While we continue to pour billions down the drain fighting ‘terrorism’ and the ‘enemy’, we continue to harm the women of Afghanistan by fomenting a continuing state of militarism with only lip service and a pittance of funding given to help them to fight the very real terrorism of violence against women. Via RAWA:

As the world marks International Women’s Day, ambivalence, impunity, weak law enforcement and corruption continue to undermine women’s rights in Afghanistan, despite a July 2009 law banning violence against women, rights activists say.

(WARNING–VERY Disturbing film)

A recent case of the public beating of a woman for alleged elopement – also shown on private TV stations in Kabul – highlights the issue.

In January domestic violence forced two young women to flee their homes in Oshaan village, Dolaina District, Ghor Province, southwestern Afghanistan. A week later they were arrested in neighbouring Herat Province and sent back to Oshaan, according to the governor of Ghor, Mohammad Iqbal Munib.

“One woman was beaten in public for the elopement and the second was reportedly confined in a sack with a cat,” Munib told IRIN.

According to the governor, the illegal capture of the women was orchestrated by Fazul Ahad who leads an illegal armed militia group in Dolaina District. Locals say Ahad, a powerful figure who backed President Hamid Karzai in the August 2009 elections, has been running Oshaan as his personal fiefdom.

“When the roads reopen to Dolaina [closed by snow] we will send a team to investigate,” said the governor, adding that he was concerned that arresting Ahad could cause instability. “We have asked the authorities in Kabul for support and guidance.”

IRIN was unable to contact Fazul Ahad and verify the charges.

Self-immolation in Afghanistan

Domestic violence, forced marriage and lack of access to justice force some Afghan women to commit self-immolation and suicide.

“I poured fuel over my body and set myself ablaze because I was regularly beaten up and insulted by my husband and in-laws,” Zarmina, 28, told IRIN. She, along with over a dozen other women with self-inflicted burns, is in Herat’s burns hospital.

Over 90 self-immolation cases have been registered at the hospital in the past 11 months; 55 women had died, doctors said.

“People call it the `hospital of cries’ as patients here cry out loudly in pain,” Arif Jalali, head of the hospital, told IRIN.

Beneath the cries lie cases of domestic violence and/or disappointment with the justice system.

“Self-immolation proves that the justice system for female victims is failing,” said Movidul-Haq Mowidi, a human rights activist in Herat.

Barriers to justice

Despite laws prohibiting gender violence and upholding women’s rights, widespread gender discrimination, fear of abuse, corruption and other challenges are undermining the judicial system, experts say.

“Women are denied their most fundamental human rights and risk further violence in the course of seeking justice for crimes perpetrated against them,” stated a report by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan on the situation of Afghan women in July 2009.

Orzala Ashraf, a women’s rights activist in Kabul, blames the government: “Laws are clear about crimes but we see big criminals thriving and being nurtured by the state for illicit political gains,” she told IRIN, pointing to the government’s alleged failure to address human rights violations committed over the past three decades of conflict.

“Because no one is put on trial for his crimes, a criminal culture is being promoted: violators have no fear of the law, prosecution and a meaningful penalty,” said Ashraf.

Deep-seated ambivalence to women’s rights is evident from a law signed off by President Hamid Karzai in early 2009: The Shia Personal Status Law, dubbed a ‘rape legalizing law’, was amended after strong domestic and international pressure.

“The first version [of the law] was totally intolerable,” said Najia Zewari, a women’s rights expert with the UN Fund for Women (UNIFEM). “Despite positive changes in the final version, there are articles that still need to be discussed and reviewed further,” she said.

Another example of this ambivalence is the case of the men who threw acid in the faces of 15 female students in Kandahar city in November 2008: Karzai publicly vowed they would be “severely punished” but court officials in Kandahar and Kabul have said they are unaware of the case and do not know where the alleged perpetrators are.

“Judges say the men were wrongly accused and forced to confess,” Ranna Tarina, head of Kandahar women’s affairs department, told IRIN.

Violence database

Over the past two years more than 1,900 cases of violence against women in 26 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces – from verbal abuse to physical violence – have been recorded in a database run by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and UNIFEM.

One recorded case is the murder, by her in-laws in Parwan Province north of Kabul, of a young woman who had refused to live with her abusive husband. Another is the regular physical and mental torture meted out to a woman by her husband and mother in-law in Kabul.

“The database does not give a perfect picture but it helps to highlight some of the common miseries of Afghan women,” UNIFEM’s Najia Zewari told IRIN.

UNIFEM is keen to make the database publicly available on the internet.

“Violence against women is not a new phenomenon in Afghanistan but it is good to see crimes do not remain confined to a home and a village,” said activist Orzala Ashraf.

Cross-posted from Reclaiming Medusa:

Those of you of a certain age will remember those grade school Armageddon drills where we we were instructed to get under our desks and put our heads between our knees in case of a nuclear attack, a tactic that served no purpose and certainly wouldn’t have saved us if the Commies attacked.

Now the U.S. military has a new version of this callously useless advice that they are using in Marjah, Afghanistan:

Afghan villagers should stay inside and “keep their heads down” when thousands of U.S. Marines launch a massive assault on a densely-populated district in coming days, NATO’s civilian representative to Afghanistan said Tuesday.

The results are predictable, here is Robert Naiman’s well-worded summary of the results:

“Civilian casualties are inevitable,” said U.S. officials before launching their weekend military assault on Marja in southern Afghanistan, and in this case, they were telling the truth. Yesterday, the New York Times reports, a U.S. rocket strike “hit a compound crowded with Afghan civilians… killing at least 10 people, including 5 children.”

What justification has been provided by the government of the United States for its decision to kill these five children?

It will be argued that the government of the United States did not decide to kill these five children specifically, and that’s absolutely true. The U.S. government did not decide to kill these particular children; it only decided to kill some Afghan civilians, chosen randomly from Marja’s civilian population, when it decided to launch its military assault. These five children simply had the misfortune of holding losing tickets in a lottery in which they did not choose to participate…

…NATO forces have decided to advise civilians in Marjah not to leave their homes, although they say they do not know whether the assault will lead to heavy fighting.

These five kids were staying inside, as instructed. It didn’t save them from U.S. rockets. Perhaps they weren’t keeping their heads down.

You can read the rest of Naiman’s commentary here. Suffice it to say, “Duck” is not an acceptable strategy for protecting civilians and should be seen as a gross violation of international law.

Billions of dollars spent killing children. How dare we talk about winning or honor.

Via RAWA:

Several hundred women, many holding aloft pictures of relatives killed by drug lords or Taliban militants, held a loud but nonviolent street protest today, demanding that President Hamid Karzai purge from his government anyone connected to corruption, war crimes or the Taliban.

Afghan police, in riot gear, monitored the rally as it worked its way slowly through muddy streets to the United Nations building here, but they did nothing to disrupt the event.

The unusual display of political activism by women comes as Karzai is under increasing pressure to remove from his cabinet anyone connected to rampant corruption, including links to the flourishing drug trade. His own finance minister says corruption is the biggest threat to the future of Afghanistan.

The protest group, under the banner Social Association of Afghan Justice Seekers, said that “our people have gone into a nightmare of unbelieving” because of the disputed election and the fact that “the culture of impunity” still exists despite Karzai’s vow to eliminate it.

While the women took the lead in the protest, about 500 men followed them in support, an unusual display in Afghan culture of men allowing women to take a leadership role.

The group spokeswoman, who gave her name as Lakifa, said many women are still afraid to demand an accounting of the death or disappearance of family members during the three decades of war that have ripped Afghanistan.

“We need to know about all of our martyrs, and the government needs to find the mass graves and the killers, not give them jobs and protect them,” she said.

While Obama continues to practice his leadership style of taking a really, really long time to decide pretty much anything, it appears likely that he will ultimately approve a significant increase in troop levels in Afghanistan.  As Sonali Kolhatkar of the Afghan Women’s Mission writes,

There’s no debate within the Democratic Party or in the White House about whether to end the war. The only thing being debated is how to continue the war.

Regardless of why we went into Afghanistan in the first place, the justifications given for our continued presence are bizarrely vague and the results have been devastating. As Kolhatkar points out,

Our actions in Afghanistan have caused a perfect storm of untold numbers of civilian deaths, fundamentalist resurgence, and women’s oppression. We’re protecting a corrupt government with a puppet president and criminal warlords, and our deadly bombing raids have led to a devastated and rightly bitter population and a stronger Taliban. There’s no promising indication that our military operations can improve the situation, no matter how many troops are added. If ever the Afghanistan war ever had any legitimacy, it’s irreversibly gone.

She  goes on to point to the way in which Afghan women’s lives are now being used as a justification for remaining in Afghanistan, despite the deep flaws in that logic.

One of the original justifications for the war in 2001 that seemed to resonate most with liberal Americans was the liberation of Afghan women from a misogynist regime. This is now being resurrected as the following: If the U.S. forces withdraw, any gains made by Afghan women will be reversed and they’ll be at the mercy of fundamentalist forces. In fact, the fear of abandoning Afghan women seems to have caused the greatest confusion and paralysis in the antiwar movement.

What this logic misses is that the United States chose right from the start to sell out Afghan women to its misogynist fundamentalist allies on the ground. The U.S. armed the Mujahadeen leaders in the 1980s against the Soviet occupation, opening the door to successive fundamentalist governments including the Taliban. In 2001, the United States then armed the same men, now called the Northern Alliance, to fight the Taliban and then welcomed them into the newly formed government as a reward. The American puppet president Hamid Karzai, in concert with a cabinet and parliament of thugs and criminals, passed one misogynist law after another, appointed one fundamentalist zealot after another to the judiciary, and literally enabled the downfall of Afghan women’s rights over eight long years.

Any token gains have been countered by setbacks. For example, while women are considered equal to men in Afghanistan’s constitution, there have been vicious and deadly attacks against women’s rights activists, the legalization of rape within marriage in the Shia community, and a shockingly high rate of women’s imprisonment for so-called honor crimes — all under the watch of the U.S. occupation and the government we are protecting against the Taliban. Add to this the unacceptably high number of innocent women and children killed in U.S. bombing raids, which has also increased the Taliban’s numbers and clout, and it makes the case that for eight years the United States has enabled the oppression of Afghan women and only added to their miseries.

This is why grassroots political and feminist activists have called for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from their country. After eight years of American-enabled oppression, they would rather fight for their liberation without our help. The anti-fundamentalist progressive organization, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), has called for an immediate end to the war. Echoing their call is independent dissident member of Parliament Malalai Joya, who tells her story in her new political memoir, A Woman Among Warlords. The members of RAWA and women like Joya are openly targeted by the U.S.-backed Afghan government for their feminism and political activism. RAWA and Joya have worked on the ground, risking their lives for political change and echo the vast majority of poor and ordinary Afghan women. It’s they whom we ought to listen to and express solidarity with. If American progressives think they know better than Afghanistan’s brave feminist activists on how liberation can be achieved, we’re just as guilty as the U.S. government for subjecting them to the mercy of women-hating criminals.

The time has come for the U.S. to quit using the lives of Afghan women to justify its presence in Afghanistan.  That is not the reason we went in and certainly not the reason we should  stay.

For more on the impact of the U.S. military’s presence in Afghanistan, please see Malalai Joya’s recent Op Ed which begins poignantly,

Life for most Afghan women resembles a type of hell that is never reflected in the Western mainstream media.

While I try to end the week with a bit of art or inspiring prose or poetry, no can do this week because I am mad, really mad. Upon awakening this morning to find that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, the first thing I did was to look at the top of my screen to see if I was on The Onion website or whether perhaps the Yes Men had hijacked the headlines.  No such luck.

While Obama is trying to decide whether to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan or maybe invade Pakistan, and having not achieved one single peaceful thing except maybe getting a Harvard professor and a Boston policeman  to sit down with  a beer–he is getting this coveted prize?  To be sure, Kissinger won it too, which was  revolting, but really??

Ironically this comes a day after a teacher  at my son’s school won a coveted teaching award that came with a $25,000 award (which the teacher said  he would spend mostly on books for his students) which is a pittance compared to the almost $1 million  Nobel award (let alone the amount the U.S. spends on military expenditures). One wonders whether Obama will use any of his prize to help the victims of the destructive folly over which he presides.

Imagine the good that would be done if honors such as this were awarded to people like Rep. Barbara Lee who was the lone vote against this war and continues to speak out against it.  Then perhaps we could truly wage peace.

To honor this sham of an award, please read this account from RAWA about what peace looks for the women in Afghanistan that we supposedly liberated.  And then, please send a donation to help RAWA in their very important work.

Self-immolation has been practiced in alarming rate by desperate Afghan women who lack access to justice and protection. (Photo: Paula Bronstein)

Twenty five years old Shafiqa set herself on fire in Jowzjan province in Northern Afghanistan, Abdul Rahim, the chief investigator to Police department of Khanaqa said.

He added, after the incident one of the neighbors informed the police and they transferred Shafiqa, who was badly burned, to the Shebrghan (center of Jowsjan) local hospital.

Doctor Abdul Satar Paygham, the chief of Jowsjan public health considered her health condition critical and said that her burn is sixty percent.

The chief investigator of Khanaqa says that Shafiqa has lost her parents years before and according to her neighbors she has been beaten by her brothers consistently.

He added that the incident is under investigation and yet the real reason of the suicide is not specified.

The two brothers of Shafiqa who were present in the public health of Jawsjan refused to talk.

Zahra Areeb the director of Jawsjan Women’s Affairs condemning any type of violence against girls and women says that during the current year five girls and women has committed suicide in this province but they have been treated in the hospital and have survived after the suicide.

According to Ms Areeb, domestic violence, mistratment of the families and bounding girls and women inside the houses are the factors of self-immolation.

Maghferat ‘Samimi’ the in charge of Human Rights Commission in Jowsjan, Faryab and Sarpul, condemning violence against Shafiqa said that the incidents of sexual abuse and self-immolation is more than the figures that a number of organizations and government officials in these three provinces report.

Samimi added: Most of the people never ask the government officials to solve the cases of murder and violence against girls and women as they see the the weakness and corruption of government officials and police to interrogate their problems.

Although Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission has not published the exact number of violence against women this year, but according to their information, in year 2008 the number of violence against women was recorded as 2000 cases, which was comprised of 77 rape cases.