Agonising American freedom

The United States claims to have brought the women of Afghanistan freedom, but the fact is that they continue to live in the shadow of starvation, disease and insecurity.

In January 2002, George W. Bush said in his State of the Union address: "The last time we met in this chamber, the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today, women are free..." Almost a year later (October 11, 2002), Bush congratulated himself again: "We went into Afghanistan to free people, because we believe in freedom. We believe every life counts. Every life matters. So we're helping people recover from living under years of tyranny and oppression. We're helping Afghanistan claim its democratic future." The U.S. campaign in Afghanistan was called Operation Enduring Freedom.

With all this talk of freedom, it is important to ask the question, how are Afghan women enduring American-style freedom? When we think of women's rights in Afghanistan, we think of the imprisonment of the burqa, the traditional Islamic head-to-foot covering that the Taliban forced women to wear. George Bush certainly seems to subscribe to this view. But many Afghan women wore the burqa before and after the Taliban. In the rural areas of Afghanistan, the majority of women covered themselves. Therefore, contrary to what President Bush would have us believe, the problems facing Afghan women run far deeper than clothing. Food security, access to health care, and safety from physical violence are key aspects of women's rights that the U.S. intervention has largely ignored or even jeopardised.

By November, Afghanistan's harsh winter will have returned and thousands of Afghans, devastated by three years of drought and 23 years of war and civil unrest, will be facing winter and starvation. Take Badghis province for example, one of the poorest. Roughly 50 per cent of Badghis' approximately 400,000 people cannot obtain enough food this winter. Fatema, a resident of Bagdhis, does not know how she will feed her six children this year. Her 15-year-old son is the only one in the family who can earn money; he does it by selling grass for fuel and food. Two months ago, they were refugees, but they returned recently. They are among the millions of refugees who have returned to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban; their return has been counted by the United Nations as a measure of the success of Operation Enduring Freedom (World Vision, October 17).

When George Bush promised us that Afghan women were finally free, he was assuaging our guilt at the bombs that had been rained down on Afghanistan, picking off wedding parties, cutting off crucial winter aid routes, and delaying spring plantings of wheat. According to Bush, now women can at least walk around without a burqa. But what good is an uncovered face when the body is starving to death? Women's rights are human rights: survival is more important than clothing, and survival has been the most difficult challenge facing women both before and after the U.S. action in Afghanistan.

A RECENT report released by the U.S.-based Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) entitled `Maternal Mortality in Herat Province: The Need to Protect Women's Rights,' said: "The rate of maternal mortality in a society is a critical indicator of the health and human rights status of women in a community." The report documented 593 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births, the majority of the cases in rural areas. This maternal mortality rate is far worse than that in all neighbouring countries; Pakistan, with 200 deaths per 100,000 births, ranks second. A researcher with the PHR concluded, "What appears to be simply a public health catastrophe in Herat province... speaks of the many years of denial and deprivation of women's rights in Afghanistan." Today, one of the most vulnerable groups of women in Afghanistan are widows. In Kabul alone there are an estimated 40,000 women who lost their husbands in the decades of war. Nationwide, the number of widows is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, since about 1.5 million Afghans were killed during the 10-year-long Soviet occupation and in the crossfire due to warlordism in the early 1990s. "While the plight of Afghan widows has improved psychologically, the main problems of finding shelter, food and income remain the same," says Awadia Mohamed , coordinator for CARE International in Afghanistan. According to him, in some cases their situation has worsened.

Widows have limited access to food and health services despite the absence of the Taliban. In fact, "51 per cent of widows surveyed reported being unwell, of whom 57.6 per cent had fever, 13.6 per cent had diarrhoea and 10 per cent leishmaniasis wounds... Furthermore, calorie intake was insufficient, with most of the women and their children subsisting on little more than bread and tea, resulting in malnutrition problems and micronutrient deficiencies" (`Afghanistan: Focus on the plight of widows,' IRIN, October 21, 2002). Hunger and lack of healthcare indicate the deprivation of the basic rights of mothers, daughters and widows. Where are the media and their cameras now?

ARTICLE 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person." If the right to survival is a fundamental principle of women's rights, freedom from insecurity is another. But insecurity is a euphemism for war, for conflict, for more violence and bloodshed. Unfortunately, "territorial skirmishes between heavily armed warlords," (`Fighting breaks out in troubled eastern Afghan province,' Agence France-Presse or AFP, October 17) are common. Practically speaking, after the Taliban fell, the warlords returned to their fiefdoms and resumed fighting one another, exactly as they had been doing when the Taliban first came to power.

According to AFP, "northern Afghanistan remains plagued by factional and ethnic rivalries despite loose allegiances between warlords controlling the area, most of whom have offered pledges of support to the central Afghan government," (`Violence in northern Afghanistan deterring refugee returns: U.N.,' AFP, October 20, 2002). Such clashes are frequent and deadly in the northern and eastern parts of Afghanistan. The media fail to report prominently that many of these warlords, who are now members of the Northern Alliance, were first empowered by the U.S. in the 1980s to repel the Soviet invasion, and then again to overthrow the Taliban, in 2001. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghansitan (RAWA) spelled out last year what the empowering of warlords will do for Afghanistan: "The Taliban and Al Qaeda will be eliminated, but the existence of the N.A. [Northern Alliance] as a military force would shatter the joyful dream of the majority for an Afghanistan free from the odious chains of the barbaric Taliban. The N.A. will horribly intensify the ethnic and religious conflicts and will never refrain to fan the fire of another brutal and endless civil war in order to retain power," (`RAWA's appeal to the U.N. and World community,' November 13, 2001). Rather than heed the words of RAWA and others, the U.S. engaged the services of the Northern Alliance, with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paying warlords $100,000 each to gather armies (`Caught Off Guard, the CIA Fights to Catch Up,' by D.S. Cloud, April 15, 2002, Wall Street Journal).

Today, the three Vice-Presidents of Afghanistan are all members of the Northern Alliance General Mohammad Fahim, Karim Khalili and Haji Abdul Qadeer. Mohammed Qasim Fahim, a former Mujahideen warrior, is the Defence Minister. The Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who recieved a plaque of appreciation from the U.S. forces for the help rendered against the Taliban last year, can add ethnic-cleansing to his achievements. Dostum's troops forced 180 Pashtun families (people who are of the same ethnicity as the Taliban), from villages in northern Afghanistan in early October. Some of the women said that his men had raped them and looted their homes (`Pashtuns driven from northern Afghan villages,' October 7, 2002, Reuters).

While Afghan women are desperate for security and for the expansion of the International Security Armed Forces (ISAF) from Kabul to all of Afghanistan, the U.S. continues to deny this. Even Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan, a puppet of the U.S., has asked for the ISAF to be expanded to all of Afghanistan, so that warlords can be disarmed and a transition to peace can begin. Instead the U.S. has been focussing on training a national army of Afghans, but the attempt is being undermined by the fact that Defence Minister Mohammed Qasim Fahim himself has a private army of 18,000 men (`Afghans ask: Whose army is it?,' David Buchbinder, October 17, 2002, Christian Science Monitor). With the U.S. empowering the warlords, and undermining the ISAF expansion, there is little hope for peace and security in the country. Afghan women will pay the highest price, as they have always done. When girls' schools were still under attack in March this year, The Washington Post happily ran a story headlined: `The Girls Are back in Afghan Schools'. One could almost hear the collective sigh of relief across America at the knowledge that our good war, meant to liberate Afghan women, was working. But are the media reporting the recent spate of attacks against schools in Afghanistan? Schools have been burned down in Kandahar, Wardak and Sar-i-Pul. In the seventh incident in a series of attacks on girls' schools, gunmen forced the closure of a school in Wardak province that served 1,300 girls. In recent weeks, girls' schools have been burned and bombed (`UNICEF denounces violent attacks on schools in Afghanistan,' October 17, 2002, U.N. News Service).

IT is crucial for us to understand that women's rights are always politically manipulated by the powerful, to justify almost anything. In the late 1970s, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and claimed that it was saving Afghan women. Then they began killing men who opposed the invasion, leaving thousands of women widowed. The U.S.-backed Mujahideen (many of whom are now with the Northern Alliance) claimed that they were saving women from the "godless" communists. Then, they simply raped women, forced them into marriages, and tortured their husbands. The Taliban took over from the Mujahideen, claiming to save Afghan women. Then they forced them to stay at home (for their own good), stopped girls from going to school, and denied women access to medical care. Finally, George Bush came riding on a white horse to save Afghan women. Perhaps it is time to rethink the promises that were made by powerful men to save Afghan women. Afghan women do not need saving. They know perfectly well how to save themselves: the brave work of RAWA in the fields of education, health care, political agitation and demands for secularism, democracy and women's rights, is a testament to this. The West does not hold a monopoly on these issues. What Afghan women want the U.S. to do is to stop imposing freedom through bombs, stop backing human rights violators and warlords, and stop hindering the security forces from expanding to the rest of the country.

The struggle of Afghan women has been reduced in the U.S. to a simplistic discussion about the burqa. Don the burqa and you are oppressed, take it off and, lo and behold, you are free. But what does this really mean? It means that to portray constantly Afghan women as weak, covered up, defenceless, and needing our help makes us feel good about helping them, about saving them. In order to express solidarity with Afghan women, we need to understand what affects them, starting with what we are responsible for and have the power to change the use of bombs and warlords as tools of U.S. policy. We need to begin treating Afghan women with dignity and not reduce their problems to a piece of clothing. Afghan women's rights are a crucial part of the equation of Afghanistan.

One year later, it is clear that Afghan women are not "free" they are simply enduring American freedom.

Sonali Kolhatkar is vice-president of the Afghan Women's Mission. She hosts and co-produces `The Morning Show' on KPFK Radio in Los Angeles, part of the Pacifica Network.