Hard won rights for Afghan women likely to be bargained away with Taliban

Nashville Herald ^ | 3/9/12

[SmithL]

• Outrage over Karzai endorsement of edict on womens rights
• President endorsed and promoted Ulema Council edict
• Significant, recent, advances for women at extreme risk

Human rights groups are up in arms about Afghan President Karzai's very public support this week for a crackdown on womens' rights in his country.

The move by the Afghanistan government, which curiously coincided with International Women's Day, has dismayed many who have applauded the advancement of women in Afghanistan in the years since the U.S.-led invasion of 2001 which toppled the Taliban.

The head of the Save the Children Fund Jasmine Whitbread (pictured) says she is "gravely concerned" over the muted response about the Karzai government's stance.

The edict by the Ulema Council requires women to wear traditional Islamic hijab dress and not take any prominent place in society. Women should not travel without a male chaperone, nor should they mix with men in places of education, the workplace, or in public. Women should be treated as secondary to men, the edict says.

The hard-won gains of recent years may well be lost as these new "values" are brought in.

"A decade ago not a single formal girls' school in Afghanistan was functioning; now over 2.5 million girls are in school," Whitbread says.

"Opening the doors to the education and vocational sectors has proliferated into new active roles for women in the country, including training sessions for midwives; training in nutritional practices; the promotion of teaching, sewing, knitting, and embroidery; and support for small-scale women's enterprises such as honey production, yoghurt processing, and the marketing of fruits, jam, saffron, and other quality products."

"As I saw for myself recently, thanks to these educational and vocational advances, Afghanistan today is in many ways a more progressive, pluralistic society than it has been for decades," said the Save the Children chief. "Women now represent a quarter of both houses of parliament and, although much work remains to be done, women's civil society groups have grown in influence and credibility, which has had positive resonance throughout Afghanistan."

"There are now around 3,000 trained midwives and 10,000 women who serve as community health workers in the country. Thanks to these women, more Afghan families are receiving basic health care services, such as vital vaccines which can prevent children in their vulnerable early years from catching life threatening illnesses like pneumonia. Fewer women are giving birth alone, more children are sleeping under malaria nets, and the warning signs for tuberculosis and acute diarrhoea are being picked up faster."

As the departure of international forces in 2014 approaches, many Afghan women look to the future with fear. "They worry that the troop pullout signals the end of interest in Afghanistan, and with it the international commitment to push the Afghan government to promote and protect women's rights," says Heather Barr, the head of Afghanistan researh for Human Rights Watch. "Also likely to decrease is the foreign aid that pays for schools and clinics that have changed many lives. Afghan women fear being abandoned again by the rest of the world, as they were during the Taliban era," says Barr.

The prospect of a truce between the Afghan government and the Taliban which is become increasingly likely will almost certainly lead to an erosion of womens' rights.

What is of serious concern to the human rights and womens interest groups is the endorsement of the measures by Karzai. The Afghan president's embracing of the edict was surprising, particularly with the extent to which he made sure his views were made known. The Ulema Council statement was distributed by officials of the president's office. It was also posted on the presidential palace Web site, and was distributed by Karzai's represnetatives to media outlets. Then on Tuesday Mr Karzai publicly defended the edict in discussions with the media.

"President Karzai has a mixed record on women's rights, says HRW's Barr. "He committed Afghanistan to an international convention promising equal rights for women and pushed through by decree the 2009 law making violence against women a crime. He recently spoke out on two high-profile cases of violence against women."

"On the other hand," says Barr, "in the run-up to the 2009 presidential election he curried favor with hard-liners by signing the Shia Personal Status Law, which, for Afghanistan's Shia minority, gives a husband the right to withdraw maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to obey sexual demands, grants guardianship of children exclusively to men, and requires women to have permission from their husbands to work. Some women fear that Karzai is using the Ulema Council statement to send a message about what compromises he is ready to make with the Taliban."

Barr says that with international interest in Afghanistan waning, the negotiations with the Taliban in the offing, and Karzai's endorsement of the Ulema Council's statement, Afghan women are more vulnerable than at any time in the past 10 years.

She says U.S. President Obama and other backers of the Afghan government should make it clear that they will not support any deals that sacrifice women's rights, and press Karzai to make his position clear. "The risks for Afghan women are too high to do anything less," she says.

Save the Children Fund chief Whitbread agrees. "Having made all these steps forward, we must do all that we can to protect and enhance women's rights in the country so that they can continue to play a crucial role in the protection and advancement of Afghanistan's future," she said.

"It would be a tragedy and a travesty if the rights of women and children were sacrificed at this stage, after all these years of progress," Whitbread added.

[dfwgator]

Seems to me the women in Afghanistan had it better when Bush was in office, but the Nags will never admit it.

[jersey117]

Laura Bush was a true advocate for the women of Afghanistan.

[Razwan]

What a f*cking waste of American lives, resources and time

[Travis McGee]

For women, Islam means sexual slavery, forced marriage to old uncles, incest, inbreeding, rape and dishonor killings.

It’s amazing that our own “feminists” hate Western values more than they love their sisters living under the boot and lash of Mohammed’s insane rape and murder cult.

[panthermom]

It is because western women are both bullies and cowards. It is safe for libs such as Sandra Fluke to take on the Catholic church over Birth Control here in the US, but she does not have the guts to take on the Muslims over the true oppression of women because she will not put her own life on the line for her cause!

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Yesterday's WSJ featured a page one story on how the Afghan Air Force is using US supplied airplanes to smuggle drugs and weapons.
Are we saps or what ?

[Razwan]

yeah, I saw that. Did 3 combat tours over there, starting in 01...had high hopes, man, was I delusional

[Impy]

Quite. Isn’t it lovely how the Taliban is still around over 10 years later.

I wonder if the Secretary of State has anything to say. Or maybe she’d rather bring Karzai a cup of coffee like a good little secretary.

Coffee, I mean Yak’s milk and bourbon or whatever that slimebag drinks.

[Mercat]

I remember seeing a photo of a woman who had just voted when this war had just moved into the “nation building stage.” I knew then that the US couldn’t permanently maintain a culture shift but I know that the woman I saw would treasure that experience and would tell her granddaughters some day what she did. Once this seed is planted, it will grow, even in darkness. These little girls now know how to read, a lot of them, and they will read, even in secret. The camel’s nose is in the tent. It may take generations but it will happen. So thank you George and Laura Bush.

Then I think of the little girls and boys in our inner city here in the KCMO metro. I heard this from the mayor, Sly James, this week - in California, the people planning the building of prison cells use the literacy rate of 3rd graders there to decide how many cells to build. In KCMO, the 3rd graders who read at or above their level are less than 50%.

[Karliner]

Likely? Likely? What a crock. It will happen when we leave. No doubt in my mind.

[Mr Rogers]

I was there for 6 months in 2007. I entered an optimist. I left believing the most moral option was to nuke the country, and let its 20,000 years of glowing in the dark be a warning...