November 14th, 2003
Prisoners in their own homes
By Katherine Heine


Afghan girls walk to school in Kabul.
Photo by AHMAD MASOOD

LONDON (AlertNet) – In Kabul, under the watchful eyes of NATO forces, women can walk alongside men, hold jobs and send their daughters to school. Hopes are high that Afghanistan’s first attempt at a democratic constitution will deliver even more freedoms.

Women elsewhere are not so lucky. In rural communities controlled by repressive warlords, many are forced to submit to intrusive gynaecological exams if seen with men outside their families, and girls have set themselves on fire to avoid being sold into marriage.

Women’s rights groups say the good intentions of Afghanistan’s new constitution, unveiled in draft form this month, will come to little unless the warlords are toppled and peacekeeping forces are expanded throughout Afghanistan’s 32 provinces.

“There is fighting all over the country,” said Mamizha Naderi, administrative director of Women for Afghan Women (WAW), a New York-based NGO working to create opportunities for Afghan women.

“Woman in Kabul feel safer because the peacekeeping troops protect them from fundamentalists, but outside of Kabul women do not go outside. There is no security.

“The only way to bring peace and security to Afghanistan is to expand the peacekeeping troops. I just don’t understand why they are not doing it. They did it in Kosovo and Bosnia. Why are they not doing it in Afghanistan?”

Two years after the U.S.-led removal of the hardline Taliban regime, hopes for change focus on the Loya Jirga, or traditional Afghan grand council, which will vote next month on whether to adopt the new constitution.

The draft is now being circulated throughout the provinces as Afghans prepare to elect Constitutional Loya Jirga representatives. Women’s groups will choose 64 of the assembly’s 500 members, while Afghan President Hamid Karzai is required to appoint 25 women.

Women have had unprecedented input in drafting the constitution. They held two of nine seats on a board created last year by President Hamid Karzai to outline the ideological framework of the constitution, and seven seats of a 35-member review commission.

While the Constitutional Review Commission says it has tried to incorporate women’s rights into the draft and sought recommendations from ordinary women, pressure groups say that without nationwide security, whatever rights it offers will be little more than a luxury for a minority of Afghan women.

'FUNDAMENTALIST WARLORDS'

“Regardless of what is being said in the constitution, the most important question is its implementation in the society,” said Tahmeena Saryal, a member of Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), a group lobbying for political and social rights for Afghan women.

Speaking from Kabul, Saryal told AlertNet: “Our fear is that we still have the Northern Alliance warlords and fundamentalists in the government and we don’t think that any constitution would become useful for our people through a fundamentalist government.”

Human Rights Watch has criticised the United States and other countries for giving powerful positions in the current government to leaders of the Northern Alliance -- anti-Taliban forces concentrated in Northern Afghanistan -- in return for enlisting their help to overthrow the Taliban.

A Human Rights Watch report faults the United States for overlooking allegations that the Northern Alliance has been linked to human rights violations and is arguably as oppressive as the Taliban, blamed by Washington for sheltering the al Qaeda network linked to the September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. landmarks.

“The United States and the international community, as major power brokers in Afghanistan, have put too little pressure on military leaders outside of Kabul to obey President Karzai’s authority, to uphold human rights standards or to relinquish power,” the report says.

“Their continued funding, joint operations, and fraternising with warlords has sent, at best, mixed messages about their goals and intentions.”

The shift in power from the fundamentalist Taliban to equally extremist Northern Alliance governors has made progress for women slow or non-existent in many rural communities, especially the southeast, leaving many women frightened prisoners in their own homes the report says.

RIGHTS ABUSES

The report quotes a woman from Paghman, a rural district west of Kabul: “We couldn’t go out during the Taliban. Now we are free and we can go out, but we don’t.”

The southeastern and western regions of Afghanistan were most affected by Taliban rule and continue to have the greatest support for Islamic fundamentalism, the report says.

Warlords have kept an oppressive hand over the people in nearly 80 percent of the country, WAW’s Mamizha Naderi said.

“These are the same people who raped women -- everything they could do against their human rights,” she said. “Now they are in power and supplying the police force. Everyone is afraid, not just women but men.”

While there have been improvements and Afghanistan recently celebrated the unprecedented number of girls in school -- an estimated one million -- rape and forced marriage are on the rise again and many women continue to wear the burqa for security, RAWA’s website says.

“Hospitals are open, but they are dirty, filthy and there is not enough medicine,” Saryal said. “It is better because women have a choice now, but outside of Kabul people are scared to send their daughters to school because of security.

“Clearly it is better than how it was under the Taliban since we don’t have the official restrictions. Now women are not forced to wear the burqa, although that was never the main tragedy of Afghan women as it was portrayed by the western media.”

The imposition of wearing the all-enveloping burqa is overshadowed by reports of women being nearly beaten to death for showing skin, even accidentally, among other human rights abuses.

SUSTAINABLE PEACE

Last year, the Los Angeles Times said an average of three girls a week were brought to Afghan hospitals after trying to burn themselves to death to avoid forced marriage, many with burns covering more than 40 percent of their bodies.

Women in Kabul are free to talk in public without fear of persecution, but elsewhere it is common for women to be hauled into hospitals by religious police to undergo gynaecological examinations for the purpose of “chastity checks”, according to a Human Rights Watch Report published in 2002.

Naderi said that for peace to be sustained, it was vital to increasing security forces in Afghanistan and target human rights programmes at both men and women.

“NGOs are focusing on women but not men,” she said. “I think the first step is to expand peacekeeping troops so everyone feels safe. The other thing is that they should try to educate the men also. They are not doing that at all yet.”

For many organisations, the creation of a democratic constitution is an opportunity for the government to affirm its commitment to women’s rights and renew its dedication to including women in the reconstruction process.

“In rural areas we don’t see much improvement in women’s situations and most of the Afghan population lives in rural areas, so we need a government that would really focus on changing and helping women,” Saryal said.

“One cannot just say, ‘There have been these changes for urban women and that is the liberation of Afghanistan.’”

'ALL PEOPLE' MEANS 'MEN'

WAW, together with other NGOs, worked this year with Afghan women representatives from every province in the country to create an Afghan women’s bill of rights.

The document included mandatory education for women through secondary school, health care for women with attention to reproductive rights, the right to divorce and equal pay for equal work.

They presented the bill of rights to the Constitutional Commission and Karzai and were assured by both that all the rights stated in the document, except a request for a federal law establishing 18 as the legal marriage age, would be included in the draft constitution, Naderi said.

Naderi criticised the broad terms used in the draft constitution, and said it should specifically define women's rights to education and health care.

“They don’t want it to say 'all people' or 'all human beings' because in Afghanistan that means men and not women. Women are not considered on the same level as men,” she said.

Progressive women participants of the Emergency Loya Jirga, set up in 2001 to establish the transitional government and outline preliminary objectives for the constitution, were sometimes not allowed to speak and were discouraged from participating in official debates and processes, Saryal said.

She is worried that history will repeat itself, and said most of the women given the opportunity to speak and participate were from the Northern Alliance or other fundamentalist groups.

“The more women representatives in the Constitutional Loya Jirga, the better it would be. The question is who are these women and will they really represent Afghan women,” Saryal said.