Here we go again.
Posted on 07/22/2006 4:12:36 PM PDT by Pokey78
AFGHANISTAN’S notorious Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which was set up by the Taliban to enforce bans on women doing anything from working to wearing nail varnish or laughing out loud, is to be re-created by the government in Kabul. The decision has provoked an outcry among women and human rights activists who fear a return to the days when religious police patrolled the streets, beating or arresting any woman who was not properly covered by a burqa or accompanied by a male relative.
“This is a very bad idea at a bad time,” said Sam Zia-Zarifi, the Asia research director of Human Rights Watch. “We’re close to the edge in Afghanistan. It really could all go wrong and it is alarming that the United Nations and western governments are not speaking out on this issue.”
President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet has approved the proposal to re-establish the department, and the measure will go to Afghanistan’s parliament when it reconvenes later this summer. The conservative complexion of the assembly makes it likely to be passed.
“When we talk of ‘vice and virtue’ . . . the one introduced by the Taliban comes to our minds. But it won’t be like that,” insisted Mohammad Karim Rahimi, a spokesman for the president. “It will be an organisation which will work on promoting morality in society as exists in any other Islamic country.”
Nematullah Shahrani, the religious affairs minister who will oversee the department, claims it will focus on alcohol, drugs, crime and corruption. But critics point out that Afghanistan’s criminal laws already address these issues and say that once the department has been re-established, it will be easy to misuse.
“We are worried that there are no clear terms of reference for this body,” said Nader Nadery, of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. “It will remind people of the Taliban.”
“They haven’t even bothered to change the name,” said Malalai Joya, a courageous female MP whose outspokenness means she has to travel with bodyguards and move every day because of threats to her life. Joya, 28, was physically attacked in parliament in May after she criticised warlords.
“The situation for women in Afghanistan has not improved,” she said. “People in the outside world say Afghan women don’t have to wear burqas any more and yes, it’s true that in some provinces like Kabul, Jalalabad and Herat, women can go outside without a burqa.
“They can go and work in offices, and we have 68 women MPs. But more and more women are wearing burqas because of the lack of security. Look at the high rate of suicide among our women — Afghan women prefer to die than live because there is no security.
“In my opinion what we have in power under the mask of democracy are the brothers of Taliban — fundamentalists, warlords and drug lords,” she added. “Our country is under the shadow of their black hands. They are against women and re-creating the [department] is proof of this.”
Afghan women recall with horror the department’s religious police who ruthlessly enforced restrictions on women and men through public beatings and imprisonment under Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001.
Women were publicly beaten for wearing white shoes or heels that clicked; using lipstick; or going outside unaccompanied by a close male relative.
The department banned women from educating their daughters in home-based schools as well as working or begging, leaving thousands of widows with no means of supporting their families. They also beat men for trimming their beards, which had to be at least the length of a fist.
The repression of women was often cited in the West as a reason to intervene and oust the Taliban. Both the American first lady and the wife of the British prime minister made passionate speeches on the subject.
Laura Bush took over her husband’s weekly radio address in November 2001 to boast that “because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment”.
The sentiment was echoed in a speech by Cherie Blair a few days later at a meeting with Afghan women at Downing Street. “In Afghanistan if you wear nail polish, you could have your nails torn out,” she said, adding that the burqa, above all, symbolised the oppression of women.
“The women in Afghanistan are entitled, as women in every country are, to have the same hopes and aspirations as ourselves and our daughters: for good education, a career outside the home if they want one; the right to health care, and, of course, most importantly, the right for their voices to be heard.”
Yet almost five years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghan women are far from achieving these aims. In a new report, Lesson in Terror: Attacks on Education in Afghanistan, Human Rights Watch identified the lack of access to education, especially for girls, as jeopardising the country’s development and security.
Increasing attacks on schools, teachers and students, as well as general insecurity — particularly in southern Afghanistan — are preventing children from attending school.
There have already been more attacks in the first half of this year than all of last year and according to a UN official, barely a day goes by without a school being burnt or teacher killed. As a result the majority of primary school age girls are not in school, and fewer than 5% of secondary school age girls are attending classes.
“Afghan women and girls face increasing insecurity, and it’s more important for the government to address how to improve their access to public life rather than limit it further,” said Zama Coursen-Neff, a senior Human Rights Watch researcher.
The government’s decision to re-create the Taliban religious police is seen by critics as the most shocking in a series of backward steps designed to appease conservatives. Last year, both Karzai and the international community turned a blind eye to the election of warlords and former Taliban to parliament.
Last month Karzai tried to introduce press censorship, though this met international resistance. He has also started allowing local commanders to re-create militia, although it was these that led to the emergence of the Taliban in the first place.
Such moves have prompted increasing disillusion with Karzai from the international community. “The way we are heading you have to ask what this was all for,” said one western diplomat.
Others blame foreign governments for a lack of commitment to Afghanistan, which remains at the bottom of most social indicators.
Both Karzai and the international community were shocked by riots in Kabul in late May that took more than six hours to bring under control and which highlighted public anger at a lack of development.
“We have to lift our game,” Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Nato secretary-general, told reporters in Kabul last week. His visit was to finalise an expansion of Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which will see British troops in the southern province of Helmand come under Nato command.
“Nato is lifting its game in the south and hopefully soon in the east so that the whole of Afghanistan will be under the control of Nato-ISAF,” he said. “But the international community has to lift its game as well by also showing commitment to the government of Afghanistan.”
'Fierce' enemy
The Taliban has fought more fiercely than British troops were led to expect, the commander of Britain’s 4,800-strong contingent in Afghanistan has admitted.
Brigadier Ed Butler told reporters at a briefing in London: “We have been a little surprised by the ferocity and persistence of the Taliban.”
Six British soldiers have been killed in the operation since the beginning of June. “Hopefully it will not be too long before the tide does turn,” Butler said.
His remarks came as senior Nato commanders indicated that they would need more helicopters and men to expand the organisation’s mission across the entire country.
US General James L Jones, Nato’s supreme commander, said that plans were expected to be approved at a summit in November.
Yesterday coalition and Afghan forces killed 19 suspected Taliban fighters in Helmand province.
*sigh*
Remember, Islam is not the problem.... its Terrorism we need to fight!
Oh brother....
I had high hopes for Karzai, but he's nothing but the same cretins that were there before.
I am sure all those Afghan women didn't vote thinking this would happen. I bet if they put it to a ballot that it would not carry! The US should step in and say no way, I don't care how many people think it is interfering it is necessary to stop the enslavement of women in Afganistan again! Why did we fight this war if we let this sh** happen all over again?
Here we go again.
We have really failed people by not actually taking over these backwards countries.
.....or showing an ankle, or being home with the children when the rape gangs came by, or.....
Where are the "I want to make a difference" liberals now?
If this isn't a womans-right's issue, what is?
Grrr!
Attacking schools, keeping children from being educated (in anything but the Koran of course). Vile scumbags. Fanatical Islam is totalitarianism in it's most vicious form. It is not religion at all it is blood lust combined with a lust for political power and material wealth for themselves. They are so evil even their "Allah" must hide his face from their atrocities.
“They haven’t even bothered to change the name,” said Malalai Joya,..."
“In my opinion what we have in power under the mask of democracy are the brothers of Taliban — fundamentalists, warlords and drug lords, she added. Our country is under the shadow of their black hands. They are against women and re-creating the [department] is proof of this.”
Indeed: What this woman says has the ring of truth.
As one of many who supported the overthrow of the Taliban, this report is -- to say the least -- very disheartening.
Women were publicly beaten for wearing white shoes
Well, if it was after Labor day...
Serial Mom just came to mind.
Bump
The MSM misreporting yet another story.
Man...We need a new department like that.
We can call it the Department of Virtue.
The solution to this problem is to give each Afgan woman a handgun.
I understand the frustration that you and many others feel. But we have to remember a few sober realities. Our Marines, Rangers and Airmen can risk their lives to cauterize the gangrene in a country, but we can't reorder their lives for them. Once the mass of corrupt tissue has been excised, the local population faces a choice. They can continue the cleansing... or they can cower safely in their homes, and destroy their mirrors. For they will never be able to look themselves in their eyes again, if they throw away the one chance their families will ever have to breathe free.
We can smash those who have misjudged, by watching the Clinton Adminstration for 8 years, that America is populated by priaptic hedonists.. but we can't airdrop the determination to remain free.
That has to come from a people who were handed a chance at the cost of American blood, but only the chance, for freedom for their children.
The reason our kids always have, and always will bend their knees only to those who they revere, is that a large number of our young people allotted 4 years or more of their young lives to enforce that freedom. This has continued for 230 some years, and began with the words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." We aren't as sophisticated as Europeans, but we've never taken orders from an occupying power. You might say we've made that a habit.
But we cannot enforce that freedom for others.
Israel now needs to demonstrate that same unwaivering stand against evil creatures. And they most certainly are.
The future will witness a number of kitchen tables. One will hold a family who grieve the loss of an uncle, and honor the freedom he has guaranteed for the kids too young to understand now. His picture will always occupy a place of honor.
Another kitchen table will seat a family which remembers those brave Americans who came to their country and gave them the chance they needed to begin their own century of freedom. Pictures of Marines will hang beside those uncles who died to keep that freedom. This has been going on for many, many decades, in countries across the globe, fortunately and unfortunately.
A third table will seat a family which misses the two teenagers who were taken from that home to have explosives belted to them and used like so many cattle, (or Iranian children to clear minefields.) Their only twisted comfort is that their children killed several other children that they didn't know. Their hell will never end. Because they never stood up against the evil men.
They were too afraid. And now, their children, and their children's children, will be too afraid.
They will never need mirrors....
* Crickets *
BS, the reason we went there was to re-order their lives, otherwise, what was the point? Bush better lay down the law and stop this crap now or we will be bombed again soon by Afghanistan terrorists.
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