Essay Article
Solidarity with women of Afghanistan
by
Terry Moon
Today
the Afghan women’s experience with fundamentalist Islam and with phony U.S.
“liberation” is being watched by the worldwide women’s
movement--particularly by women in Iraq who fear the willingness of the U.S. to
sell out women’s lives in Afghanistan is evidence of their willingness to do
the same in Iraq. The situation of women in Afghanistan reveals their fears are
well founded.
Today,
the ability of Afghan women to gain even a minimal amount of freedom is being
severely hampered by the U.S.’s support of the Northern Alliance and
fundamentalist warlords, a repressive male-dominated culture, and the hold that
fundamentalist ideas have on the countryside. We look to the struggle of women
in Afghanistan to see Woman as Revolutionary Force and Reason in the most
difficult of circumstances.
AFGHANISTAN
TODAY
Despite
the claim by President Bush in his speech to the nation on May 1 that “We
continue to help the Afghan people lay roads, restore hospitals, and educate all
of their children,” the Education Department in Afghanistan’s Balkh Province
just announced closing 180 schools due to lack of funds. This leaves over 4,000
teachers and school employees jobless and stops 170,000 students’ education.
Many teachers have yet to receive salaries since the academic year began
(“School Closures in Balkh Province Leave Teachers, Students Stranded,” July
23, 2003, by Farangis Najibullah, rawa_supporters@yahoogroups.com).
The
escalating attack on girls’ education was addressed directly on International
Women’s Day, March 8, in Parwan province when a teenager, Mahera, said: “The
world is going to the moon and across the Internet, but Afghan girls are living
under fanatical prejudices. We want these mullahs to be quiet.”
The
director of the Panjsher school district in Parwan province confirmed that there
were no schools for girls because of opposition from fundamentalist Islamic
scholars. In Herat province rules were announced in January which prohibit men
from teaching girls and impose strict sex segregation in schools. A shortage of
women teachers restricts the ability of girls to go to school at all. Warlord
Ismail Khan, who rules Panjsher, ordered increasing restrictions on women and
girls over the past year, including immediate mandatory gynecological exams for
women and girls found alone or with unrelated men, walking on the street or
riding in a taxi.
Even
the appalling lack of security has its own sexual politics. Over 150 people are
wounded by land mines or unexploded ordnance in Afghanistan every month. But if
a girl or woman is maimed, she becomes unmarryable; it is “also difficult for
them to make friends, nobody really accepts them,” reports physiotherapist
Rohajza Naudri, who herself lost a leg to a mine when she was 11.
U.S.
BETRAYS DEMOCRACY
Afghanistan
has a chance of becoming a place where its citizens can enjoy some freedom, but
at every opportunity the U.S. stopped it. One such opportunity was the LOYA
JIRGA of July 2002, which set up the government structures and chose who would
run it. It was preceded by the Bonn Summit in November 2001, where the
transitional government was formed. Out of 57 delegates, only five women were
selected by male delegates in, as Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange tells us,
“a completely undemocratic fashion.”
The
manipulation of the LOYA JIRGA takes on great significance given the present
reality of Afghanistan: the warlords are again fighting among themselves; the
Northern Alliance is raping women of the Pashtun ethnic group and imposing
Taliban-like restrictions on women; the Northern Alliance and warlords have been
using U.S. money to build up their own private armies and power bases and to
attack those of other ethnicities and those who support the Karzai government.
The
forces responsible for countless brutalities under the former Rabbani government
were the ones decreed by the U.S. as the decision-makers. It did not start out
that way. As delegates to the loya jirga Omar Zakhilwal and Adeena Niazi tell
us: “Men and women mingled openly and comfortably. In tolerant and lively
exchanges, we discussed the compatibility of women’s rights with our Islamic
traditions. Women played a leading role at these meetings. We were living proof
against the stereotypes that Afghans are divided by ethnic hatreds, that we are
a backward people not ready for democracy and equality....The one issue that
united the delegates above all others was the urgency of reducing the power of
warlords and establishing a truly representative government.”
There
was a grassroots movement to nominate the former king, Zahir Shah (a Pashtun) as
head of state as a counterbalance to the Northern Alliance. This move was not
favored by the warlords of the Northern Alliance and other tribal leaders who
want to maintain a weak and decentralized Afghan state in order to preserve
their lucrative enclaves of power.
To
appease them, the U.S. postponed the loya jirga for close to two days while it
strong-armed the king into renouncing any role in the government-to-be. This
allows the U.S. to drop a bomb or snatch a terrorist whenever it pleases, rather
than risk a recomposition of a centralized Afghan state.
After
any semblance of democracy was destroyed by the U.S., Zakhilwal and Niazi
report, “the atmosphere at the LOYA JIRGA changed radically. The gathering was
now teeming with intelligence agents who openly threatened reform-minded
delegates, especially women. Fundamentalist leaders branded critics of the
warlords as traitors to Islam and circulated a petition denouncing the Women’s
Affairs Minister Samar as ‘Afghanistan’s Salman Rushdie.’” The warlords
terrorized their critics and came out controlling the armed forces, security
services, foreign affairs, and ministry staffs--in short, the country.
BACK
TO THE FUTURE
With
U.S. collusion, Afghanistan is slipping back into chaos, misery, starvation,
feudalism. Now more women are being raped because of ethnic rivalries; deepening
poverty means the practice of selling girls as brides--some as young as
eight--is escalating. Selling women is against Islam, but that hasn’t stopped
the practice.
While
the oppression can seem overwhelming, we have learned from our Afghan sisters
how universal is the concept of “two worlds in every country.” Just as women
organize themselves to fight our government and culture, and oppose Bush’s war
in Afghanistan and now in Iraq, so women in Afghanistan, South Asia, and the
Middle East--in fact women worldwide--reveal themselves as militant fighters for
freedom against their own governments.
You
can see the dialectic at work--self-development through contradiction--as women
confront a key characteristic of their oppression: their complete
dehumanization. The Taliban and the Northern Alliance have reduced women to
their sexual function and view women as things. That reality means these women
put their lives on the line to experience self-development, to insist to
themselves and to the world that they are full human beings.
During
the Taliban years, women ran hundreds of clandestine schools for girls, despite
the fact that their discovery could mean at least a severe beating and, at
worst, death.
Women
resisted in every way. At the Bagrami Clinic, for example, Dr. Mir Faziullah and
his four women staff members continued to treat men, even though the Taliban
checked the clinic three to four times a month. Aqela Sarwary, a 49-year-old
nurse, said: “Sometimes, as we took turns watching the front, a mullah might
come in through the back. When the Taliban came, I’d close the curtains and
cover my face. Then they would leave and we’d go out without burqas, and all
the men patients could see our faces and didn’t care.” Daily evasion of
Taliban law by women health workers and medical professionals was extensive.
Women’s
defiance took many different forms. Some girls like Laili, 10 years old, wore
pants and kept her hair cut short. “I pretended to be a boy and studied in the
boys’ school,” she said triumphantly. “It was the only way for me.”
Another girl, too old to pass as a boy, passed herself off as a teacher, while
still a student. What we see is a fantastic self-development through the
contradiction of what the Taliban tried to impose. This is the heart of the
dialectic and the movement of history: self-development through contradiction.
FACING
INTERNAL CONTRADICTIONS
Women
are not only fighting an imperialist outside force--which is what much of al-Qaida
and the Taliban were in Afghanistan. They are also fighting, as women’s
liberationists have had to fight in every country, their own indigenous culture.
This is clear from incidents like the one last November in Kabul when a crowd of
burqa-clad women shouted “yes, yes” when asked whether they wanted to shed
it. But then a man shouted: “No. They need food, they don’t need to take off
their burqas.” In fear, the women became silent.
The
Northern Alliance deputy prime minister, Abdur Rasool Sayyaf, publicly opposes
women voting, and says women should remain veiled and not mix with men in
public. But burqa or not, women want freedom, as is clear from a woman who fled
to Pakistan after the Taliban took power. Here she speaks for herself:
There
has been much discussion about how Afghan women have been...abused, tortured
and killed. But these discussions...have done little to solve our lack of
basic human rights. Many Afghan women look to the West in the name of
freedom and expect people in the West to promote our rights. But in the West
they neither consult us about the issues that affect our daily lives, nor do
they uphold or promote on our behalf the standards by which they themselves
live...All our hopes have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Our
voices have been buried without any recognition that our hands have carried
swords to fight against our enemies....Those who have come to power, those
with guns, continue to leer at us, to make fun of us, to take pleasure in
harassing us. These men who think of themselves as the defenders of our
faith, as our fathers and brothers sent to protect us, are the same ones who
call us "Honey."...Others tell us that we are "live wires
that must be covered." It is a pity they don’t recognize us as
individuals, as fellow human beings.
Her
words reveal that women’s fight is total: they fight their government, their
culture, and in many cases the men who are closest to them. This reveals at
least three things: 1. That the uprooting of the old society must be total from
the start; 2. That freedom for women is not some “Western” imperialist idea
imposed on women but springs from indigenous soil; and 3. That it is not enough
to oppose U.S. imperialism without also opposing all religious fundamentalisms
that want to send women back to the dark ages.
These
points are implicit in why the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan
(RAWA) insists that “Revolutionary” remain part of their name. As RAWA
member “Sahar” said: “What we want is full human rights for women; we want
women to be recognized as human beings; in Afghanistan, this in itself is
considered ‘revolutionary.’ We want a secular, democratic government, with
freedom of thought, speech and religion for everybody. This too is
revolutionary....For Afghanistan we have to be radical.”
DEMAND
FOR NEW HUMAN RELATIONS
Implicit
in Afghan women’s demands is the need for new human relations--which cannot be
without a completely transformed society where sexism, racism, and capitalism
are what is “consigned to the dustbin of history.” To achieve that total
uprooting requires a unity of the movements from practice with a philosophy that
encompasses and makes explicit those desires.
Afghan
women’s struggles, and our own, challenge the idea that all we need to do is
sit back and let the U.S. “liberate” a country--or we only need to fight
against the U.S. and its economic and military policies. Even if we are
successful in ending Bush’s endless war on terrorism, does that mean that
women will be free? Women’s struggles and demands reveal why the anti-war
movement must not limit itself to only being against Bush and not also condemn
terrorists who kill innocent people and religious fundamentalists who enslave
women and deny our humanity.
Women
fighting for total freedom challenge the Left to make clear what we are fighting
for, what is our vision of the future. The Afghan woman quoted above said:
“All we can try to do is move forward towards our freedom. There is no magic
wand that will give it to us instantly....It is time to improve our lot in life
and throw off the shackles that have allowed the caravan of civilization and
democracy to travel far beyond us.”
She
is making a crucial point because Bush has tried to establish, with the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, that people cannot win freedom on their own, the U.S. has
to give it to them. But as Afghanistan shows, no one can give you freedom, and
if they try to, they can take it away just as easily. Afghan women’s struggle
reveals that they are fighting not just for an end to starvation and
dehumanization, but for totally new human relations.
No
one can doubt, when confronted with the creativity of Afghan women’s
continuing struggle against reaction--the Taliban, and now also the warlords and
Northern Alliance propped up by the U.S.--that they have the creativity and
ability to help transform this sexist, racist, alienating capitalist society.
But we cannot put that on their shoulders alone. The battle is also in
theoretically projecting the vision of a new society that is implicit in the
actions and Reason of Afghan women, to show that another world is possible.
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