Sun, Nov 25, 2001 page4

• Afghan women's rights group stays underground

  • DPA
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  Afghan women are paying little credence yet to the claim from the one of the new masters of Kabul that "one of our aims has been the restoration of the rights of the women of Afghanistan."

  Asked about that statement by Northern Alliance Interior Minister Yunis Qanuni, a spokeswoman for the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) said, "It's laughable."

  "Liberation from the Taliban cannot come through another fundamentalist group," said Marina Matin, who lives in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Women's leaders like her fear a future Afghan regime will once again repress women.

  "If you want to know what the Northern Alliance really thinks of women, just look at what they did between 1992 and 1996," she said.

  That was the period when the Kabul government was led by Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Northern Alliance president, and women's rights were hardly better than later under the Taliban.

  The fact that women are to take part in next week's Afghanistan conference in Bonn does not greatly encourage RAWA activists.

  "Some women are fundamentalists too," said Matin, who is concerned the Northern Alliance is only sending women as a token.

  "At most we expect help from Zahir Shah's delegation," she said, adding herself that it was odd for revolutionary women to be counting on the ex-king. Zahir permitted women to attend university and to wear western dress during the 1960s and early 1970s.

  Fundamentalists do not approve of either. Rabbani was among those who opposed women taking their place in society and a radical young Islamist, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was mounting acid attacks on women in western dress to disfigure them.

  Later Hekmatyar's Islamist forces were armed by the West to fight Soviet forces, and today he is again a power in the land.

  There is little doubt that the treatment of women was worst under the Talibanis, who often caned women in the street for not going out in the blue chador or burqa, an all-covering vestment prescribed by the Taliban as the only proper dress for women.

  Even in such dress, women were not allowed to leave the home without a male relative accompanying them. Women were banned from working. Girls had no access to education. Sport for women was outlawed. The Northern Alliance says it will abolish those rules.

  Society's pressure on women to stay veiled and stay at home will not disappear overnight. According to Matin, repression of women has its roots neither in Islam nor in traditional customs, but in ignorance.

  "Among Afghans, it is considered a masculine quality to be coarse and brutal," she said.

  RAWA says it is active inside Afghanistan but strictly as an underground group because repression could resume at any moment. It also admits it has to contend with the unenlightened attitudes of women themselves.

  "I can respect a women who only wants to go out wearing a burqa," said Matin. "But I believe she should have the choice to decide herself to do so or not." Matin said the burqa is an uncomfortable garment.

  "It is just very impractical. A women can't move easily in it," she said. Making this dress a principal symbol of religion or tradition is absurd, she added. "Western fashions also prescribe impractical things like high-heeled shoes that limit movement.

  "I'd say the same about them: don't wear them," she said.

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