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Posted on 11/28/2001, 10:41:09 PM by laureldrive

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 28 2001 The Times of London

West's feminists under fire from female general

FROM STEPHEN FARRELL IN KABUL

THE general leans forward in the gathering gloom, her eyes glinting with anger, and delivers a surprise attack on an unexpected foreign enemy.

... General Suhaila Siddiq, 60, sighs with exasperation at Western feminists and their obsession with the burka, the all-enveloping veil whose forcible use symbolised for many outsiders the Taleban’s oppressive rule.

“The first priority should be given to education, primary school facilities, the economy and reconstruction of the country but the West concentrates on the burka and whether the policies of the Taleban are better or worse than other regimes,” she says dismissively. “Let these things be decided by history.”

She believes that the burka, which was worn long before the Taleban and still is by most women around Kabul, is not the battlefield upon which to fight their war.

General Siddiq is Afghanistan’s only woman general, a surgeon, hospital director and heroine to a generation of young women who remained in the country....

Now head of the Women and Children’s Hospital in Kabul, she is scornful of exiled Afghan women’s rights campaigners and Western feminists who champion their agenda. ...

Of Hillary Clinton, another supposed advocate, she simply says: “She cannot defend her own rights against her husband. How can she defend the rights of my country?” At the 400-bed hospital in Kabul, where she now heads a separate women’s section, her colleagues speak reverentially of the woman who took on the Taleban on their own ground.

...

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