Vida Samadzai ... "beauty for a cause".

'Liberating' Afghan Women

Kalpana Sharma

SO, have Afghan women been "liberated" now that the first Afghan woman in three decades has participated in a beauty contest? A media fixated on trivia has predictably picked out a United States-based Afghan woman, Vida Samadzai, who participated in a little known beauty pageant in Manila called Miss Earth 2003 (now that the Universe and the World are exhausted?). Pictures of a weeping Ms Samadzai appeared on the front pages of some Indian newspapers after she was awarded the "Beauty for a cause" award. What was the "cause"? If it is the liberation of Afghan women from decades of oppression, then it is highly unlikely that pictures of Ms Samadzai's bikini-clad image will make a difference. On the contrary, this is likely to make their struggle even more difficult as the ever-present conservative elements in the country seize on such images to reinforce their belief that women are best confined within four walls.

Not surprisingly, while Ms Samadzai's adventures have drawn considerable media attention, how much is the media telling us about the struggles of Afghan women within Afghanistan? If you scour newspapers and magazines of the last three months, you will find practically nothing written about this.

On the contrary, the "liberation" of Afghanistan from the Taliban has still a long way to go before it can make a material difference to the lives of the majority of women living in that country. We in India cannot come close to understanding the trials poor women, in particular, have been through in the last three decades as Afghanistan has swung from one extreme to another. Siba Shakib's book Afghanistan, Where God Only Comes to Weep, reads almost like a work of fiction because you just cannot believe that women in that country could have endured such suffering and still come out alive and with a level of optimism for the future.

The fact that at least some women within Afghanistan are still willing to keep alive hope for the future emerged during a recent meeting of 45 Afghan women from all parts of the country that was held in the heartland of the Taliban, Kandahar. These women met to discuss what should go into the new Constitution of Afghanistan. They drafted an Afghan Women's Bill of Rights before the Constitution was finalised and presented it to the Minister for Women's Affairs, Habiba Sarabi, the Constitutional Commission of the Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan, and President Hamid Karzai.

Their Bill of Rights makes interesting reading, because its demands are so basic, rights that we take so much for granted and would not feel that they need reiteration. But given their experience in Afghanistan, it is clear that Afghan women do feel that such rights must be codified.

For instance, they ask that education for women through secondary school be made mandatory and that women are provided up-to-date health services. They ask for security and suggest that sexual harassment in the home or outside are deemed a crime. They also ask for an end to practices such as "bad blood-price", where women are used as compensation for crimes by one family against another. They also demand freedom of speech, freedom to vote and run for office, the rights to marry and divorce according to Islam, equal pay for equal work, right to financial independence and ownership of property, equal representation in the Loya Jirga and Parliament, women's inclusion in the judiciary system, and full rights of inheritance.

In their additional demands, they mention disarmament. That is particularly interesting as today, according to reports, Afghanistan is slowly slipping back into a state of war. According to The Guardian's Jonathan Steele reporting from Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan last month, there is a "low-level civil war" in northern Afghanistan as three main groups controlled by different warlords and all financed and supported by the Americans fight it out. This, he says could "change the map of power". In southern Afghanistan, he reports that there is now "a full-scale war" where the U.S. forces "engage resurgent Taliban forces in the Pashtun heartlands two years after they were supposed to have been defeated". He asks, "How is it possible that the Bush administration could launch its war on international terror while being so unwilling to clip the wings of warlords who inflict terror mainly on other Afghans?" He points out that while in more developed Iraq, people are agitated about the absence of electricity and water, in Afghanistan, where such basic needs have not been met for years, the biggest issue is security.

This is particularly true for women who have suffered the absence of security and the presence of constant conflict for generations. Siba Shakib's book, for instance, which illustrates the lives of Afghan women through the story of one woman, Shirin-Gol, shows how women suffered equally from the atrocities committed by the Taliban and by the different warlords. The women were forced to constantly uproot their families and move to another part of the country in the hope that they would be able to live in peace. But no sooner had they settled down then the "map of power", as Steele puts it, would change, and they would be forced to move again.

Predictably, the male-dominated body given the task of drafting the new Afghan constitution has ignored the Women's Bill of Rights. Instead of heeding the demand of the women, that their rights need specific protection in the Constitution, they have chosen to speak generally of the rights of the Afghan "people". Given that women were not even granted basic human rights under the Taliban, what guarantee is there that in the emerging Afghanistan their lot will be any better? Unfortunately, the news so far is not very good. While the focus of the world media remains on Iraq, the little that we do hear about Afghanistan is about the problems of security and consolidation. There are no windows through which we can peer and decide for ourselves whether a new generation of Afghan women has a chance of standing up and being counted as equal citizens.