to school.

[…]

[Dr Massouda] Jalal works more than 12 hours a day with one of the smallest ministerial budgets. She says women’s rights have been ignored by the inter national community, which has assumed women have attained instant freedom since the fall of the Taliban.

“The West believes in equal rights, but why don’t they help us bring it here?” says Jalal. Of all the ministries, hers has the fewest foreign workers – vital for imparting knowledge in an emerging country. [“Afghan women still in chains under Karzai” (Sunday Herald)]