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Reaching
Women In Afghanistan - The Nearer You Are, The More Complicated
It Gets
Fariba Nawa, Pacific News Service, July 6, 2000
Women in Afghanistan have no legal right to education or employment,
and this has drawn outright condemnation from many individual
women and women's groups. Some of those who work directly
with Afghani women, by negotiating their way through loopholes
in the current system, fear these protests may make things
worse. PNS commentator Fariba Nawa was a staff reporter for
various California newspapers and is now based in Peshawar,
Pakistan.
Farida
Azizi, an Afghan aid worker in Peshawar, Pakistan, travels
to train women to work in Afghanistan, where most work for
women is outlawed.
Azizi has learned how to deal with the Taliban, the hard-line
militia controlling 90 percent of Afghanistan. She travels
with her husband, wears the all-enveloping burqa and has permission
from the government to be a health educator. The Taliban allowed
Azizi and her organization, Norwegian Church Aid, to train
20 women as midwives with the condition that they must also
study Islamic scriptures.
Azizi is one of hundreds of aid workers, many based in Pakistan,
who have been moving cautiously for change ever since Afghan
women lost their legal right to education and employment six
years ago. But they say their efforts are thwarted by campaigns
conducted by exiled Afghan and other feminists
Certainly, the idea of liberating Afghan women is big in the
United States with Hollywood stars like Meryl Streep and Sidney
Poitier gracing fundraisers for the cause. Photos of women
shrouded in veils appear in American magazines with disapproving
captions. But aid groups working in the field say all this
may hurt as much as it helps. At issue is a conflict between
a Western and a Middle Eastern approach to the Taliban problem.
Western feminists conduct a straightforward, strong campaign
against the Taliban, demanding to be heard, and in the process
making things worse for the women they want to help, critics
say.
In contrast, those trying to work within the system exploit
loopholes and play on the economy's need for women workers
-- but also run the risk of change coming slowly and not always
steadily.
Those at the center of the conflict -- the Afghan women --
also are split.
Educated city women loathe the Taliban and want their freedom
back. Poor and village women whose lives have become safer
since the Taliban seized control support the hardliners' ways
At the forefront of the U.S. campaign is Feminist Majority,
a Washington D.C.-based organization that publicizes accounts
of atrocities in Afghanistan. But aid workers say by taking
individual cases and blowing them up as a national crisis,
feminists discourage donor funds, making it difficult for
non-governmental agencies to open home schools and create
home work -- activities the Taliban grudgingly allow in some
Afghan provinces.
"They are poisoning the general attitude in Europe and
America, taking away funding," said Nancy Dupree, the
senior consultant at the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan
Relief in Peshawar.
"We must all persevere in our efforts to find ways, using
quiet dialogue, to take our steps forward. Too much aggressive
haste can only jeopardize those we seek to help," Dupree
wrote in a letter to the feminists.
She said she received no reply. Aid workers say the feminists
ignore their protests.
Jennifer Jackman of Feminist Majority dismissed the criticism
as based on misconceptions about the organization's campaign
and denied that the group's advocacy has depleted funding.
She said Feminist Majority and other women's groups have been
pressuring the United States and United Nations to provide
humanitarian assistance for women but also to continue their
isolation of the Taliban as a government.
"To remain silent would be to condemn women to unspeakable
misery," Jackman said.
The debate includes Afghans and non-Afghans on both sides.
Zieba Shorish, an Afghan woman and head of the Washington
D.C.-based Women's Alliance for Peace and Human Rights in
Afghanistan, has assisted Feminist Majority with their campaign.
"We the Afghan women do not have any power over the Feminist
Majority and should be grateful that they have taken the 'Afghan
women problems' and have made it their own," Shorish
said. "They are on our side and struggle against injustice
to our Afghan sisters with us."
Aid providers say the more feminists push the Taliban, the
stricter radicals become; providers say working with the Taliban
helps women more.
And the best way, they say, is to invoke Islam, the Taliban's
law. The religion essentially gives men and women equal rights,
as aid workers are quick to remind the Taliban. "They're
uneducated village boys who sometimes listen when you teach
them," Azizi said.
The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, one of the most established
aid groups in the country, runs more than 100 girls' schools
in Afghan villages.
Carol Le Duc, the organization's gender coordinator, said
they work with communities to solve problems with the Taliban.
A British native, Le Duc is one of the most vocal opponents
of the feminist approach. "The feminists," she says,
"are marginalizing women. They're repeating historical
mistakes and focusing on the political."
While women in Peshawar and Washington shoot at each other,
inside Afghanistan the Taliban -- religious students, who
are by no means monolithic -- are easing up.
Initially women could not leave the house without a male kin,
now they can. International pressure is part of the reason
for the change, but the big reason has been need -- for example,
Taliban realized that firing all the women doctors would leave
a void that men doctors could not fill.
But there's no consistency. One militia leader may allow a
woman's clinic to operate on one day but another official
will shut it down the next.
Mary Rahmany, a 20-year-old from Kabul, said she preferred
the communists in the 1980s to the Taliban. They were the
lesser evil with women, she said.
"I've been sitting home doing nothing for four years
now when I could have finished high school, gone to college,"
Rahmany said.
According to Rahmany, the aid providers help people they know,
not the people in need, and so their good relations with the
Taliban benefit a selected few. She hopes the feminist approach
will give women more freedom in time.
"Afghan women don't have the spirit to fight anymore.
We sit all day listening to BBC hoping to hear that somebody
out there is doing something so that we can live again,"
Rahmany said, sighing.
But it may be that women in villages, where aid organizations
are most active, exert more power over their lives.
Coco Gul lives in a village in Logar province. The mother
of six children said the Taliban have not affected her life.
She is illiterate but brings in an income. She sews and sells
the clothes through a program that one of the grassroots groups
has set up.
"I like my life. Education is not for women anyway. It's
these Westerners and city women who ask for too much,"
Coco Gul said.
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