| Four years ago Rahima Hamid buried both of her children. They lost their lives in the war that has raged across Afghanistan since 2001. Their deaths left 61-year-old Hamid with the task of raising her five grandchildren, ranging in age from three to 12 years old. The task fell upon her alone, as she had lost her husband years before in a car accident. Their deaths also left Hamid with no land, no assets and no means to support her grandchildren.
Hamid is one of an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 widows living in Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan. The stories of these widows lurk in the shadows of the millions of women who have joyfully returned to school and work since the Taliban was toppled in 2001 and the war began.
The contrast between these women’s stories is staggering. While the fall of the Taliban has meant liberation for some Afghan women, for others like Hamid, the war has been a paradox – an event that has made her life worse while being waged in the name of improving women’s lives. This contrast has sparked a divisive debate among those who promote women’s rights as to whether the Canadian military should be involved in rebuilding Afghanistan.
During their five years in power, the Taliban’s ultra-conservative interpretation of Muslim law restricted Afghan women severely. They couldn’t work or attend school or university. They couldn’t leave their homes unless escorted by a close male relative. When in public, they had to be covered from head to toe in a burka, a long robe that leaves only a small, mesh opening at the eyes. Those who disobeyed Taliban law risked public beatings, floggings and even death.
Before the Taliban, women constituted 40 per cent of the country’s doctors, half of the government workforce and half of the students at Kabul University. During Taliban rule, women disappeared from Afghanistan’s public sphere. After the Taliban was removed from power, a jubilant George W. Bush declared in his 2002 State of the Union address, "today women are free and are part of Afghanistan’s new government."
His statement is backed by statistics. Women currently make up more than 28 per cent of the Afghan parliament. More than five million children have returned to schools since 2001, and approximately 30 per cent of these are young girls.
But contrary evidence has surfaced on a few occasions. In 2003, the head of the U.N. Security Council mission reported that the lives of Afghan women have shown little improvement since the end of Taliban rule and that they continued to be victims of abuse, death threats and isolation.
A 2003 report by the human rights group Amnesty International documented widespread concern among Afghan women about domestic violence, the forced marriage of girls as young as eight years old and rape by armed gangs.
Some argue that war and women’s development are not simultaneously possible, as women are disproportionately affected by conflict. "I don’t think we can think of any war in human history that has ever liberated women," says Roksana Bahramitash, a professor at the Centre for Developing Areas Studies at McGill University and producer of a 2004 documentary on Afghan women called Beyond the Burqa. "We need to remember that the feminist movement was born out of anti-war activism."
Bahramitash calls the notion of Canada emancipating Afghan women by bombing the country a dangerous fiction. "There are raids in the morning and then there is aid in the afternoon. People associate raids with aid," she says. "You can’t go and kill people and raid their houses and then give them aid in the same way."
Her position is backed by anecdotes from her time in Afghanistan. In 2004, she met a teenage girl who said she preferred being ruled by the Taliban. As the young girl explained in front of Bahramitash’s rolling camera, during the Taliban rule when she left her house, she knew she would return home safely. But now, the girl said, when she went out, she never knew if she would make it back home.
If Canada really wants to improve the lives of Afghan women, Bahramitash says, Canadian involvement must shift from the military to focus on reconstruction and human security.
Khorshied Samad disagrees. Samad is an Afghan-American who spent four years reporting from Afghanistan for FOX News after the fall of the Taliban. "For Afghan women to have their legal rights and their human rights protected there has to be an international presence in the country, both from a humanitarian perspective, in the development and reconstruction, and from a military perspective," she says.
Samad is also the co-curator of an exhibit entitled Voices on the Rise: Afghan Women Making the News, which highlights the progress of females in Afghan media since the end of Taliban rule. "Since 2001 I would say that, in many areas of Afghan life, things have definitely improved," she says. "Millions of women have returned to work and school."
The problem, says Samad, is that most of the liberation has been confined to the urban centres of Afghanistan. She describes rural Afghanistan, home to an estimated 85 per cent of the population, as "stepping back 2,000 years."
Women’s development in rural areas has been hampered by extreme poverty and severe cultural restrictions, says Samad, and compounded by the fact that up to 96 per cent of women in rural Afghanistan are illiterate.
In recognition of this, development initiatives have started to move out to the rural areas, Samad says. "It’s a slow moving change," she says. "It can take at least 10 to 15 years, or more, to really turn Afghanistan around."
Canadian military involvement is an integral part of this effort, she says, because it helps to secure areas so that development programs can be enacted. She cautions that the withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan would wipe out the tremendous progress that women have made in Afghanistan over the past five years.
"If this NATO mission, if the coalition forces, if the international community turns its back, Afghanistan will be completely destroyed again," says Samad. "And these women will have no future." |
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