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AFGHANISTAN: Women’s Rights Await New Parliament

Abdul Salad Rohani

LASHKARGAH, Dec 18 2005 (IPS) - As a new parliament opens in the Afghan capital, Monday, all eyes are on Malalai Joya, a 27-year-old woman, who has emerged as a fearless critic of the warlords that control the country.

In 2003, Joya, then a women’s literacy and health worker, had stood up at a public meeting to discuss the new constitution and denounced the factional leaders as – criminals” who should be taken to the world court.

Her speech earned her powerful enemies. Despite her immense popularity, which led to her winning the September election from the border province of Farah on her own steam, she rarely travels alone. She employs at least 12 security guards – there have been at least four assassination attempts – and is always seen in public wearing a burqa (veil that covers the body and face from head to toe).

ôViolence against women and girls is pervasive,” an Amnesty International report said in May. ôAfghan women and girls live with the risk of abduction and rape by armed individuals; forced marriage, being traded for settling disputes and debts; and they face daily discrimination from all segments of society as well as by state officials.” Female life expectancy in Afghanistan is a mere 45 years.

The independent Pajhwok Afghan News reported Dec 6 that violent crimes against women were on the rise in the southern Helmand and northern Kapisa provinces. There have been several cases of women having been thrashed to death by their husbands or other male relatives.

Reports of torture have come from several districts in Helmand including Baghran, Baghni, Nad Ali and Washir. Most of the victims were given in marriage by their parents as ‘swara’, to settle family disputes, a cruel practice common amongst tribes in Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan.

Bibi Shirinai, 65, a resident of Marja district, recounts the ordeal of her neighbour. Given by her father to settle a dispute, ôshe is tortured by her husband,” she says. ôNow her miseries have doubled. Her husband has married another woman.”

Rahmato, from the Kart-i-Lagan area, adjacent to the provincial capital of Lashkargah, told Pajhwok that her husband and his two brothers married off her two underage daughters without informing her.

ôHer husband’s family used to maltreat and beat one of my daughters,” the mother says. ôWhen she fell ill, they did not take her to hospital. It was when her condition became very serious that they shifted her to my house. But she died after two days at the Bust hospital,” she adds.

A resident of Ubaidullah village in Nad Ali district, Abdul Ghani, revealed that he had given his daughter to his opponents to save the life of his son. “Everything was going well for three months. Then they stopped my daughter from visiting my house and five months later, I come to know that she had been killed by her father-in-law.”

Ghani’s tragedy was confirmed by deputy chief of the crime branch of the provincial police headquarters Mohammad Hashem Haibat, who said they had arrested a man named Mohammad Rasool for killing his daughter-in-law. The accused is lodged in the central prison,the police officer said.

In the northern Kapisa province, on Dec 10, a man, accused of murdering his wife, shot dead a cousin who denounced the killing. The victim’s brother told Pajhwok that ôAsadullah shot dead my brother Shukrullah just for condemning Samia’s murder as a brutal act.”

Area police chief Colonel Atta Mohammad said the man had buried his wife within the house after decapitating her. In a bid to conceal the crime, Asadullah had spread speculation that his wife had fled with valuables.

However, a probe into the case revealed that the husband had, in fact, slaughtered his 25-year-old spouse, whose son Nauman said: ôMy father fought with my mother, thrashed her a lot and then beheaded her.”

Asadullah has disappeared after committing the second murder, the police chief said, adding that they were trying to arrest him as soon as possible.

Asked to comment on the rising incidents of violence against women, director of the Women’s Affairs Department, Fauzia Uloomi said the main causes were illiteracy and ignorance in the populace. ôThere’s widespread illiteracy in the far-flung (areas of the country),” she said. ôAfghani men are illiterate. They pick up quarrels with other men, and vent their anger on their female partners,” she added.

For most Afghan women, little has changed since the fundamentalist Taliban’s ouster as part of the U.S.-led ‘war on terror’. Literacy rates for women are an abysmal 14 percent compared to slightly more than 50 percent among men.

Many educated men and women are pointing fingers at officials of the Women’s Affairs Department for the excesses against females in Helmand province. A teacher at the Lashkargah central high school for girls, who wished not to be named, says the department hardly functions.

ôThey (department staff) receive huge sums in salaries for nothing. Their only duty is to hold a meeting once a month and that is all,” the anonymous teacher said. ôIf they were really interested in doing something concrete for women, they would have gone into the districts to educate and inform women about their rights.”

Some of Afghanistan’s religious scholars are speaking up for women. Maulvi Mohammad Sadiq Haqqani has called on husbands to respect wives. ôIf a woman disobeys her husband, the male partner should settle the matter in a polite manner instead of an outburst and use of force,” he urges.

The violence has to come to an end, the Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights and Violence against Women, Yakin Erturk, told a news briefing in Kabul this August.

ôAction has to be taken to protect women, to save lives,” she added, outlining a list of measures that appear feasible in the short term including building shelters for women at risk. ôThe present time constitutes a unique window of opportunity that must not be missed,” she urged in the run-up to the September elections.

Now, the future of the country’s women is in the hands of Afghanistan’s new parliamentarians including Joya.