By Marwaan Macan-Markar
MEXICO CITY, Nov 14 1999 (IPS)

The Taliban, the ultra-conservative Muslim group that rules most of Afghanistan, is notorious for its intolerance toward gender equality.

Tales of oppression have been seeping out of Afganistan since the Taliban emerged in 1995 as the dominant force of all the rebels groups that fought for 10 years to bring down the Soviet-backed government in Feb. 1989 and then fought among themselves.

In the Americas an anthropologist from Afghanistan, Zieba Shourish-Shamley, has battled for three years to raise awareness of the plight of women in her homeland.

Now her Women’s Alliance for Peace and Human Rights in Afghanistan, based in the United States, has been joined by other women’s groups and human rights activists. And that, Shourish- Shamley hopes, will help achieve her immediate objective: to bring global condemnation of the Taliban.

“We thank God for this,” says Shourish-Shamley, referring to such efforts as the US-based Feminist Majority Foundation and campaigns run by European groups to keep alive the issue of equality for Afghan women.

One petition has been circulated by groups in France and Italy as far afield as Mexico, India, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. It charges the Taliban with ” waging war against women,” and lists a litany of complaints in support of the accusations.

The petition ends with a demand for change in Afghanistan but that will be an uphill task, Shourish-Shamley admits. The Taliban controls close to 90 percent of Afghanistan and has been reluctant to share power with other factions. Also, Taliban leaders believe all their problems can be solved by force.

Last year, Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) received a taste of the Taliban’s recalcitrance when she broached the subject of education for women. She was told by Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, chairman of the Taliban Supreme Shura, that these were their customs and that Western ideas could not be imposed on them.

The Taliban began abusing women soon after it took control of the Afghan capital, Kabul. This included forcing women out of work, beating them for “un-Islamic” practices and, at times, even stoning them to death.

In 1998, after massacring ten to eleven thousand people of ethnic minority communities, they took the women “as spoils of war or female slaves,” says Shourish-Shamley.

She has detailed some of the desperate measures women have taken to escape life under the Taliban.

“Some women in Kabul commit suicide to escape witnessing their children starve to death; some are taking caustic Soda, some are jumping from buildings, and some use poison,” she writes in her latest report, “The Plight of Women and Health Care in Afghanistan.”

Most of those women had been civil servants who had lost their jobs since the advent of the Taliban. “In Kabul almost half of the 80,000 civil servants were women.”

Last month, in fact, the UN Special Rapporteur for Violence Against Women painted a similar dismal picture of a misogynist environment. “I have never seen suffering like in Afghanistan,” declared Radhika Commaraswamy, a lawyer and human rights activist from Sri Lanka.

Coomaraswamy, who rcently spent two weeks in the region, blamed the Taliban’s notorious “Department for the Promotion of Virtu and Prevention of Vice” for perpetuating much of the abuse.

However, she also noticed some improvements from previous visits. “The Taliban have made some changes in education and in their health policy,” she told IPS in an interview.

This, she attributes, is due to the public pressure and awareness campaigns launched by human rights activists and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

“I think such campaigns are very important,” she added. “They raise the political cost of doing certain things and sometimes they are successful.”

Shourish-Shamley gather strength from such campaigns and from women such as Hollywood star Meryl Streep, who have stood up for the cause of the Afghan women declaring that women there are being “entombed alive.”

There also have been moves in the UN Security Council to enforce sanctions on Afghanistan. When a draft resolution was introduced by the United States and Russia there were few objections – suggesting the Taliban has become more isolated than ever.

Shourish-Shamley is looking for more action from the United States other than supporting sanctions over the issue of Afghanistan sheltering Osama bin Laden – the Saudi-born terrorist accused of planning the Aug. 1998 bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

“There is a lot of rhetoric,” she says adding that Washington needed to stamp down hard on the rulers of Afghanistan -“the monster it created for the sake of oil and gas..”

Excerpt:

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
MEXICO CITY, Nov 8 1999 (IPS)

The Taliban, the ultra-conservative Muslim group that rules most of Afghanistan, is notorious for its intolerance toward gender equality.

Tales of oppression have been seeping out of Afganistan since the Taliban emerged in 1995 as the dominant force of all the rebels groups that fought for 10 years to bring down the Soviet-backed government in Feb. 1989 and then fought among themselves.

In the Americas an anthropologist from Afghanistan, Zieba Shourish-Shamley, has battled for three years to raise awareness of the plight of women in her homeland.

Now her Women’s Alliance for Peace and Human Rights in Afghanistan, based in the United States, has been joined by other women’s groups and human rights activists. And that, Shourish- Shamley hopes, will help achieve her immediate objective: to bring global condemnation of the Taliban.

“We thank God for this,” says Shourish-Shamley, referring to such efforts as the US-based Feminist Majority Foundation and campaigns run by European groups to keep alive the issue of equality for Afghan women.

One petition has been circulated by groups in France and Italy as far afield as Mexico, India, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. It charges the Taliban with ” waging war against women,” and lists a litany of complaints in support of the accusations.

The petition ends with a demand for change in Afghanistan but that will be an uphill task, Shourish-Shamley admits. The Taliban controls close to 90 percent of Afghanistan and has been reluctant to share power with other factions. Also, Taliban leaders believe all their problems can be solved by force.

Last year, Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) received a taste of the Taliban’s recalcitrance when she broached the subject of education for women. She was told by Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, chairman of the Taliban Supreme Shura, that these were their customs and that Western ideas could not be imposed on them.

The Taliban began abusing women soon after it took control of the Afghan capital, Kabul. This included forcing women out of work, beating them for “un-Islamic” practices and, at times, even stoning them to death.

In 1998, after massacring ten to eleven thousand people of ethnic minority communities, they took the women “as spoils of war or female slaves,” says Shourish-Shamley.

She has detailed some of the desperate measures women have taken to escape life under the Taliban.

“Some women in Kabul commit suicide to escape witnessing their children starve to death; some are taking caustic Soda, some are jumping from buildings, and some use poison,” she writes in her latest report, “The Plight of Women and Health Care in Afghanistan.”

Most of those women had been civil servants who had lost their jobs since the advent of the Taliban. “In Kabul almost half of the 80,000 civil servants were women.”

Last month, in fact, the UN Special Rapporteur for Violence Against Women painted a similar dismal picture of a misogynist environment. “I have never seen suffering like in Afghanistan,” declared Radhika Commaraswamy, a lawyer and human rights activist from Sri Lanka.

Coomaraswamy, who rcently spent two weeks in the region, blamed the Taliban’s notorious “Department for the Promotion of Virtu and Prevention of Vice” for perpetuating much of the abuse.

However, she also noticed some improvements from previous visits. “The Taliban have made some changes in education and in their health policy,” she told IPS in an interview.

This, she attributes, is due to the public pressure and awareness campaigns launched by human rights activists and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

“I think such campaigns are very important,” she added. “They raise the political cost of doing certain things and sometimes they are successful.”

Shourish-Shamley gather strength from such campaigns and from women such as Hollywood star Meryl Streep, who have stood up for the cause of the Afghan women declaring that women there are being “entombed alive.”

There also have been moves in the UN Security Council to enforce sanctions on Afghanistan. When a draft resolution was introduced by the United States and Russia there were few objections – suggesting the Taliban has become more isolated than ever.

Shourish-Shamley is looking for more action from the United States other than supporting sanctions over the issue of Afghanistan sheltering Osama bin Laden – the Saudi-born terrorist accused of planning the Aug. 1998 bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

“There is a lot of rhetoric,” she says adding that Washington needed to stamp down hard on the rulers of Afghanistan -“the monster it created for the sake of oil and gas..”

Excerpt: