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NEWS & LETTERS, March 2002
Lead article
Women fight terror and war in South Asia and the
Middle East
by Maya Jhansi A global women's movement has
made itself heard over the din and violence of Bush's so-called "war on
terrorism" following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in
New York. The fall of the Taliban brought women from around the world to
Brussels to take part in a parallel conference to the official Summit on Afghan
Women. Women from Belgium, Croatia, France, India, Italy, Jordan, Morocco,
Netherlands, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkey, United
Kingdom and the United States expressed their support for Afghan women by
declaring that "Afghanistan is everywhere." Yet no sooner had the interim
government been installed in Afghanistan under the dubious leadership of Hamid
Karzai, than Bush and his allies dropped women from the international agenda as
they searched new areas of the world to bomb. Despite condemnations of the
treatment of women by the Taliban, the issue of women's rights was not on the
agenda of Secretary of State Colin Powell's foreign visits. BUSH ABANDONS AFGHAN WOMEN Likewise, Bush, who signed the
Afghan Women and Children Relief Act of 2001, decided to withhold the $45
million that Congress had approved for the United Nations Population Fund, which
distributes much needed birth control and birthing kits to war-torn Afghanistan.
Afghan women have an average of seven children. According to the TORONTO STAR,
contraception is not available, and 17 pregnancies per woman are common,
beginning at age 15. Of the 1.5 million refugees who fled Afghanistan when
Bush's bombing campaign began, 375,000 were women of reproductive age, and
56,000 of them were pregnant. As the Revolutionary
Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) has pointed out, the future of
women in Afghanistan remains uncertain. Factional fighting in several areas of
the country, instability in Kandahar and Kabul, as well as widespread looting
and banditry are beginning to wear away the confidence of Afghans in the ability
of the interim government, installed on Dec. 22, to move the country toward
democracy. Reports of rapes and abuse
continue. The International Federation of the Red Cross reported that girls in
the western part of the country, some as young as 10, were being sold as
"brides" for as little as 100 kilograms of flour. While the Taliban's
involvement in the trafficking of Afghan women was long reported by Afghan
refugees fleeing Afghanistan, more details are emerging following the regime's
collapse. Government officials and
witnesses report that the Taliban routinely kidnapped women from Tajik, Uzbek,
Hazara and other ethnic minorities to be sold to brothels or used as sex slaves
and "wives" for Al Qaeda soldiers. As many as 600 women have been
reported missing in one region of Afghanistan. Women are still vulnerable to
sex trafficking, and the prospect for justice for the thousands of abducted
women remains dim under the new leadership. The only solution offered by Sima
Samar, the deputy prime minister and minister of Women's Affairs, was her pledge
to build orphanages to protect young orphan girls from abduction. Bush's abandonment of Afghan
women is hardly surprising or unexpected. But the courageous work of RAWA, their
principled stand against all fundamentalists, and the support they have received
from thousands of women in the U.S. and around the world signal a new awareness
and new opening for women to take their lives back into their own hands. AFGHANISTAN IS EVERYWHERE Women from many parts of the
world find themselves in a new situation. On the one hand, the attention that
feminists and activists have brought to abuses of women by fundamentalists has
weakened fundamentalism, especially in places where it has a hold on state
power. In Pakistan, for example, feminists are seizing this moment to push the
self-declared President Musharraf to reform laws that clearly discriminate
against women as part of his agenda to "democratize" Pakistan from
above. In Bangladesh, the international feminist outcry has pressured the new
Prime Minister, Khaleda Zia, brought to power by an alliance with
fundamentalists, to propose tougher legislation against acid attacks. On the other hand,
fundamentalists have become increasingly more extremist. Nothing shows this
better than the sentencing of Safiya Husseini in northern Nigeria to death by
stoning for adultery. Safiya's stoning is scheduled for mid-March, delayed long
enough for her to wean her baby. Although Nigeria has a long history of conflict
between the Islamic north and the Christian and animist south, the imposition of
sharia is a new development in state politics. As the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
put it, "Between one-third and one-half of Nigeria's [population] will find
themselves living under a judicial system with which Mullah Muhammed Omar, the
ousted Taliban leader, would find little to quibble" (Jan. 27, 2002). In another less publicized
case, an 18-year-old woman, Abok Alfa Alok, was recently sentenced to death by
stoning for adultery by a criminal court in Sudan. Both women's cases are under
appeal, but to save their lives the global women's movement needs to come to
their defense more vocally. Elsewhere, in South Asia and
the Middle East, women continue to fight against female genital mutilation,
domestic violence, honor killings and other forms of violence against women. The
numbers are staggering. According to the newsletter of Women Living Under Muslim
Law, Bangladesh tops the world's charts in violence against women. Forty-seven
percent of women in Bangladesh are victimized by male partners or family
members. Bangladesh is followed by India, where 40% of women are similarly
abused by men they are married or related to. An estimated 5,000 women are
murdered each year in India in dowry-related incidents. Women are also fighting against
the widespread practice called "honor" killings. In these cases women
are murdered by family members for transgressing social or religious codes, and
murderers are rarely brought to justice by courts influenced by fundamentalist
hatred of women. - In Pakistan, three women a
day become victims of honor killings, usually murdered by male members of their
families, including their husbands, fathers, and brothers. - In the Gaza strip and West
Bank, two-thirds of all murders were most likely honor killings, according to UN
agencies. - In Jordan, an average of 23
women are murdered every year in the name of "honor." - In Yemen, an Al Qaeda
stronghold, 400 honor killings are believed to have taken place in 1997. - In Bangladesh, there was a
four-fold increase in reported disfiguring acid attacks between 1996-1998. - In Turkey, an estimated 200
girls and women are murdered in the name of honor each year. Human rights groups note that
the figures are inconclusive because so few crimes are reported or convicted.
According to Human Rights Watch, in 2001, judges in Turkey trying
"honor" killing cases often reduced the penalties for perpetrators,
holding that the victim had "provoked" the murder by transgressing
codes of conduct imposed on women by society. In Jordan, there has been a
vocal grassroots public awareness and signature campaign since 1999 run by the
Jordanian National Committee to Eliminate the So-called Crimes of Honor, but the
government has so far failed to repeal the law that allows for a reduced
sentence for the perpetrators of "honor crimes." Women's liberationists argue
that "honor" killings are not unique, but lie on a continuum of
violence against women across cultures. They are calling for an international
response to "honor" killings. Grassroots activists have planned over
800 actions all over the world in conjunction with V-Day, a global movement to
end violence against women organized by the author of "The Vagina
Monologues," Eve Ensler. Amnesty International will launch a similar
campaign in 2003. WAR AND POLITICS Women's efforts to combat
violence unfold in the context of a war-torn world. While Bush's bloodthirsty
hounds search out new lands to prolong his "war on terror," South Asia
stands on the brink of possible nuclear war. The nuclear threat in that region
should not be underestimated. India's rejection of General Musharraf's offer to
make South Asia a nuclear free region and to sign a no-war pact exposes India's
continuing efforts to build up its nuclear arsenal. A recent CIA report to
Congress concludes that both Pakistan and India "continue to acquire
nuclear technology." It is against this nuclear
threat that women in South Asia persist in their battles for a more humane
world. Following the September 11 attacks, a coalition of South Asian feminist
organizations released a statement in which they wrote: "Religious fundamentalism
and military aggression are two sides of patriarchy, that aim to seek control
and wield power over women and other oppressed sections. The women's movement
opposes the forces of religious fundamentalism whether they are from the U.S. or
Afghanistan or from India or Pakistan because fundamentalist forces in essence
trample upon all democratic and women's rights and seek to reverse the gains
made by women's liberation movements." With more than a million troops
amassed along the border between India and Pakistan, the tensions between Hindu
and Islamic fundamentalist groups run high. Communalist sentiment is being
whipped up in various regions of India between Christians and Hindus as well. In the state of Orissa the rape
of a woman and the ensuing prosecution is embroiled in the conflict between
Hindus and Christians. The woman, a Hindu, was raped by two men, at least one of
whom is believed to be a Christian. In that same region, an Australian
missionary and his son were set on fire by Hindu fundamentalist thugs two years
ago. However, voters dealt a serious
blow to the ruling right-wing Hindu fundamentalist party, the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), in the recent state assembly elections, showing that many Indians
oppose the government's militarism and communalism. LESS SANCTUARY IN SECULAR
STATES Women are becoming more
vulnerable to fundamentalist policies, not alone in the Sudan or Saudi Arabia,
where the state openly imposes religious laws, but also in places like India,
which claim to practice democracy. There exist in many places two
types of laws—one set of laws for women and the family and another set of laws
for the public sphere. Personal and family laws in places like India and Algeria
have stripped women of the basic rights of inheritance and ownership as well as
of divorce. Countries like Egypt, Sri
Lanka, and Bangladesh have nationality laws on the books that deny women the
right to transfer citizenship to their children. Despite years of protest by
women's groups in Egypt, in May 2000 the government dismissed a parliamentary
plea to reform the nationality law. Laws such as these deny women a national
identity in the very lands that they fought to liberate from colonialism. In the face of such reaction
and violence, women continue to battle for a more human world, struggling
against war, nuclear weapons, religious and ethnic hatred, and to protect the
environment against the ravages of global capital. Women are raising questions
about nationalism and about what it means to be human in this increasingly
violent world. Looking at women's struggles in the Middle East and South Asia shows us that we can't separate the personal from the political. Women fight for new human relations in the home, where they might face violence or even death, at the same time that they challenge warmongering and jingoism at the national and global level. Freedom and anti-war movements everywhere need to listen to these women, so we can work out a more comprehensive vision of social transformation to counter the future of permanent war being offered to us by Bush, Bin Laden and other fundamentalists around the world. |
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