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April 21, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: A few brave women in Afghanistan march for millions

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — If a woman says no, the man has the right not to feed her.

— Muslim cleric Ayatollah Mohammed Asef Mohseni, explaining why Westerners are wrong to think a new Afghan law sanctions marital rape



About 300 of them took to the streets of Kabul last week. Young and middle-aged women, they were modestly dressed, their heads covered by scarves.

Carrying signs that referred to equality and human rights, they endured shouts of “dogs” and “whores” and a barrage of small stones thrown at them by about 1,000 angry people, most of them men. At least one bus full of marchers was forced to drive away when men stormed the women before they could walk more than a few feet.

The protesters wanted to call attention to a law — passed last month by the Afghan Parliament and quietly signed by President Hamid Karzai — that limits to four the number of consecutive days a healthy wife can decline to have sex with her husband.

The law also regulates when and why a woman may leave her own home, requires her to dress or groom herself according to her husband’s wishes, and reportedly guarantees custody of children to the man if his wife chooses to leave their marriage.

“It means a woman is a kind of property to be used by the man in any way that he wants,” a 26-year-old protester named Fatima Husseini told the New York Times’ Dexter Filkins.

Defenders of the law — and they are legion among conservative Muslims — insist it applies “only” to 3-to-6 million of Afghanistan’s population. That would be the 10 to 20 percent who make up the country’s Shiite minority.

Women’s advocates argue that not all Shiites agree with the new law and they predict it will not stop with that segment of the population. They say the law is the latest stage of a return to Taliban-style oppression of Afghan females.

International human rights groups, such as the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), say the Afghan law “undermines the right to education, the principles of gender equality and the rights of children.”

President Obama has pronounced the law “abhorrent,” and statements of protest from other world leaders have rained down on Karzai’s head. In response, Karzai, who faces re-election later this year, has placed the law in a kind of limbo, promising a judicial review by his justice ministry.

But the international organization, Human Rights Watch, warns that a valid review is unlikely because conservative Shiites will conduct the analysis.

When U.S. military forces invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, much was made by the Bush administration of the great gift of liberation the United States had bestowed on Afghan females. Like so many other aspects of our operations there, however, the gift was poorly maintained.

The Taliban, or tribal warlords, or ultra-conservative Muslim clerics with equally radical ideas of woman’s lowly place, are taking back Afghanistan — village by village and region by region.

Three days before the Kabul protest, Sitara Achakzai, a veteran women’s rights activist and one of the few female provincial council members, was gunned down outside her home in Kandahar. According to several news reports, four men on motorcycles fired upon her. Reportedly, two men have been arrested, but their identities have not been made public. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the killing.

Earlier this month, a young couple in a remote southwestern region of Afghanistan were publicly executed for trying to elope. Tribal elders used AK-47s to kill the 19-year-old woman and 21-year-old man.

In November, more than a dozen girls in Kandahar were attacked on their way to school by men who threw acid in the students’ faces to intimidate them and their families into keeping the girls at home and uneducated.

According to UNICEF, most of some 4,000 child beggars on the streets of Kabul are girls.

Human rights groups and Middle Eastern news Web sites, such as rawa.org — Reality of Life in Afghanistan — try to keep up with reports of atrocities. Meanwhile, Karzai tries to walk an impossible line: His nation’s constitution guarantees women’s rights but also accepts the laws of Islam as ultimate authority.

Fauzia Kofi, a women’s rights activist and one of 89 female members of Parliament, told the Vancouver Sun, “If you speak of human rights or women rights in Afghanistan, you get accused of having converted to Christianity.”

Since the assassination of Sitara Achakzai, Kofi said, the Afghan government had increased the number of body guards who accompany her to eight from four.

“NATO is here to fight terror,” she said, “but if you do not protect democracy and human rights, we may not end up with terrorism but with extremism, which is just as bad.”

Significantly, Afghanistan’s Minister of Women’s Affairs has been so far silent on the new marital law.

Husn Banu Ghazanfar is in her early 50s. A former linguistics and literature dean at Kabul University, she spent the destructive years of Taliban rule essentially confined to her own home. In 2006, she was named to Karzai’s cabinet.

In January, on the English translation page of the news Web site, Quqnoos.com, Ghazanfar discussed the many once-“unimaginable” advances Afghan women have made since the fall of the Taliban.

“Women are actively working in the community, they run businesses, teach at schools and even take part in cultivation,” she said. Violence is still a major problem, she told Quqnoos, but it is being addressed by national awareness programs.

In an interview with the Associated Press that same month, Ghazanfar acknowledged, “Afghan women are facing unacceptable customs from decades ago that are just obeyed. These traditions don’t have any religious or legal basis, but the people accept them.”

Thanks to both houses of Afghanistan’s Parliament and to a fearful president, that legal basis is much nearer to becoming reality. Unless the rest of the world joins those few hundred women who walked through Kabul in protest, several million Afghan women will be forced by law to accept the unacceptable.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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