Focusing on the Tragedy of Afghan Women
By Judy Mann, Washington Post, October 30, 1998; Page E03

This is a column about the living dead: the women of Afghanistan who are suffering under one of the most viciously anti-female regimes ever to grip a country, women who have been forced into virtual house arrest while much of the world has looked the other way.

The news stories about Taliban atrocities against women seem too horrible to believe, but it's time to believe them, and it's time to do something.

Physicians for Human Rights, the Boston-based group that is part of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines that won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for its work against the explosives, spent three months in early 1998 investigating the treatment of women in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Investigators saw firsthand the medieval punishments meted out by the Taliban's sin police. PHR has issued the most scathing indictment I have ever read of a government's systematic repression of women.

"PHR's researchers . . . saw a city of beggars --women who had once been teachers and nurses now moving in the streets like ghosts under their enveloping burqas, selling every possession and begging so as to feed their children. It is difficult to find another government or would-be government in the world that has deliberately created such poverty by arbitrarily depriving half the population under its control of jobs, schooling, mobility and health care. Such restrictions are literally life threatening to women and to their children."

From the Soviet invasion in 1979 to the civil war that led to and followed the collapse of the Soviet backed regime in 1992, Afghanistan has endured 20 years of conflict, with mass killings, disappearances and the largest recorded refugee outflow in history, according to the PHR report. The country is pocked with land mines.

The Taliban, which means "students of Muslim religious studies," emerged in November 1994, a gang of uneducated young thugs coming out of refugee camps and religious schools in neighboring Pakistan. The movement is led by a 31-year-old mullah named Mohammad Omar -- whom I would cheerfully nominate as a war criminal.

The Taliban took control of Kabul on Sept. 26, 1996, and began a reign of terror against women by issuing a series of decrees that would be ludicrous if they weren't so deadly. Many Afghan women are widows -- there are 30,000 in Kabul alone -- without close male relatives, and they are the sole supporters of their children.

Operating under the guise of Islamic law, the Taliban has prohibited women from working, attending school, leaving their homes unless accompanied by a close male relative and wearing shoes that make noise when they walk. The windows of buildings with women inside must be painted. In public, women must be covered from head to toe by a burqa, an oppressive garment that has only a tiny mesh opening over the eyes.

In September 1997, the Taliban began segregating men and women into separate hospitals. Male doctors are forbidden to treat women unless they are accompanied by a close male relative. At one point, Kabul's half-million women were relegated to one hospital that had 35 beds and no clean water, electricity or surgical equipment. After an international uproar, the Taliban eased some restrictions on women's access to hospitals.

Horrible stories continue to emerge. Women and girls are dying of treatable conditions because they can't get medical care or can't afford a burqa. "A burqa costs $9," says Eleanor Smeal, of the Feminist Majority Foundation, which is spearheading a campaign to stop the gender apartheid. "It's a month's salary for them. They never had to wear these before." Moreover, she says, the burqas don't allow women to breathe properly and are themselves a health hazard.

"These are inhumane conditions," Smeal says. "We have a United Nations. We have a world community. We've got to create the will and then do something extraordinary for once, for humanitarian reasons."

Women and men who disobey dress and other behavioral codes are subjected to barbaric punishments. PHR reports that every Friday, "the Taliban terrorizes the city of Kabul by publicly punishing alleged wrongdoers in the Kabul sports stadium and requiring public attendance at the floggings, shootings, hangings, beheadings and amputations."

"We are told they dragged out a young girl and beat her in the stadium and you could only see the veil becoming full of blood," Smeal says.

Initially, she says, she, like many of us, wondered if the horrific news accounts about the Taliban's barbaric treatment of women were true. "We spent several months in research . . . and we found it was only worse than what we were reading.

"Not to have the sun shine on our bodies, to paint your windows dark, I don't know which one of these straws drove me around the bend," Smeal says. "These women can't see out when they do go out. . . . They can't see a blade of grass, can't feel the wind in their hair, they can't get sunshine. Talk about Vitamin D and minimal needs of survival for a human being. I've spent my life fighting for equality for women, and to think in 1998 we have to fight for the right to have sunshine or to be able to see out the window. The whole world should be rushing in to rescue these women."

Getting sustained attention to what PHR calls "the Taliban's War on Women" has been "the hardest thing I've ever had to do," Smeal says.

She knows that the first step in ending the Taliban's brutal suppression of women is to get it on the radar screen of public opinion. "If the American public knows what is going on, they can help to bring about the political will and climate to change it," she says.

And that is finally beginning to happen.

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