"No one listens to us, no one treats us as human beings."
That's the quote Amnesty International uses to head its October
2003 report on the sorry state of women in Afghanistan. Whatever
the American military presence may be accomplishing in that troubled
land, it hasn't done much for the female half of the population.
The women are still getting kicked around.
Reading Amnesty's account of wife beatings and rapes, abductions
and forced marriages, repression and neglect, I'm reminded of
the two proud Afghan women who came to see me during my office
hours at California State Hayward in the winter of 1999. They
looked to me like their nation's best and brightest. But here
they were taking classes at a school far, far from home. Why?
Because that was back when the Taliban were still using whips
on women who allowed an inch of skin to show in the streets of
Kabul.
The United Nations thinks the International Security Assistance
Force in Afghanistan should be expanded to 15,000 members. The
United States refuses to raise the number above the current 4,800.
The Afghan Ministry of Reconstruction estimates that getting the
country up to the poverty level it knew under Soviet occupation
would cost $15 billion over the next 10 years. Fat chance President
Bush will appropriate a tenth that much. As Sen. Joseph Biden
has put it, the Bush administration has "given up the ghost"
in Afghanistan and is allowing the country to slip back into the
hands of the warlords.
What makes me most ashamed about this betrayal of trust is the
plight in which it leaves the women of Afghanistan. As Anne Brodsky
points out in "With All Our Strength," her new study
of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan,
women may have found token participation in the new government,
but they are working against overwhelming odds in simply getting
back to where they were before the Taliban. The Taliban -- whom,
let us remember, the United States brought to power -- took over
a country in which women enjoyed decent status.
My Afghan students speak proudly of mothers who were doctors
or chemists. Half the civil servants in the country were female.
Now, according to the watchdog group Feminist Majority, whatever
progress the American intervention brought for women is rapidly
being lost outside the capital. Feminist Majority reports that,
with American forces hunkering down within the city limits of
Kabul, warlords like Ismail Khan are forcing women of Herat to
wear the burqa again and to have gynecological exams to check
for "illicit" sexual activity. On the other hand, when
women have a legitimate need for medical care -- say,
during childbirth -- UNICEF reports that prudish husbands often
refuse to let male doctors attend their wives, with the result
that Afghanistan is running one of the highest death rates for
child delivery in the world.
When American troops went into Afghanistan, Laura Bush said the
liberation of women should be our highest priority. Well, perhaps
it can still be -- and without waiting for her tardy husband to
get around to it. Suppose we invited the first lady to head a
program for encouraging Afghan women to resettle in the United
States. The deal would be this:
If an Afghan woman makes her way to a U.S. Army base, an office
of the assistance force or through the door of any relief agency
in the country and asks for a plane ticket to the United States,
she gets one, no questions asked.
In the States, she will be received by a consortium of universities
that have agreed to scare up the money for a full college scholarship
plus living expenses. The program would be a sort of gender-based
underground railroad, though neither as clandestine nor as illegal
as the escape routes offered to slaves before our Civil War. If
George or Laura Bush wants to contribute a few federal dollars
and the prestige of their support to the effort, fine. That might
help make a reality of the Afghanistan Freedom Support Act the
president signed into law in 2002.
After all, Sen. Barbara Boxer managed to make the liberation
of Afghan women a "funding priority" under the act,
which authorizes spending $2.3 billion over the next four years.
Here's one way to achieve that goal directly and with minimal
overhead.
Currently, women who flee the country looking for a better future
are apt to wind up as unwelcome guests in one of the refugee camps
in Pakistan. With a diminished number of Afghan men left after
the nation's long wars, they often find no husbands. My students
tell me that many a refugee woman must reluctantly settle for
a marriage of convenience with a male immigrant in the United
States to be admitted to this country. A "save the women"
rescue program would provide another option, one that might even
pay unforeseen dividends for Afghanistan, especially if the new
government succeeds in making it attractive for educated women
to return. Indeed, the program might help achieve that goal by
serving notice to the warlords that if their misogyny continues,
they will see the best and the brightest of their women vanish
and their country will be all the poorer. They may not care; but
why should millions of women suffer for the alpha-male stupidity
of their leaders?
In Aristophanes' "Lysistrata," women exert power by
withholding sexual favors. In a country like Afghanistan, so severely
in need of all the scientific and technical brains it can muster,
women who find their way to a decent education might gain even
greater leverage with the patriarchy back home. They would be
in a position to say, "If you want us back, equality is the
price you'll have to pay."
Theodore Roszak teaches history at California State University,
Hayward. His latest novel is "The Devil and Daniel Silverman."
Mud homes razed to make room for top Afghan
officials
Pamela Constable, Washington Post
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Kabul -- Sayed Ahmad's mud-brick house looks as if it was struck
by an earthquake. The main wall has toppled into his yard, where
the family cow is tethered to an apple tree. Half the roof has
collapsed, and his wife is sweeping rubble into piles.
But this destruction was not an act of God. It was the work of
city bulldozers that were sent in last week to force Ahmad and
20 of his neighbors out of the rudimentary homes they had built
two decades ago. Once cleared, the army-owned land was slated
to be distributed to senior government officials and former militia
commanders to build their own houses.
"The police came in and beat me with their guns when I refused
to leave," said Ahmad, 56, an army officer and father of
six who earns $80 a month. "The machines pushed down the
wall and a wardrobe fell on my little girl. Our holy Korans were
buried under the earth. I have worked for the army for 26 years,
but now the powerful people with guns have humiliated my family
and destroyed our home."
A growing scandal over the tiny community known as Sherpur, spurred
by two sharply critical reports last week from a U.N. housing
expert and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, has
deeply embarrassed the U.S.- backed government. According to the
reports, seven Cabinet ministers and Kabul's mayor received plots
in Sherpur, which abuts the capital's most exclusive neighborhood,
for nominal fees.
The dispute has thrown a spotlight on the widely rumored but
previously undocumented practices of high-level land grabbing,
corrupt municipal real estate dealings and forcible occupation
of properties in the capital, where half the population of 3.2
million does not have adequate housing.
"What happened in Sherpur is a microcosm of what has been
happening all over the city and the country," said Miloon
Kothari, a U.N. specialist on housing and land rights, who spent
several weeks here. His final report accused several senior Afghan
officials, including the powerful defense minister, of active
collusion in official land grabs, and flatly recommended that
they be fired.
In his report, Kothari described a "culture of impunity"
in which Afghan officials and other powerful individuals can seize
homes and refuse to leave them or appropriate valuable public
land for their own profit.
"There is a crisis of housing and a freeze on land allocation,
but that doesn't apply to the wealthy, the well-connected, the
commanders or the drug lords," he said in an interview.
Separately, the human rights commission released a report Sunday
that described a widespread problem of forcible land occupation
and profiteering by "warlords and strong governmental officials."
In the Sherpur case, it listed 29 senior officials and other powerful
individuals who had received plots for nominal fees, including
six Cabinet ministers, the mayor, the Central Bank governor and
two former militia commanders.
Aides to the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said he was infuriated
at the charges. At the weekly Cabinet meeting Monday, aides said,
he ordered a commission appointed to investigate the Sherpur case
and upbraided his ministers on their responsibility to help the
poor rather than enrich themselves.
But two of the senior officials who received plots in Sherpur
called a news conference Monday, during which they denied any
wrongdoing. The officials denounced Kothari for interfering in
Afghan affairs and challenged the work of the human rights commission,
whose chairwoman sat in the audience.
"I believe in human rights. I support human rights. This
is political terrorism," said Anwar Ahady, the governor of
the central bank, who was listed in one of the reports as receiving
one plot of land. Like another official, Education Minister Yonus
Qanooni, Ahady did not deny receiving the land, but said it had
been legally transferred to him on Karzai's orders and that he
had done nothing wrong.
Qanooni said there was a difference between "taking land
by force and being given land by the current rulers." He
demanded an apology from the human rights commission and handed
out copies of a letter from Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. special
envoy to Afghanistan, reproving Kothari for some of his public
comments.
But Brahimi, in a hastily called meeting Monday with several
journalists, said he did not disagree with the substance of Kothari's
findings. He condemned the destruction of the Sherpur houses as
unacceptable and said he had complained to Afghan officials about
the problem of official land grabs and illegal occupation of homes.
The disclosures of high-level land deals and giveaways came as
the Afghan capital suffers from a shelter crisis of catastrophic
proportions. According to officials, the capital's population
has nearly doubled in the past two years, largely because of returning
refugees, and about half the population lives in "informal"
homes without electricity or water, such as tents and ruins.
City planners have designed blueprints of low-cost housing projects
but have no funds to build them. The Kabul municipality has turned
away thousands of returned refugees who say they have old deeds
to public land plots.
"The housing supply in Kabul does not meet even 10 percent
of the demand," said Nasir Saberi, the deputy minister for
housing and urban development. "We are trying to relieve
the pressure by allowing people to rebuild their old houses in
some districts, but people are desperate, living 12 and 14 in
one room, while some officials and commanders are distributing
land to their friends, and there is nothing we can do about it."
It remains unclear how the situation in Sherpur increased to
such a dramatic confrontation and who ordered the land to be distributed
to the senior officials. Ahady, Qanooni and others have said the
order came from Karzai, but the president's spokesman strongly
denied that Monday.
The spokesman, Jawad Luddin, said Karzai had spoken very clearly
to the Cabinet, declaring that no official had the right to individually
bestow, sell or occupy city land.
The Sherpur houses were built on land belonging to the Defense
Ministry.
The
Revolutionary Association
of the Women of
Afghanistan
by
Anne Brodsky
Book report:
Behind the Scenes
UMBC’s Anne Brodsky Tells the Story of Afghan Women
By Charles Rose
Retriever Weekly Guest Writer
In the two years since the horrific attacks of Sept. 11 and the
ensuing American invasion of Afghanistan, the world’s attention
has shifted away from the plight of the Afghan people, who have
been ravaged by decades of war. But even before Sept. 11, Anne
Brodsky, an associate professor of psychology and affiliate professor
of women’s studies at UMBC, was already risking her life
to tell the story of Afghan women under the oppression of the
Taliban and other fundamentalist Islamic factions and she continues
that fight today.
Brodsky’s research background studying the resilience of
women and the role of communities in resisting societal risks
such as violence, poverty and racism led to her current work with
the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).
RAWA is a humanitarian and political women’s organization
that has operated clandestinely in Afghanistan and Pakistan for
the past 26 years. Brodsky has been working with the group for
over three years to help raise awareness of the plight of women
who still risk their lives when they stand up for basic freedoms
like going to school, having a job, wearing modern clothes, and
being able to leave the house unescorted by a male.
As part of these efforts, Brodsky has traveled to underground
girls’ schools, orphanages and refugee camps in Afghanistan
and Pakistan. She has risked her life ? both from the dangers
facing a Western woman in areas controlled by fundamentalist groups,
and from the ongoing fighting and unexploded landmines and ordnance
that litter the countryside.
Recent news items have underscored the relevance of Brodsky’s
work: a report released this summer by Human Rights Watch detailed
how women are still being raped and attacked by Afghan warlords
outside of Kabul and a Newsweek story noted the post Sept. 11
rise in domestic violence in American Muslim families.
Even worse is the apparent resurgence of the Taliban, who have
launched several recent attacks on Afghan border police and girls’
schools from just across the Pakistan border, a development that
doesn’t surprise Brodsky.
"While schools for girls have reopened, only about 32 percent
of the students who returned were girls," she says. "Girls’
schools have been fire bombed and threatened; and forced marriages,
imprisonment of girls and women for attempting to escape abusive
marriages, forced medical chastity tests and other extreme forms
of oppression are ongoing, thus RAWA’s activities and message
are still urgently needed."
Since Sept. 11, Brodsky has continued her research through multiple
trips to the region and by helping to bring members of RAWA to
the United States and UMBC to tell their stories. Earlier this
year, Brodsky published a book about RAWA and her experiences
with the group, With All Our Strength: The Revolutionary Association
of the Women of Afghanistan (Routledge).
Publisher’s Weekly described With All Our Strength as "Groundbreaking...The
first writer with in-depth access to RAWA, Brodsky writes a passionate
narrative...[S]tands out as a lone and important study of a remarkable
organization." Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban, calls it
"A powerful story."
Brodsky will never forget her five months in the field with the
brave women of RAWA. "I gained a much deeper understanding
and appreciation for their struggle, and was able to record the
in-depth stories of real people’s lives under so many years
of oppression, war and trauma," she says. "But more
than being victims, RAWA has empowered women, children and men
to use education as a tool to fight for democracy, freedom, human
rights and peace."
According to Brodsky, the fight for democracy and human rights
in Afghanistan is far from over. "RAWA remains a threatened
group for their outspoken opposition to the oppression of women
and all democratically minded people that continue under the current,
warlord dominated government," she says. "They fervently
hope that the rest of the world will continue to support them
and will not, once again, turn their backs on the long suffering
people of Afghanistan."
Brodsky’s work on behalf of women at UMBC and beyond was
recognized with the 2003 award from the President’s Commission
for Women, one of several presented at UMBC’s 37th Anniversary
Opening.
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