posted on December 17, 2002 06:43:18 AM new
Pakistan Woman Councilor Beaten, Paraded Naked
Dec 16, 10:38 am ET
LAHORE, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistan's leading rights group said Sunday it was shocked at the public humiliation of a woman councilor beaten and paraded naked through a village on the orders of a powerful landlord.
The News Sunday newspaper said the incident happened on Dec. 7 in a village near Sialkot, an industrial town north of Lahore.
It said in an ordeal that lasted several hours, the woman, the widowed mother of seven, was beaten, stripped and paraded naked through the village by the landlord and his sons after she refused to back his candidate in a local election.
Kamila Hyat, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said the incident was not the first of its kind.
"At least four similar cases have been reported this year," she said, adding the incident was indicative of the low status of women in Muslim, male-dominated Pakistan.
"People think they have the license to humiliate women on some pretext or the other, to subject them to this kind of degradation," she said.
Hyat said more such incidents were inevitable unless the government took tough steps to ensure women's rights were upheld.
Earlier this year a woman was gang-raped on the orders of a traditional jury in a village in the Punjab province. A Pakistani court later sentenced six men to death for the rape, in a trial which highlighted the abuse of women in rural areas.
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Sure, Sure, it about bringing human and women's rights to the area.
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We call them our heroes...but we pay them like chumps
posted on December 17, 2002 07:49:57 AM new
As William Bennent, darling of the Republican Right, has stated on occasion that "American people have too many rights!" And so too, must Bush and the GOP for taking away our Constitutional Rights indefinetly with the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act. Are you so surprized then that we don't flinch an inch at having these barbarians as friends? Just because she wouldn't support him, he made sure that she was an example, and you can imagine how Bush and his cronies are drooling right now, thinking of all of the people that they are hoping to do this to in our country in their lifetimes. I'm sure that Jane Fonda will be the first, then will eventually lead to the average American.
This winter thousands of Afghans, devastated by 3 years of drought and 23 years of war and civil unrest, will be facing starvation. Take the Badghis province of Afghanistan for example—one of the poorest. Roughly 50 percent of Badghis’s approximately 400,000 population cannot obtain enough food this winter. Fatema, a resident of Bagdhis, doesn’t know how she will feed her six children this year. Her 15-year-old son is the only one in the family who can earn any money and he does it by selling grass for fuel and food. They are among the millions of refugees that have returned to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, the millions who have been counted as a measure of success by the UN of the U.S. Operation “Enduring Freedom.”
What good is an uncovered face if it is starving to death? Women’s rights are human rights: survival is more important than clothing and survival has been the most difficult challenge facing women both before and after the U.S. action in Afghanistan.
Women’s Health in Crisis
A recent report released by the U.S.-based Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) entitled “Maternal Mortality in Herat Province: The Need to Protect Women’s Rights,” said, “The rate of maternal mortality in a society is a critical indicator of the health and human rights status of women in a community.” The report documented 593 maternal deaths in every 100,000 live births, with the majority of the cases in rural areas. This maternal mortality rate is far worse than in all of the countries neighboring Afghanistan.
The second worse neighboring country is Pakistan, with 200 deaths per 100,000 births. A researcher with PHR concluded, “What appears to be simply a public health catastrophe in Herat Province...speaks of the many years of denial and deprivation of women’s rights in Afghanistan.” Today one of the most vulnerable groups of women in Afghanistan are widows. In Kabul there are an estimated 40,000 widows who have lost their husbands in the decades of war in Afghanistan. Nationwide, the number of widows is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, since about 1.5 million Afghans were killed during the ten year Soviet occupation and the cross fire from warlordism that followed in the early 1990s.
“While the plight of Afghan widows has improved psychologically, the main problems of finding shelter, food and income remain the same,” says Awadia Mohamed, the coordinator for CARE International in Afghanistan. “Indeed, in some cases they have worsened.” Widows have very limited access to food and health services despite the absence of the Taliban. In fact, “51 percent of widows surveyed reported being unwell, of whom 57.6 percent had fever, 13.6 percent had diarrhea and 10 percent leish- maniasis wounds.... Furthermore, calorie intake was insufficient, with most of the women and their children subsisting on little more than bread and tea, resulting in malnutrition problems and micro- nutrient deficiencies.”
Warlords Threaten Security
Practically speaking, since the Taliban fell and warlords of the past returned to their old fiefdoms, they resumed fighting one another, exactly what they were doing when the Taliban first came to power. According to Agence France-Presse, “Northern Afghanistan remains plagued by factional and ethnic rivalries despite loose allegiances between warlords controlling the area, most of whom have offered pledges of support to the central Afghan government” (“Violence in northern Afghanistan deterring refugee returns: UN,” Agence France-Presse, October 20, 2002). Such clashes are frequent and deadly, in the northern and eastern part of Afghanistan.
The media fail to report prominently that many of these warlords, now members of the Northern Alliance, were first empowered by the United States in the 1980s to repel the Soviet invasion and again during the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban.
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) spelled out last year what empowering war lords will do for Afghanistan: “The Taliban and Al-Qaeda will be eliminated, but the existence of the NA [Northern Alliance] as a military force would shatter the joyful dream of the majority for an Afghanistan free from the odious chains of barbaric Taliban. The NA will horribly intensify the ethnic and religious conflicts and will never refrain to fan the fire of another brutal and endless civil war in order to retain power” (“RAWA’s appeal to the UN and World community,” November 13, 2001).
Rather than heed the words of RAWA and others, the U.S. engaged the services of the Northern Alliance, with the CIA paying warlords $100,000 each to gather armies (“Caught Off Guard, the CIA Fights to Catch Up,” Cloud, D. S., April 15, 2002, Wall Street Journal).
Today, the three vice presidents of Afghanistan are all members of the Northern Alliance—General Mohammad Fahim, Karim Khalili, and Haji Abdul Qadeer. Moham- med Qasim Fahim, a former Mujahadeen warrior, is now Defense Minister of Afghanistan. The Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who received a plaque of appreciation from U.S. forces for help against the Taliban last year, can add ethnic cleansing to his achievements. Dostum’s troops recently forced 180 Pashtun families (people who are the same ethnicity as the Taliban) from villages in northern Afghanistan in early October. Some of the women said they had been raped by his men and had their homes looted (“Pashtuns driven from northern Afghan villages,” October 7, 2002, Reuters).
While Afghan women are desperate for security and for the International Security Armed Forces (ISAF) to be expanded from Kabul to all of Afghanistan, the U.S. continues to deny this. Even Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, a puppet of the U.S., has asked for the ISAF to be expanded to all of Afghanistan, so that warlords can be disarmed and a transition to peace can begin. Instead the U.S. has been focusing on training a national army of Afghans which is undermined by the fact that Afghan Defense Minister Mohammed Qasim Fahim has a private army of 18,000 men (“Afghans ask: ‘Whose army is it?’” David Buchbinder, October 17, 2002, Christian Science Monitor).
With the U.S. empowering warlords, and undermining the ISAF expansion, there is little hope for peace and security in the country. Afghan women will pay the highest price as they have always done.
In March of this year the Washington Post happily ran a story headlined “The Girls Are back in Afghan Schools.” One could almost hear the collective sigh of relief across America. But are the media reporting the recent spate of attacks against schools in Afghanistan? Schools have been burned down in Kandahar, Wardak, and Sar-i-Pul. In the seventh incident in a series of attacks on girls’ schools in Afghanistan, gunmen forced a school in the Wardak province that served 1,300 girls to close. In recent weeks girls schools have been burned and bombed (“UNICEF denounces violent attacks on schools in Afghanistan, October 17, 2002, UN News Service).
posted on December 17, 2002 12:21:56 PM new
I know, Helen. I am so damned angry at Bush for not following through as he promised.
"Promises are like Pie Crusts - made to be broken" - Joseph Stalin -
"We will rebuild Afghanistan!" - G.W. Bush -
"We will rebuild Iraq after the War." - also G.W. Bush -
Now this would be a fit mission for the United States millitary: to take armed convoys of foods and needed emergency goods deep into Afghanistan and deliver it directly into the hands of those that need it. We should set the Army Corps of Engineers and the Naval COnstruction Batallion (Sea Bees) to rebuilding the infrastructure - as promised by King Bush the first and set aside the money to do it with. We could have oil and gas in exchange for the help.
Under no circumstances should we abandon the Afghanistani people. Nor should we abandon the Iraqi people after we go devastate their country. Without the promised rebuilding and recovery efforts, we are all nothing more than Butchers and deserve every airplane that smashes in our buildings!
Can't you see that what Bush promises and fails to keep his word affects us ALL??
