First lady at UN beyond the burqa in Afghanistan

Reuters | Friday, March 8, 2002 | By Evelyn Leopold

[JohnHuang2]

UNITED NATIONS, March 8 (Reuters) - Flogged, draped in an enveloping burqa and deprived of education and employment, Afghan women hope to emerge from the twilight zone of the Taliban, with first lady Laura Bush now championing their cause.

Bush makes her debut address at the United Nations on Friday to commemorate International Women's Day after promoting the rights of Afghan women for months, an unexpected consequence of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

In November she delivered the weekly White House radio address, the first wife of a president to do so, saying the plight of women and children is Afghanistan "is a matter of deliberate human cruelty, carried out by those who seek to intimidate and control."

"All of us have an obligation to speak out," she said.

Bush then invited a group of 12 Afghan women, in Washington for a leadership workshop, over to the White House, where she offered them a tour and spoke to them for an hour. She has mentioned their plight in various forums since then.

Her predecessor, Hillary Clinton, in one of several visits to the United Nations, gave a similar speech in March 1999, saying oppression of women by Afghanistan's Taliban was not cultural but criminal. She last appeared at a U.N. women's event in June 2000 while she was running for the U.S. Senate from New York and was treated like a rock star.

But the United States and the United Nations have their work cut out for them in promoting equality for women in Afghanistan, where some anti-Taliban factions are considered only a degree less conservative and less violent than their purist predecessors.

According to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the demise of the Taliban has not necessarily diminished the "culture of violence" in the central Asian country.

U.S. military intervention and the routing of the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States have given Afghan women an opportunity to begin claiming their rights, beyond the wearing of the burqa, Annan said in a report.

"Afghan women themselves considered other forms of discrimination, such as the ban on employment and education, to be of greater significance," he wrote.

In anticipation of International Women's Day, some 100 women doctors, engineers, journalists and other professionals held a conference in Kabul on Monday to demand a more meaningful role for women.

And on Friday up to 800 Afghan women from all over the country are coming to Kabul for Women's Day celebrations, something that would have been impossible under the Taliban.

One of every 15 Afghan women dies in childbirth, with birth control to space the number of children barely known, U.N. figures show. Reproductive health, however, is a touchy subject with the Bush administration, which is withholding $34 million in congressionally-authorized funds for the U.N. Population fund, headed by Thoraya Ahmed Obaid of Saudi Arabia.

[JohnHuang2]

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