Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)
 Public execution while people shouted "God is great." |
Women
in Afghanistan
|
Women
in Afghanistan
The extent to which the Taliban regime has threatened the freedoms and
needs of Afghan women is unparalleled in recent history. Taliban policies
of systematic discrimination against women seriously undermine the health
and well-being of Afghan women. Such discrimination and the suffering
it causes constitute an affront to the dignity and worth of Afghan women,
and humanity as a whole.
The people of Afghanistan have suffered extensive human rights violations in the course of the past twenty years. The Soviet invasion and occupation from 1979 to 1989, aided by Afghan communist military and civilian collaborators, brought mass killings, torture, disappearance, the largest recorded refugee outflow in history, and a scourge of landmines. The subsequent civil war, fueled by support from neighboring countries and other regional powers for various factions following the collapse of the Soviet-backed regime in 1992, witnessed extensive abuses by the armed factions vying for power, including the virtual destruction of the capital city, Kabul, from rocket shelling, aerial bombardment and mortaring. Indiscriminate use of force, torture, killing in detention of both civilians and combatants, the extensive laying of antipersonnel landmines, and the arbitrary exercise of authority principally through military force characterized Afghanistan for much of this period.
In November 1994, a group named "Taliban" emerged as a military and political
force. Taliban, which means "students of Muslim religious studies," are
poorly educated rural Pashtun youths mostly recruited from refugee camps
and religious schools (madrasas) in neighboring Pakistan. This movement,
led by Mullah Mohammed Omar, a 31-year-old religious leader, claims to
be restoring peace and security through the imposition of a strict Islamic
order. With no functioning judicial system, many municipal and provincial
authorities use the Taliban's interpretation of Shari'a (Islamic law)
and traditional tribal codes of justice.
The Taliban is the first faction laying claim to power in Afghanistan,
that has targeted women for extreme repression and punished them brutally
for infractions. To our knowledge, no other regime in the world has methodically
and violently forced half of its population into virtual house arrest,
prohibiting them on pain of physical punishment from showing their faces,
seeking medical care without a male escort, or attending school.
After taking control of the capital city of Kabul on September 26, 1996,
the Taliban issued edicts forbidding women to work outside the home, attend
school, or to leave their homes unless accompanied by a husband, father,
brother, or son. In public, women must be covered from head to toe in
a burqa, a body-length covering with only a mesh opening to see and breathe
through. Women are not permitted to wear white (the color of the Taliban
flag) socks or white shoes, or shoes that make noise while women are walking.
Also, houses and buildings in public view must have their windows painted
over if females are present in these places. 
Furthermore, in January 1997, Taliban officials announced a policy of
segregating men and women into separate hospitals. This regulation was
not strictly enforced until September 1997 when the Ministry of Public
Health ordered all hospitals in Kabul to suspend medical services to the
city's half million women at all but one, poorly-equipped hospital for
women. Female medical workers also were banned from working in Kabul's
22 hospitals. The temporary Rabia Balkhi facility was designated the sole
facility available to women. At that time the facility had 35 beds and
no clean water, electricity, surgical equipment, X-ray machines, suction,
or oxygen. An international uproar ensued, and in November 1997, after
two months of negotiations with the International Committee of the Red
Cross, the Taliban partially rescinded its directive and agreed to reopen
some of the hospitals and make available limited beds therein. Despite
the reversal however, Taliban gender restrictions--preventing women from
moving freely and prohibiting women from working--continue to interfere
with the delivery of health services and humanitarian assistance to women
and girls.
The Taliban's edicts restricting women's rights have had a disastrous
impact on Afghan women and girls' access to education, as well as health
care. One of the first edicts issued by the regime when it rose to power
was to prohibit girls and women from attending school. Humanitarian groups
initiated projects to replace through philanthropy what prior governments
had afforded as a right to both sexes. Hundreds of girl's schools were
established in private homes and thousands of women and girls were taught
to sew and weave.
On June 16, 1998, the Taliban ordered the closing of more than 100 privately
funded schools where thousands of young women and girls were receiving
training in skills that would have helped them support their families.
The Taliban issued new rules for nongovernmental organizations providing
the schooling: education must be limited to girls up to the age of eight,
and restricted to the Qur'an.
Taliban policies that restrict women's rights and deny basic needs are
often brutally and arbitrary enforced by the "religious police" (Department
for the Propagation of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice) usually in
the form of summary, public beatings. In addition, Afghan staff members
of international organizations have reportedly faced threats, harassment,
beating and arrest in the course of conducting their professional duties.
PHR's researcher when visiting Kabul in 1998, saw a city of beggars --
women who had once been teachers and nurses now moving in the streets
like ghosts under their enveloping burqas , selling every possession and
begging so as to feed their children. It is difficult to find another
government or would-be government in the world that has deliberately created
such poverty by arbitrarily depriving half the population under its control
of jobs, schooling, mobility, and health care. Such restrictions are literally
life threatening to women and to their children.
The Taliban's abuses are by no means limited to women. Thousands of men
have been taken prisoner, arbitrarily detained, tortured, and many killed
and disappeared. Men are beaten and jailed for wearing beards of insufficient
length (that of a clenched fist beneath the chin), are subjected to cruel
and degrading conditions in jail, and suffer such punishments as amputation
and stoning. Men are also vulnerable to extortion, arrest, gang rape,
and abuse in detention because of their ethnicity or presumed political
views. The Taliban's Shari'a courts lack even a semblance of due process,
with no provisions for legal counsel and frequent use of torture to extract
confessions.
Afghanistan's history of civil war and particularly the period of anarchy
between 1992 and 1995 following the collapse of the Communist regime has
contributed to the perception outside Afghanistan that while the Taliban
is repressive, at least it has stopped the war and ended violent crime
in the capital.
That is the wrong assessment of Afghanistan under the Taliban. For nearly
twenty years, the Afghan people have suffered the health consequences
of armed conflict and human rights violations. That Taliban officials
now claim to be "restoring peace" to Afghanistan is perhaps one of the
cruelest ironies of our time, as they have virtually imprisoned Afghan
women in their homes and threatened their very survival. The "peace" imposed
on that portion of the country under Taliban rule is the peace of the
burqa, the quiet of women and girls cowering in their homes, and the silence
of a citizenry terrorized by the Taliban's violent and arbitrary application
of their version of Shari'a law.
According
to UNICEF's State of the World's Children Report, Afghanistan has the
fourth worst record in under five child mortality, the infant mortality
rate being 152 per 1,000 live births.
According to a survey conducted by the UNHCR in 1997, there are an estimated
35,000 street children in Kabul alone. More than 250,000 children are
reported dying every year of malnutrition alone in Afghanistan.
Every three hours or so, a child is blown up as a result of more than ten million landmines planted all over Afghanistan.
In a group of refugee children, after being asked to raise their hands if any of them have had their parents killed by the Taliban, seven out of 10 raised their hand to show they had lost a parent. A recent United Nations Children's Fund report says that 72 percent of Afghan children have lost a relative in the last four years of fighting.
Above:
Three girls in a northern Afghanistan village said Taliban soldiers shot
their mother when she resisted the occupation of her house claiming that
the area was covered in snow and she couldn't keep her daughters out.
After leaving her there for two days they left the house. When the girls
were asked what happened to them during those 2 days, they refuse to answer.
( Picture provided by CNN from documentary "Beneath the veil".
Please check CNN.com
for more details on this remarkable film by Journalist Saira Shah )
RAWA
RAWA,
the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, was established
in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1977 as an independent political/social organization
of Afghan women fighting for human rights and for social justice in Afghanistan.
The founders were a number of Afghan woman intellectuals under the sagacious
leadership of Meena who in 1987 was assassinated in Quetta, Pakistan,
by Afghan agents of the then KGB in connivance with fundamentalist band
of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Since
the overthrow of the Soviet-installed puppet regime in 1992 the focus
of RAWA’s political struggle has been against the fundamentalists’ and
the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban’s criminal policies and atrocities against
the people of Afghanistan in general and their incredibly ultra-male-chauvinistic
and anti-woman orientation in particular. Apart from the political challenges
facing RAWA, tremendous social and relief work amongst unimaginably traumatised
women and children.
To learn more about RAWA and how to help, go to:
http://www.rawa.org
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Content
provided by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR)and RAWA.
Pictures by RAWA
