Afghan women flee life of pain, darkness Taliban insists they're `happy, satisfied'

Tribune staff reporters. Uli Schmetzer reported from Islamabad and Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah from Karachi Published October 17, 2001

KARACHI, Pakistan -- The Taliban insists its religious dogma honors women by restricting them to a veiled life in public and a strictly domestic life in private. Officials denounce as lies allegations that Afghan girls grow up in ignorance and eventually marry men who consider them more servants than partners.

The Taliban's senior official here said women are "happy and satisfied" with the Taliban's Islamic rule and denied that they are fleeing into Pakistan. He claims Afghan men are entering Pakistan only to drop off family members in refugee camps before returning to their native land to fight.

Not so, say aid workers and refugees in women's shelters. In Afghanistan, they insist, men rule and women obey.

While the U.S.-led bombing campaign presses on, another battle for public opinion is engaged.

"At the root of most conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan are the rights of women. Men simply don't want to see women as human beings," said Khalid Salimi, who runs SACH, an Islamabad-area shelter for abused women, many of whom have fled Afghanistan.

The Taliban's penal code metes out public floggings for women walking alone in public. Zealous religious students have executed female adulterers before crowds in sports stadiums. Religious police have lashed women with rods or canes if their heels are visible or strands of hair peek from their veils.

"One night my grandmother was sick so I went to the pharmacy for medicine. There were no men in our house so I had to go alone," said Humaira, a 28-year-old Afghan refugee who fled Kandahar and found her way to the shelter. "The Taliban police caught me and yelled: `How dare you go without a male escort?'

"I explained. They lashed me anyway. Across the back and legs, with thick wire cable. It hurt. But I went to the pharmacy all the same."

Women in the shelter, a haven funded with money from church groups in California and Norway, tell stories not only about torture, beatings, rape, forced marriage and prostitution, but also about girls, barely in their teens, who have been traded by their families like commodities.

When Nuria was 12, her father offered her as a gift to the commander of a warlord army. But the night before the wedding, she and her grandmother ran away from a village near Kandahar to live in hiding with a family friend for four years.

Eventually betrayed by an informer, the women escaped again, this time to Kabul and Taliban rule.

In the Afghan capital, Nuria was courted by what she describes as an elderly Taliban commander. Once more she fled with her grandmother, this time across the Pakistan border to Peshawar, where she studied English and computer science.

Still hunted by jilted suitors

"My grandmother sold all her jewelry so I could attend classes. She wanted me to have a real life," Nuria said. Still hunted, she believes, by her jilted suitors, she finally found refuge in the women's shelter on the outskirts of Islamabad.

"In Afghanistan and in Pakistan, women are treated like animals," said Nuria, now 22.

Nuria shares a room with Aisha, 26, another Afghan woman who fled to Pakistan searching for a better life.

Instead, she said, police in Peshawar detained her and raped her, tossing her back into the streets where other men sexually abused her.

"I didn't know I had the right to say no. Ever since I was a small girl, men just did what they wanted with me. I didn't know it could be different," she said, after two weeks of psychological counseling.

In an Urdu-language interview Tuesday at the Afghan consulate in Karachi, consul general Moulvi Rahmatullah Kakazada denied that women in Afghanistan are oppressed.

Reports from aid agencies in Afghanistan have indicated that most women have not been allowed to work, but Kakazada said women are not restricted to their homes. The wearing of veils, he insisted, is required by Islamic law.

Kakazada also asked: "If America cares so much about women and kids, why did it bomb villages and kill so many people, including women and children?"

His office is in the newly built Afghan consulate, a building decorated with marble tiles and plush rugs. The black-and-white Taliban flag, touting the Islamic declaration of "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger" flies atop the building. Another graces the desk of Kakazada, who declined to be photographed.

There were no women in the consulate.

Kakazada, 35, firmly denied that the Taliban forbid women an education.

"It was all lies," he said. "There was no such rule."

He said that 45,000 girls between the ages of 10 and 12 were enrolled in a school in Kabul but that those classes stopped when U.S.-led air strikes began early last week.

`Proceeding bit by bit,' he says

"We were not so economically sound or stable to build so many colleges and universities like America," he said. "We were proceeding bit by bit."

Before the extremist Taliban came to power, Afghan women could attend school. Some even attended college.

The difference in women's rights under the Taliban and the Northern Alliance--a coalition of warlords now promoted as de facto allies of the U.S.-led anti-terrorist coalition--for the most part appears slight.

"Under the rule of the warlords [from 1989 to 1995] we were allowed to wear only the chador [a longer head scarf]. We could walk in the streets, but their men could rape and abuse women without being punished," said Meena Bibi, 29, who fled Kabul two weeks ago.

"Under the Taliban we must wear the burqa [a head-to-toe covering]. We are safe in the streets if accompanied by a male relative. We are not raped but we are forced to marry," she said.

On Tuesday, the Northern Alliance rebels fighting the ruling Taliban said a new, postwar government must include all sections of Afghanistan society. Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah added that women should be included in any future administration.

The alliance has taken at least a small step in that direction, operating a girls' school in Yang-e-qal, a rural village in a northern sector not controlled by the Taliban.

The school has 500 pupils in grades 1 through 8 who study the same subjects the boys do at a nearby facility, including math, Persian and the Koran.

-- Anonymous, October 17, 2001

Answers

remember that stupid bitch journalist that was captured in Afghanistan and then released?

I heard her last night on Dateline. She said that the women there feel that western women are wimps beause they only have one or two babies while the Afghanistan woman can have fifteen or something like that.

"When all your children are killed in the war, I will still have children left to come after you." One woman said something like that which she was quoting on the show.

It had to do with teh fact that the stupid bitch had only one child.

Also, she was within a few miles of the border, after having been undercover for a few days, when her mule did something and she reacted by speaking loudly just as a taliban soldier was near, which is how she was caught. Couldn't keep her mouth shut like a good Afghanistan woman.

-- Anonymous, October 17, 2001

Here is the link to her story on Dateline.

The Qutoe I was referring to:

Yvonne Ridley: “I met this 100-year-old woman who said, you know she would still fight now if America came and invaded but she prayed for peace. And there was another woman who was in her 30s. Then she said, ‘Have you got any children? And I said, I have a daughter, and she mocked me and said, ‘You English women, you American women — you only ever produce one or two children. I can produce 15, when you run out of your soldier boys, I will have more waiting to come.”

Strong words, powerful stories and exactly what Ridley had come to find. She was ready to head back to Pakistan to file a report for her London newspaper, the Sunday Express.

More at the link.

-- Anonymous, October 17, 2001

I saw Ridley on Larry King. Not impressed, quite an unpleasant woman, I'd say. When she was asked about being a single mother, she immediately bristled and said, words to the effect, "Hypocrites! Nobody ever asks male reporters if they have any children!" That wasn't the point. The point was she is a single mother and the child's father is, apparently, nowhere in evidence. I wonder how many other reporters, male or female, are single parents of a 9-year old child? As a single parent myself during most of my son's juvenile life, I would never have put myself deliberately in harm's way.

-- Anonymous, October 17, 2001

makes ya wonder who the father is, don't it?

poor sap.

-- Anonymous, October 17, 2001