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11 March 2002
Six Months On
Part III: The Liberated
PHASE I: AFGHANISTAN
In his speech to the Labour Party Conference
on 2 Oct. 2001, the Prime Minister offered a wide-ranging justification
for the coming war on Afghanistan. He invoked the terror of those
killed on 11 September. He went on to suggest reasons for taking
action against the Taliban regime quite apart from the fact that
they had harboured Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda organisation.
WOMEN LIBERATED FROM THE ANKLE DOWN
Mr Blair said that in Afghanistan,
‘Women are treated in a way almost too revolting to be credible.
First driven out of university; girls not allowed to go to school;
no legal rights; unable to go out of doors without a man. Those
that disobey are stoned.’ Interestingly, ‘Women voters are supporting
the war and President bush in numbers previously undreamt of by
Republicans. A recent Los Angeles poll showed that 85 per cent
of women were backing military action... The figures are seen
as a triumph for the strategy of highlighting the repression of
women by the Taliban and emphasising the fight for women’s rights.’
The Telegraph added, ‘Republicans hope the women’s support
will translate into victory in November’s mid-term elections.’
(23 Jan. 2002, p. 15)
Has the destruction of the Taliban
increased women’s freedom? Yes. ‘The Taliban may be gone, but
the women of Afghanistan remain under wraps. Still forced to wear
the burqa, their faces, bodies and clothes are hidden.
Their only means of public self-expression is footwear, visible
under the head-to-calf veil.’ High heels, buckles, painted toe
nails and open toe sandals are now permitted in Herat, one of
the most liberal areas of Afghanistan. ‘After six years of Taliban
rule, Roya [Hamid, 23, a fine art student at Herat University]
and her peers have won the right to study and to work, but to
their intense frustration, little more.’ (Telegraph, 29
Jan. 2002, p. 16)
Sima Samar, Afghanistan’s first
minister of women’s affairs, has no office, budget or staff. ‘She
cannot afford her telephone bill and she is growing weary of western
protestations of support for the oppressed women of Afghanistan.’
She began her job in tears at accounts of women’s suffering under
the Taliban. Now, ‘she is merely angry: at cabinet colleagues
who are suspicious of her mission, at the delays in getting her
ministry off the ground, and at the international community for
making a cause celebre of Afghan women and then failing to stump
up the cash as quickly as she would like.’ Ms Samar says, ‘I keep
telling people the situation of women is not the product of the
Taliban. It’s a product of 23 years of war. The Taliban... achieved
the maximum peak of human rights violations after all those years
of war, but the violations were already on the ground.’ (Guardian,
17 Jan. 2002, p. 5)
Indian journalist Pankaj Mishra points
out that ‘The press reports [of Taliban brutality towards women]
came mostly from the cities, where less than 10 per cent of the
population lives; almost all of them came from Kabul,where the
rural men of the Taliban had tried vengefully to impose the ways
of the Pashtun countryside upon Afghans they perceived as belonging
to the privileged urban minorities - the urban elites that the
Taliban hardliners in Kandahar blamed for the near-genocidal project
of modernising Afghanistan. In contrast, the Taliban were barely
visible in the villages, where in any case power rested with the
local mullah or tribal chief.’ (New Statesman, 11 Feb.
2002, p. 28)
There are other factors also. Women
own 40 per cent of the private wealth in Saudi Arabia, and account
for more than 50 per cent of university graduates - ‘a situation
that is unique in the Arab world’ - but ‘they make up a mere 4
per cent of the country’s workforce.’ The black abaya,
or robe, and strict gender segregation ‘are often raised in the
west as the ultimate examples of discrimination, [but] Saudi women
say their priorities lie elsewhere.’ Restrictions in the field
of work, discrimination in divorce, and the ban on women drivers,
for example. (Financial Times, 25 Jan. 2002, p. 7)
It was clear before the new government
was installed what the likely fate of Afghanistan’s women would
be. In the Northern Alliance-controlled areas (the Northern Alliance
[NA] being the dominant force in the new administration), women
were walking around fully covered in the burqa. ‘The majority
of Afghan men do not believe women should have rights,’ said Farahraz
Nazir, head of the Afghanistan Women’s Association, the only women’s
organisation operating openly in the country in mid-Nov. 2001.
‘Taliban or Northern Alliance, there are fanatics everywhere,’
she added. A woman not wearing a burqa was beaten and stoned
in a NA-controlled town near to Nazir’s headquarters shortly before
she was interviewed. (Time, 12 Nov. 2001, p. 51)
The women of Afghanistan can benefit
now from international solidarity in a way that they could not
under the rule of the Taliban. However, it is clear that the defeat
of the Taliban was contributed little to women’s freedom in Afghanistan.
THE BLOSSOMING OF THE OPIUM FIELDS
Tony Blair
told the Labour Party conference in Oct. that the Taliban were
‘a regime founded on fear and funded on the drugs trade’: ‘The
biggest drugs hoard in the world is in Afghanistan, controlled
by the Taliban. Ninety per cent of the heroin on British streets
originates in Afghanistan. The arms the Taliban are buying today
are paid for with the lives of young British people buying their
drugs on British streets.’ This was ‘another part of their regime
that we should seek to destroy.’
The new Afghan administration promised
its aid donors in Jan. 2002 that it would try to reduce the flow
of narcotics out of the country: it officially banned opium-growing
and drug trafficking on 16 Jan. 2002. (Telegraph, 17 Jan.,
p. 14) Afghanistan is the world’s largest exporter of heroin and
provides about 80 per cent of Western Europe’s supply. ‘Between
a third and a half of the Afghan population is believed by experts
to be involved in growing, producing or trafficking in narcotics.’
The first action taken by the Hamid Karzai administration in relation
to narcotics control was the eviction of the main drugs control
agency from its headquarters and the seizure of its vehicles.
‘They literally threw us into the street,’ said Mir Najibullah
Shams, the Secretary-General of the State High Commission for
Drug Control. ‘I don’t have a phone to call up commanders in the
provinces. They didn’t even leave us with a bicycle.’ (Independent,
24 Jan. 2002, p. 13)
‘Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader,
had successfully banned the planting of poppies in 1999, but the
collapse of central government control in much of Afghanistan
in the last two months may mean that farmers will once again produce
opium.’ (Independent, 24 Jan. 2002, p. 13) ‘The Taliban
were too demonised to earn much international credit for their
campaign against producing opium. But the farmers of Kalawal,
a mud-brown settlement of 200 families, say that Mullah Omar’s
decree against cultivating the crop in July 2000 was highly effective.
Faiz Mohammed, from the village, said: ‘The Taliban had complete
control and could stop us growing the poppies but in the near
future we think the new government is not strong enough to prevent
us.’ ‘Mullah Omar had been able to enforce his so-called Decree
19, which outlawed growing opium, in 2000 by sending orders to
the provincial governors. The new government in Kabul is too weak
to do this. Outside the capital it controls very little. In southern
Afghanistan, newly appointed governors are struggling to assert
their authority. They are unlikely to give priority to destroying
the crop on which so many of their people rely.’ (Independent,
14 Feb. 2002, p. 14)
In the northern areas, the Northern
Alliance authorities are deeply involved in the drugs trade. Ali,
a drug smuggler in Badakhshan, ‘the traditional stronghold of
the now triumphant Northern Alliance’, told the Independent
that he did not move drugs inside the country: "We usually
got the military commanders to move them for us." ‘Northern
Alliance commanders were greedier than the Taliban, said Ali,
sometimes seizing heroin and only selling it back for large sums.
Ali added that many heroin laboratories were now in Badakhshan,
in Northern Alliance territory, whereas previously they had mostly
been around Jalalabad.’ (Independent, 14 Feb. 2002, p.
14)
‘According to western intelligence
and customs officials, Afghans planted vigorously in the autumn
in areas liberated from the Taliban and now beyond the control
of the new administration in Kabul... For the UK, the political
stakes are high. Tony Blair, prime minister, identified the opportunity
for eradicating opium production in Afghanistan when justifying
British military involvement with the US bombing campaign last
October. But now British officials say that such early optimism
was misplaced, with the US government showing little interest
in evidence that opium is being cultivated.’ (Financial Times,
18 Feb. 2002, p. 9) ARROW
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