Afghanistan

A ticket to equality for Afghan women

Theodore Roszak
Sunday, November 9, 2003

"No one listens to us, no one treats us as human beings." That's the quote Amnesty International uses to head its October 2003 report on the sorry state of women in Afghanistan. Whatever the American military presence may be accomplishing in that troubled land, it hasn't done much for the female half of the population. The women are still getting kicked around.

Reading Amnesty's account of wife beatings and rapes, abductions and forced marriages, repression and neglect, I'm reminded of the two proud Afghan women who came to see me during my office hours at California State Hayward in the winter of 1999. They looked to me like their nation's best and brightest. But here they were taking classes at a school far, far from home. Why? Because that was back when the Taliban were still using whips on women who allowed an inch of skin to show in the streets of Kabul.

The United Nations thinks the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan should be expanded to 15,000 members. The United States refuses to raise the number above the current 4,800. The Afghan Ministry of Reconstruction estimates that getting the country up to the poverty level it knew under Soviet occupation would cost $15 billion over the next 10 years. Fat chance President Bush will appropriate a tenth that much. As Sen. Joseph Biden has put it, the Bush administration has "given up the ghost" in Afghanistan and is allowing the country to slip back into the hands of the warlords.

What makes me most ashamed about this betrayal of trust is the plight in which it leaves the women of Afghanistan. As Anne Brodsky points out in "With All Our Strength," her new study of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, women may have found token participation in the new government, but they are working against overwhelming odds in simply getting back to where they were before the Taliban. The Taliban -- whom, let us remember, the United States brought to power -- took over a country in which women enjoyed decent status.

My Afghan students speak proudly of mothers who were doctors or chemists. Half the civil servants in the country were female. Now, according to the watchdog group Feminist Majority, whatever progress the American intervention brought for women is rapidly being lost outside the capital. Feminist Majority reports that, with American forces hunkering down within the city limits of Kabul, warlords like Ismail Khan are forcing women of Herat to wear the burqa again and to have gynecological exams to check for "illicit" sexual activity. On the other hand, when women have a legitimate need for medical care -- say, during childbirth -- UNICEF reports that prudish husbands often refuse to let male doctors attend their wives, with the result that Afghanistan is running one of the highest death rates for child delivery in the world.

When American troops went into Afghanistan, Laura Bush said the liberation of women should be our highest priority. Well, perhaps it can still be -- and without waiting for her tardy husband to get around to it. Suppose we invited the first lady to head a program for encouraging Afghan women to resettle in the United States. The deal would be this:

If an Afghan woman makes her way to a U.S. Army base, an office of the assistance force or through the door of any relief agency in the country and asks for a plane ticket to the United States, she gets one, no questions asked.

In the States, she will be received by a consortium of universities that have agreed to scare up the money for a full college scholarship plus living expenses. The program would be a sort of gender-based underground railroad, though neither as clandestine nor as illegal as the escape routes offered to slaves before our Civil War. If George or Laura Bush wants to contribute a few federal dollars and the prestige of their support to the effort, fine. That might help make a reality of the Afghanistan Freedom Support Act the president signed into law in 2002.

After all, Sen. Barbara Boxer managed to make the liberation of Afghan women a "funding priority" under the act, which authorizes spending $2.3 billion over the next four years. Here's one way to achieve that goal directly and with minimal overhead.

Currently, women who flee the country looking for a better future are apt to wind up as unwelcome guests in one of the refugee camps in Pakistan. With a diminished number of Afghan men left after the nation's long wars, they often find no husbands. My students tell me that many a refugee woman must reluctantly settle for a marriage of convenience with a male immigrant in the United States to be admitted to this country. A "save the women" rescue program would provide another option, one that might even pay unforeseen dividends for Afghanistan, especially if the new government succeeds in making it attractive for educated women to return. Indeed, the program might help achieve that goal by serving notice to the warlords that if their misogyny continues, they will see the best and the brightest of their women vanish and their country will be all the poorer. They may not care; but why should millions of women suffer for the alpha-male stupidity of their leaders?

In Aristophanes' "Lysistrata," women exert power by withholding sexual favors. In a country like Afghanistan, so severely in need of all the scientific and technical brains it can muster, women who find their way to a decent education might gain even greater leverage with the patriarchy back home. They would be in a position to say, "If you want us back, equality is the price you'll have to pay."

Theodore Roszak teaches history at California State University, Hayward. His latest novel is "The Devil and Daniel Silverman."

San Francisco Chronicle

 

        With All Our Strength

        The Revolutionary Association
        of the Women of Afghanistan

           by Anne Brodsky

 

Book report:

Behind the Scenes
UMBC’s Anne Brodsky Tells the Story of Afghan Women

By Charles Rose
Retriever Weekly Guest Writer

In the two years since the horrific attacks of Sept. 11 and the ensuing American invasion of Afghanistan, the world’s attention has shifted away from the plight of the Afghan people, who have been ravaged by decades of war. But even before Sept. 11, Anne Brodsky, an associate professor of psychology and affiliate professor of women’s studies at UMBC, was already risking her life to tell the story of Afghan women under the oppression of the Taliban and other fundamentalist Islamic factions and she continues that fight today.

Brodsky’s research background studying the resilience of women and the role of communities in resisting societal risks such as violence, poverty and racism led to her current work with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).

RAWA is a humanitarian and political women’s organization that has operated clandestinely in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the past 26 years. Brodsky has been working with the group for over three years to help raise awareness of the plight of women who still risk their lives when they stand up for basic freedoms like going to school, having a job, wearing modern clothes, and being able to leave the house unescorted by a male.

As part of these efforts, Brodsky has traveled to underground girls’ schools, orphanages and refugee camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She has risked her life ? both from the dangers facing a Western woman in areas controlled by fundamentalist groups, and from the ongoing fighting and unexploded landmines and ordnance that litter the countryside.

Recent news items have underscored the relevance of Brodsky’s work: a report released this summer by Human Rights Watch detailed how women are still being raped and attacked by Afghan warlords outside of Kabul and a Newsweek story noted the post Sept. 11 rise in domestic violence in American Muslim families.

Even worse is the apparent resurgence of the Taliban, who have launched several recent attacks on Afghan border police and girls’ schools from just across the Pakistan border, a development that doesn’t surprise Brodsky.

"While schools for girls have reopened, only about 32 percent of the students who returned were girls," she says. "Girls’ schools have been fire bombed and threatened; and forced marriages, imprisonment of girls and women for attempting to escape abusive marriages, forced medical chastity tests and other extreme forms of oppression are ongoing, thus RAWA’s activities and message are still urgently needed."

Since Sept. 11, Brodsky has continued her research through multiple trips to the region and by helping to bring members of RAWA to the United States and UMBC to tell their stories. Earlier this year, Brodsky published a book about RAWA and her experiences with the group, With All Our Strength: The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (Routledge).

Publisher’s Weekly described With All Our Strength as "Groundbreaking...The first writer with in-depth access to RAWA, Brodsky writes a passionate narrative...[S]tands out as a lone and important study of a remarkable organization." Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban, calls it "A powerful story."

Brodsky will never forget her five months in the field with the brave women of RAWA. "I gained a much deeper understanding and appreciation for their struggle, and was able to record the in-depth stories of real people’s lives under so many years of oppression, war and trauma," she says. "But more than being victims, RAWA has empowered women, children and men to use education as a tool to fight for democracy, freedom, human rights and peace."

According to Brodsky, the fight for democracy and human rights in Afghanistan is far from over. "RAWA remains a threatened group for their outspoken opposition to the oppression of women and all democratically minded people that continue under the current, warlord dominated government," she says. "They fervently hope that the rest of the world will continue to support them and will not, once again, turn their backs on the long suffering people of Afghanistan."

Brodsky’s work on behalf of women at UMBC and beyond was recognized with the 2003 award from the President’s Commission for Women, one of several presented at UMBC’s 37th Anniversary Opening.

Article originally published in Insights Weekly.

From: http://trw.umbc.edu/