"In parliament, she says, she is often greeted with screams of “kill her” when she stands up to speak, and she has had no shortage of personal threats from fellow MPs."
"Afghanistan’s women lawmakers speak out as conditions worsen," by Clancy Chassey for the Guardian, November 26:
They were walking to school in the southern city of Kandahar, a group of teenage girls discussing a test they had coming up, when two men on a motorcycle sprayed them with a strange liquid. Within seconds a painful tingling began, and there was an unusual smell as the skin of 16-year-old Atifa Biba began to burn.
Her friend rushed over to help her, struggling to wipe the liquid away, when she too was showered with acid. She covered her face, crying out for help as they sprayed her again, trying to aim the acid into her face. The weapon was a water bottle containing battery acid; the result was at least one girl blinded and two others permanently disfigured. Their only crime was attending school.
It was not an isolated incident. For women and girls across Afghanistan, conditions are worsening — and those women who dare to publicly oppose the traditional order now live in fear for their lives.
Member of Parliament (MP) Shukria Barakzai receives regular death threats for speaking out on women’s issues. Talking at her home in central Kabul, she closed the living room door as her three young daughters played in the hall.
“You can’t imagine what it feels like as a mother to leave the house each day and not know if you will come back again,” she said, her eyes welling up as she spoke.
“But there is no choice. I would rather die for the dignity of women than die for nothing. Should I stop my work because there is a chance I might be killed? I must go on, and if it happens it happens,” she said.
Barakzai receives frequent but cryptic warnings about planned suicide attacks on her car, but no help from the government. Officials advise her to stay at home and not go to work, but offer nothing in the way of security assistance, despite her requests. She said warlords in parliament who received similar threats were immediately provided with armored vehicles, armed guards and a safe house by the government.
Afghan women are feeling increasingly vulnerable as the security situation worsens and a growing number of Western and Afghan officials call for the Taliban to join the government.
“We are very worried that, now the government is talking with the Taliban, our rights will be compromised,” said Shinkai Karokhail, an outspoken MP for Kabul. “We must not be the sacrifice by which peace with the Taliban is made.”
Under Taliban rule, up until 2001, women were not allowed to work and were forbidden from venturing outside the home without a male escort.
Afghan women who defy traditional gender roles and speak out against the oppression of women are routinely subject to threats, intimidation and assassination. An increasingly powerful Taliban regularly attacks projects, schools and businesses run by women.
Six weeks ago, Lieutenant-Colonel Malalai Kakar was assassinated in her car on her way to work in Kandahar. She was Afghanistan’s highest-ranking female police officer and a fierce defender of women’s rights. Only 1.5m tall, she was known to have beaten men she found to be abusing their wives. Another senior female police officer was killed in the province of Herat in June.
Talking at a safe house on the outskirts of Kabul, Mullah Zubiallah Akhond, a Taliban commander from the southern province of Uruzgan, said the group’s attacks on women were always political and not based on any desire to target or punish women specifically. [...]
The Islamist group is just one of the many threats facing Afghanistan’s few outspoken female MPs.
“Our parliament is a collection of lords,” Barakzai said. “Warlords, drug lords, crime lords.”
In parliament, she says, she is often greeted with screams of “kill her” when she stands up to speak, and she has had no shortage of personal threats from fellow MPs.
They visit her privately to tell her she will be killed if she continues to speak out on such issues as the right of a woman to have a personal passport (separate from the standard “family passport”) or against compulsory virginity tests for young women, and the right of a man to have custody of a child at two-years old. It is not only men who oppose women in parliament — both Barakzai and Karokhail have faced obstruction from other female MPs on key women’s issues.
Karokhail said that, of the 68 women in the 249-strong parliament, only five were vocal on women’s issues. The majority of women in parliament vote in favor of more traditional legislation that often rules against women’s rights.
Some women now fear the parliament is becoming more conservative towards women.
“Talibani ideas are natural among our people, particularly their vision about women,” Barakzai said.
And to make matters worse, the "new" Afghan constitution itself stipulates that ""no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam" (Chapter 1, Article 3)."
Afghan commentators say President Hamid Karzai, desperate to win next year’s elections, has been bringing former mujahidin commanders into parliament in the hope they will support him at election time.
Most of these former jihadi commanders share the Taliban’s ideas about women and are expected to support legislation that will once again limit women’s freedom. In addition, according to the Taliban commander, the group has a growing number of MPs in parliament lobbying for their policies. [...]
Najla Zewari, who works for the UN’s gender and justice unit, believes violence against women is increasing, fuelled by growing frustrations caused by the economic crisis and lack of security.
She said there had also been a sharp increase in rapes by men who claimed they could not afford the pay the dowry needed to marry. After the public shame of an attack, the victim is usually outcast and the rapist is then the only man who will have the woman as his wife.
It is crimes like this that make many Afghans nostalgic for the harsh justice of Taliban rule. Barakzai countered: “Women were safe, in one sense, under the Taliban — but they were kept as slaves, they were not allowed to do what they wanted even in their own home.”
As the Taliban strengthen, the future for women in Afghanistan looks bleaker. Barakzai said women’s rights, once heralded as the great success of post-invasion Afghanistan, had been sidelined and might suffer more in the struggle to find a solution to the fighting.
Last week, a council of 400 women politicians met in Kabul to discuss this possibility and prepare ways to counter it.
“Our biggest fear at the moment is that the return of Talibani ideas to government will wind back the gains we have made in these last years,” Karokhail said.
"Najla Zewari, who works for the UN’s gender and justice unit, believes violence against women is increasing, fuelled by growing frustrations caused by the economic crisis and lack of security."
more and more each day Muslim women are desiring to be free from the yoke of Islam....as Muslim women seek to be freer, the worse the Muslim men treat them...
freedom for women is a Muslim mans worst nightmare.
To his dying day, the outgoing lame duck President, George W. Bush, will feel proud that he brought "Duhmahcracy" to Afghanistan.
On the assurance of his ignorant and equally dimwitted advisers he was perfectly fine with the insertion of a clause in the Afghan constitution that stated that all laws were to be consistent with Islamic law.
Hey, they're good people. They're people, of faith, right?
There will be a terrible planet wide bloodbath by the middle of this century thanks to invincibly ignorant and uneducable leaders like George W. Bush and many of the equally ignorant elite who have white anted themselves into positions of leadership in the western world's two or three dozen elective juntas.
As bad as it sounds, it's time to cut the muslimahs loose. They don't want our help, and moreover they don't deserve it. Browse muslimahmediawatch.com if you don't believe this. The lack of rigorous thinking, the free slinging of labels like "islamophobe" and "hater," the inability to perceive anything beyond the immediate and specific -- it's very sad, and very telling.
From a Western woman's perspective, it comes down to this: If you believe you are a slave because your book tells you that's what you are, and follow the rituals and dress codes every day that enforce this idea, then there is little anyone can do to "help" you. If muslimahs wish to change their circumstances, they will have to do it the same way American women did.
The first step may be to take the slave insignia off their heads. This may be too much for most of them. It's not our problem, their suffering and deaths are not our fault, and to get involved in their self-inflicted religious drowning is pointless.
Let's face it-some places just aren't ready for real democracy and they never will be. Afghanistan seems to be one such place. The ancient Koranist thinking is just too strong to overcome and as we all know put Koranism and democracy in the same place and the former eats the latter for lunch every single time. I feel bad for those Afghans who want to actually emerge from the shadow of Mo but the majority seems to not care if NATO, the Taliban or the Martians are running things-had they really cared they themselves would have hunted down the Taliban and exterminated them years ago when memories of its brutal rule were still fresh.
Things will only get worse with Karzai in place-he's just like Mushy Raff in playing with both NATO and the Taliban. Now he's trying to make a deal with the devil to keep power. In the end the Satanic Taliban will give him what he deserves.
"The first step may be to take the slave insignia off their heads."
-- from a posting above
But it isn't easy to do so in a society suffused with Islam. It requires, at the very least, a determined despot, a man, one who will, while claiming he is "a Muslim" nonetheless systematically constrains, by putting into place all sorts of laws, Islam as a political and social force. Such a man was Ataturk. He, of course, was a war hero, and he also inherited Turkey at a time when the Ottoman Empire had collapsed, and he could present himself as taming Islam, to the demi-semi-hemi enlightened, as the only way of saving Turkey. And he had the army to prove it, to all those who stood in his way (he did not hesitate to attack imams, and mosques, that opposed him).
The Western world should of course understand that it cannot improve the real lives of people in Muslim-dominated lands without the power of Islam itself being weakened. And Infidels cannot do that. It has to be done from within. And it is more likely to come out, can only come about, if the local government is not seen as a suzerain or satrap of the Infidels, or if he, and other local lords of misrule, as well as their largely benighted populations, continue to receive billions or tens of billions or hundreds of billions in Western aid, which merely prevents them from ever having to confront the consequences of Islam itself -- the political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual failures that are the direct result of the tenets inculcated by the texts of Islam. and the habit of obedience to authority, if the authority, the Ruler, is Muslim, and the habit of mental submission (that also stunts mental growth --hence the miasma of craziness, of conspiracy theories and lunacies, little and big, that characterize public, and even private, discourse, among those suffused with Islam, whether or not they live in Dar al-Islam), that explain why Muslim countries, including those that have received trillions of dollars in OPEC aid or tens of billions in Infidel aid, cannot create modern economies, cannot create advanced democratic states or even begin to do so (for in Islam, legitimacy comes not from the will expressed by the people, but from the will expressed by Allah in the Qur'an, and glossed by the Sunnah), cannot conceivably allow full legal (and also extra-legal) equality to women and to non-Muslims, cannot permit real freedom of conscience, cannot allow for full artistic expression or encourage free and skeptical inquiry without which the enterprise of science (mere technology is another thing) cannot be understaken.
One sympathizes with some of these women. But also one realizes that in the end, many of them, as a poster (Marwan's Daughter) notes above, remain Defenders of the Faith, incapable of connecting their own mistreatment to the larger intolerances of Islam. See, for example, the Iranian "fighter for women's rights," as she is too uncritically described, Shirin Ebadi, whose Nobel Prize address, and other speeches, not only absolve Islam of any connection to the mistreatment of women, but reveal someone entirely comfortable in repeating Islam-prompted nonsense about other issues.
And that is why one's natural sympathies for Muslim women, who so often seem interested not in arriving at a true comprehension of what explains their situation, and certainly not at comprehending that even worse is that permanent hostility toward non-Mulsims that Islam inculcates, for Islam rests, as a politics and geopolitics, on the understanding that a permanent state of war (if not always open warfare) exists, and must exist, between Believers and Infidels.
Because maltreated Muslim women appear to be fixated on themselves, and to have no interest in that larger question, or even -- as in the case of Shirin Ebadi -- to otherwise become Defenders of the Faith -- one's natural sympathies for these women do, in the end, slightly curdle.
Appalled is right about some places not being ready for democracy. It was only due to the influence of Christianity in the West and the example of Rome and Greece, that democratic thought was able to develop...over a millenium. Certainly the islamic world with its slavish devotion to the koran isn't going to overturn a millenia of traditions and embrace democratic thought anytime soon if you ask me.
That said, the West, with the elites and leaders having jettisoned Christianity and the basis for individual freedoms, appears to be on the doorstep of losing our own hard fought freedoms if we are not careful.