Taleban justify tagging Hindus
Now Hindu and Sikh women will have to wear veils too
A controversial order that Hindus in Afghanistan should carry identity tags is designed to protect them from police harrassment, a Taleban official has said.
Giving details of the edict, the head of the Taleban news agency said Hindus should carry thumb-size pieces of yellow cloth to identify themselves as non-Muslims.
The Taleban's religious police has the power to detain people without trial for not complying with Islamic rulings.
The tagging edict has been fiercely denounced outside the country as discriminatory and oppressive.
Complying with Islam
The Taleban's religious police regularly herd men into mosques at prayer time, often using short lengths of cable to whip them into line.
The police, whose job is to promote virtue and prevent vice, also check men's beards to make sure they are at least the length of a fist.
The head of the Taleban news agency, Abdul Hanan Hemat, said identity tags for Hindus would mean the police would not harrass them.
The tags are not deemed necessary for Sikhs because of their distinctive turbans.
Mr Hemat denied reports that Hindus would have to fly yellow flags from their roof tops.
'Outrageous'
Tuesday's announcemnent of the tagging order prompted swift international condemnation.
US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher called it "the latest in a long list of outrageous oppressions" by the country's militant Muslim movement.
Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman Raminder Singh Jassal said his government "absolutely deplored such orders which patently discriminate against minorities".
The Taleban's Minister for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice, Mohammed Wali, says the movement's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, will approve the new edict soon.
Under the directive, Hindu and Sikh women will also have to veil themselves like other Afghan women.
Vulnerable
A Hindu in the Afghan capital, Kabul, said the identification would make Hindus "vulnerable".
"It will degrade our position in society," Anar, who uses only one name, told the Associated Press news agency.
Afghanistan has only a tiny non-Muslim community, including several thousand Hindus and Sikhs and, it is thought, only one single Jew. Some 500 Hindus live in Kabul.
Most of the minorities left in the mid-1990s, when their property was looted by warring factions, but some returned to Afghanistan when the Taleban took power.
The Taleban's destruction of ancient Buddhist
statues in March raised fears for the safety of
these minorities.
-- Anonymous, May 23, 2001