The
government of Afghanistan is waging a war against women. The situation is getting so bad that one person in
an editorial of the NY Times compared the treatment of
women there to the treatment of Jews in pre-Holocaust
Poland.
Since
the Taliban took power in 1996, women have been beaten
and stoned in public for not having the proper attire;
even if this means simply not having the mesh covering
in front of their eyes. One woman was beaten to DEATH
by an angry mob of fundamentalists for accidentally exposing
her arm while she was driving. Another was stoned to death
for trying to leave the country with a man that was not
a relative.
Colourful yes, but happy?
Women are not allowed to work or even go out in public
without a male relative. Professional women such as translators,
doctors, lawyers, artists and writers have been forced
from their jobs and told to stay in their homes. Depression
is becoming so widespread that it has reached emergency
levels. There is no way in such an extreme Islamic society
to know the suicide rate with certainty. But relief workers
are estimating that the suicide rate among women has increased
significantly. Women who cannot find proper medication
and treatment for depression, would rather take their
lives than live in such conditions.
Homes
where a woman is present must have their windows painted
so that she can never be seen by outsiders. They must
wear silent shoes so that they are never heard. Women
live in fear for their lives for the slightest misbehavior
or infraction of these rules. Because they cannot work,
those without male relatives or husbands are either starving
to death or begging on the street-even if they hold Ph.D.'s!
Many of these women had fulfilling careers until the
men of the Islamic revolution sent them home
Quick mother, hide that arm, the police are coming!!!
There
are almost no medical facilities available for women.
Relief workers, in protest, have mostly left the country,
taking medicine and psychologists and other things necessary
to treat the sky-rocketing level of depression. At one
of the rare hospitals for women, a reporter found still,
nearly lifeless bodies lying motionless on top of beds,
unwilling to speak, eat, or do anything, but slowly wasting
away. Others have gone mad and were seen crouched in corners,
perpetually rocking or crying, most of them in fear. One
doctor is considering, when what little medication remaining
finally runs out, leaving these women in front of the
president's residence as a form of peaceful protest.
It
is at the point where the term 'human rights violations'
has become an understatement. Husbands have the power
of life and death over their women relatives. David Cornwell
has said that those in the West should not judge the Afghan
people for such treatment because it is a 'cultural thing',
but this is not entirely true. Women enjoyed relative
freedom, to work, dress generally as they wanted, and
drive and appear in public alone until only 1996. It is
not their tradition or 'culture', but is alien to them,
and it is extreme even for those cultures where fundamentalism
is the rule.
Oops, sorry, I didn't see where I was going...
If
we could excuse everything on cultural grounds, then we
should not be appalled that the Carthaginians sacrificed
their infant children, that little girls are circumcised
in parts of Africa, that blacks in the US's deep south
in the 1930's were lynched, prohibited from voting, and
forced to submit to unjust apartheid laws.
Everyone
has a right to a tolerable human existence, even if they
are women in a Muslim country, in a part of the world
that Westerners may not understand. If we can threaten
military force in Kosovo in the name of human rights for
the sake of ethnic Albanians, then NATO and the West can
certainly express peaceful outrage at the oppression,
murder and injustice committed against women by the Taliban.
