Consider:
• On April 27, 2000, several Taliban, whips in hand, went to Dr. Nader
Sina's dental office located in the New City of Herat, while the doctor
was busy with filling some women's teeth. On the pretext that the women
were not accompanied by relatives to chaperone them, they whipped them,
jailed the doctor for two days, and closed the clinic. They threatened
the doctor that if he does such a thing again, the clinic will be closed
permanently.
It should be
noted that there are no female dentists in Herat.
• Misery caused
by drought and conflict has brought the bride price down in northern Afghanistan,
a United Nations office in Islamabad said in June.
Families in Balkh
and Baghlan provinces are having a hard time finding enough to eat and
are "giving away their daughters at greatly reduced bride prices and at
a young age'', the office of the U.N. Coordinator for Afghanistan said
in a statement.
• Poverty-stricken
farmers, unable to pay their debts because of a Taliban ban on growing
poppies -- the flower that produces opium -- are trading their young daughters
to pay off loans, U.N. and Taliban officials say.
"I just talked
to a farmer who said: 'I gave my small daughter to the one I got a loan
from,"' said Amir Mohammed Haqqani, the Taliban's chief anti-narcotics
man in Nangarhar province.
In Afghanistan,
girls often are married off at puberty. According to tradition, the family
of the groom pays the bride's parents for their daughters. But girls are
now being handed over in marriage at a much younger age to grooms who often
are in their late 20s and early 30s, Poulsen said.
"I talked
to this uncle who gave away his 7-year-old niece whose parents had died
for three bags (330 pounds) of wheat," Hans-Christian Poulsen of the U.N.
office for the coordination of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan said in
western Herat. "The age is going down and they are going much further away
to live with their new husbands."
Farmers
traditionally use opium as a source of credit, borrowing against the next
year's harvest, said Bernard Frahi, director of the U.N. Drug Control Program
in neighboring Afghanistan. But this year, there was no harvest because
of an edict banning cultivation of the crimson-red flower.
• Seyyed Abdul-Rahman,
a former resident of Ghazni and an aviation engineer, who works for the
Intelligence Ministry of the Taliban in Kabul, had an argument with his
wife, Salehah, on October 25, 1999.
During the argument,
he poured gasoline over her body and set her on fire.
When neighbors
found out about the fight, they entered his house and saw Salehah's burned
body, with her hands and legs tied up. They immediately took her to the
hospital. At the hospital, Salehah told the doctors and neighbors that
her husband tied her up, after he beat her up, and then set fire to her.
She died two days later at the hospital.
Seyyed has not
faced any charges and left Ghazni with their two children.
One of the most
popular sidebars to the ongoing war with Afghanistan has been the Taliban's
treatment of women. Everyone has printed some story about the veiled women
of Afghanistan and the list of illegal activities under the Taliban. In
fact, President Shrub has been beating that drum over and over, referring
to "women of cover" in an absurd attempt to avoid angering other veiled
societies.
It has been quite
a conflict for feminists. It's hard to complain when the powers-that-be
finally start listening. On the other hand, standing shoulder to shoulder
with Shrub et al is rather distasteful, to say the least.
I was deeply
disturbed by the Taliban's misogyny before Sept. 11. It frightened me in
ways I cannot describe. But since Sept. 11, the issue has come to the forefront,
and we have been deluged with stories and photos of years of oppression.
Reading the stories
of what is happening to Afghan women makes me feel like the Jews in American
must have felt, reading about the oppression of their people in Germany.
The corollary
is stronger than you think, only in the judgment of history, I think we
will be condemned as more heartless, more blind than our predecessors.
In the
1930s, America and much of the world turned a blind eye to the not-so-gradual
erosion of Jewish rights in Germany. Leave aside the appeasement faction;
we turned away Jewish refugees, we ignored the confiscation of Jewish property,
herding the Jews into ghettos and eventually to concentration camps. Newspapers,
including the New York Times, buried stories of mass murders and human
rights abuses in the inside pages, a trend documented in a brilliant documentary
by the History Channel last year.
But the Jewish newspapers
shouted from the mountaintops that Hitler was killing millions, and why
don't you care? No one listened.
When reports
of the camps leaked out at the end of the war, everyone was horrified.
"We didn't know," they exclaimed. Whether or not they knew will be a subject
for debate until time ends.
We have no such
excuse. We have known since the Taliban took over nearly ten years ago
that women who formerly were teachers, doctors, business owners and leaders
were being forced under the veils and into their homes. Women died in droves
of curable illnesses because male doctors were not permitted to treat them
and female doctors were not permitted to practice. Women caught teaching
girls how to read and write were executed, along with any married woman
caught walking with a man who was not a relative. An unmarried woman was
merely beaten, since her dishonor did not dishonor her owner - excuse me,
her husband. A woman carrying her dying child to a doctor was shot by Taliban
officers for being on the street without a male relative escort.
We have no excuse.
We knew and did nothing. Organizations like Revolutionary Women of Afghanistan
have become militant in their resistance to the Taliban, yet we ignored
both them and the male-led Northern Alliance. Oh, if you asked a politician,
they'd say, "That's really too bad." But actually do anything? "Not our
problem."
Until Sept. 11,
when the rest of the world suddenly became our problem again.
There are no
words in the English language for the sorrow I feel, reading stories of
the women who starve to death in their own houses. The woman pictured on
this page has no male relatives to earn money for her and is not permitted
to earn her own money, so she and her children beg in the streets.
Over and over,
we justify the horrific images of the Holocaust in history books, movies
and television mini-series with the mantra: "It must never happen again."
Well, it did happen again, and we did nothing. Again. Instead of the Jews,
it was the women.
When you tell yourself
that I am exaggerating the situation to make for a stronger column, consider
this question, and if you disagree with my answer, I will leave you to
your own conscience: Does it matter whether they are starved, beaten, mutilated
and murdered in camps, or in their own homes? Does it make a difference? |
