GENDER APARTHEID: Afghanistan's Taleban rulers continue to oppress women

The Times (London) 7-13-2000

There are an estimated 28,000 war widows in Kabul - the victims of a 20-year civil war that has killed thousands of male fighters, reduced much of the capital to rubble and scattered a deadly crop of mines across Afghanistan's sparse arable land. For the past four years they have been doubly victimised: having lost the husbands who brought them an income, shelter and dignity in a tribal society, they have, since the start of Taleban rule, been held under virtual house arrest, forbidden to work, travel, appear in public or leave their homes unchaperoned or unveiled.

Mary MacMakin, an indomitable American grandmother in her seventies, has for the past 30 years lived in Afghanistan, where she has tried to ease the plight of these widows. Raising funds in America to support her project, she has helped to find jobs with international agencies for widows desperate to support family dependants. Four days ago she and several Afghan women were arrested on charges of spying; yesterday she was given 24 hours to leave the country. There could be few more telling examples of the paranoia and sexual psychosis that has gripped the extremist bigots in power in Kabul.

Her arrest follows a decree by Mullah Muhammad Turabi, the Minister for Preventing Vice and Fostering Virtue, forbidding women from working for foreign aid groups, one of the few ways left open to them to earn money. The one-legged Muslim zealot is the author of many restrictions intended to enforce what Madeleine Albright has called Afghanistan's "gender apartheid". This includes not only the strict dress code and the social disenfranchisement of women but such absurdities as ordering Afghans to black out their ground-floor windows in case men catch a glimpse of women inside.

Yesterday the Taleban, under United Nations pressure, retreated. Women will now be permitted to return to work, including working in segregated areas in health and education. The concession, similar to relaxations made after global protests at the blanket sex discrimination introduced in 1996, appears tactical; the Taleban, whose suspicion of women appears to border on the pathological, has lost none of its narrow-minded zeal in enforcing a puritanical form of Islam. The UN and the West have already ostracised the Taleban for its sheltering of Osama bin Laden, encouragement of heroin smuggling and human rights abuses; it is now time for fellow Muslim countries to denounce unambiguously this disgraceful treatment of women, as cruel as it is contrary to Islam.