Afghan minister wants cash, not words, to help women

By Rosalind Russell

Monday February 11, 8:39 PM

KABUL (Reuters) - Sima Samar says she has the toughest job in Afghanistan.

The minister for women's affairs is tasked with reinstating the rights of women so zealously snatched away by the Taliban.

But seven weeks into the job, she has only just been given an office. She has no budget, no staff and, she says, little support from her cabinet colleagues in the interim government.

"I'm not really getting the support I need," she said, flopping down on a chair in her house in a northern Kabul suburb.

"I've been lobbying all this time to get premises for our ministry and now we've got it, but it is empty, all the desks and chairs have been taken away, everything."

The women's ministry has finally been given space at the ministry for social affairs, and Samar has been promised desks, chairs, two computers and three months' supply of stationery from U.N. agencies.

It has been a frustrating start, Samar says, made all the more galling by Western protestations of support for long-oppressed Afghan women.

There are plenty of conferences, seminars and websites about the rights of Afghanistan's burqa-clad women, but Samar needs cash if she is going to implement her ambitious programme.

NO MONEY FOR WOMEN

Afghanistan's six-month interim government, established in December, has received $16 million of a $20 million emergency U.N. start-up fund to get the administration off the ground, said U.N. spokesman Yusuf Hassan.

None of it has reached the women's ministry.

"There is money earmarked for this ministry, there have been promises, but it hasn't arrived yet," Samar said.

Samar has invited women to apply for the hundreds of jobs she hopes can be created by the women's ministry. She wants to set up a legal section to lobby for women's rights to be enshrined in a new constitution.

She plans to set up protection and counselling centres for traumatised women, vocational training for jobless widows and literacy and computer courses for women who missed out on their education under the Taliban.

The Taliban banned women from schools, universities and the workplace. They were not allowed to leave the house unless accompanied by a close male relative and covered in the all-concealing burqa.

Curbs on women's rights run deep in Afghan tradition and, in rural areas at least, they remain entrenched despite Washington's war on the Taliban and al Qaeda network prompted by the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Samar, 45, is a medical doctor who fled Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s and ran health centres for Afghan refugees in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

To the annoyance of her cabinet colleagues, she wears jeans or trousers and often forgets to cover her cropped brown hair.

"Don't film me without my scarf on," she tells a Chinese television crew setting up their camera. "I keep getting into trouble."

Samar says things are slowly starting to change.

"Women are already starting to go back to work. They can go outside without a male escort. They have access to hospitals and nobody is beating them up if they don't wear their burqas.

"We have a long way to go," she said. "(My colleagues) are trying to ignore me but if I keep on talking they will have to listen."