November 19, 2003
Awakened Woman's Circle is working for peace
Published on Saturday, November 15, 2003 by the Miami Herald
Women are Still Awaiting Freedom from the Taliban
by Masuda Sultan
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1115-05.htm
President Bush proclaimed in his 2002 State of the Union Message that with the Taliban removed from power, Afghan "women are free." But Afghan women have yet to taste real freedom two years after the Taliban fled Kabul on Nov. 13, 2001.
When I visited Kabul and Kandahar this September, women asked me why my government was so quick to send bombs to liberate them but so tardy in sending them the aid that they were promised.
No Marshall Plan yet
Bush said that Afghanistan would get a Marshall Plan, but he forgot to include any money for Afghanistan in his administration's budget proposal for 2003. In the administration's latest $87 billion request, Afghanistan was slated to get less than 1 percent of that money, or $800 million, for reconstruction. Not one dollar was earmarked for Afghan women, however.
U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and others are fighting hard for an amendment to earmark $60 million for programs to benefit Afghan women and girls. This money would help the courageous women on the frontlines of their own war&emdash;a war against oppression and poverty.
I recently went back to Kandahar, my birthplace and the second-largest city in Afghanistan, to help organize a conference on women and the constitution. Forty-five women leaders from across the country devised the Afghan Women's Bill of Rights, a document demanding that Afghan women be treated as humans, not sold into marital slavery or traded as compensation for crimes by one family against another. The women insisted on national disarmament, the disempowerment of warlords and trials for war criminals.
The women report that the Taliban and warlords still threaten their lives. The Taliban and local warlords continue to rape, kill and intimidate women and girls to prevent women's rights from becoming a reality.
In a recent initiative where women planned to get signatures for a petition for disarmament, I saw even some of the organizers refuse to give their own, fearing that they would be shot -- or worse.
They have good reason to be afraid.
These women spoke out against the Taliban and told the world how horrible it was to them. Yet on Oct. 6, the highest ranking Taliban official in U.S. custody, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, was set free.
On top of this, the worst violence since the war began continues to spread throughout the south. Attacks by the Taliban and remnants of al Qaeda threaten aid workers and the Afghans who work with them to rebuild their country.
Muttawakil, the Taliban's former foreign minister, is back in his hometown -- and mine. He may even be allowed to participate in elections. This is the same person who in 2001 described Osama bin Laden as a "guest of the people of Afghanistan."
Stop wooing Taliban members
The Afghan government, backed by Washington, is wooing other members of the Taliban. The Afghan government and the Taliban should "come together and join hands, and participate in the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the country," says Khalid Pashtun, a spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province.
Something is going terribly wrong in Afghanistan when the Taliban is being encouraged to vote and join in reconstruction while women are being intimidated into silence.
Masuda Sultan, an Afghan American, is program director of Women for Afghan Women.