generalspeaking

Afghanistan's Courageous Women

They are the women who, fully knowing the compulsive fundamentalism at the base of their country's cultural-religious traditions that enslave women to men's view of their inferiority, struggle to impose their views of women as sturdily capable, independent and intelligent agents of independent thought. They have suffered for their commitment to equality, for their unacceptable arrogance in believing that there will come a day when women are valued equally with men in their society.

They dedicate their determined struggles against adversity and the intransigence of religious precepts that deign to recognize woman as worthily subservient to men, in full knowledge of the precariousness of their existence. There are not too many men in that impoverished, culturally and socially backward country still mired in the 16th Century who champion the cause of women and children. These strong-willed and brave women carry on for the sake of the children, both boys and girls.

Seeing for them the potential of a better future, a world of hope and enterprisingly successful achievements to bring the country as a whole out of its straitened circumstances. And they are murdered, relentlessly, one after another, by the very religious fanatics who turned their lives into a misery of existence until they were uprooted as a government by NATO in 2001. They have asserted their presence in a society reluctant to acknowledge their efforts.

But quick to mourn them as 'martyrs'. The Taliban took deadly action against the country's most high-profile and effective role model female police officer, last year. Two years earlier they assassinated the head of the provincial women's affairs department in Kandahar. In 2008 Taliban fundamentalists sprayed acid in the faces of schoolgirls and their teacher, for daring to want to become educated members of their society.

On Sunday a high school teacher and women's rights activist, Sitara Achakzai, who was also a member of the provincial legislature, was shot dead in Kandahar City, right outside her home, by four men on motorbikes. Another women's rights campaigner representing the Badakhshan constituency, had her personal bodyguard doubled from four to eight because of this most recent murder. She has herself received threats of kidnapping and murder.

Sitara Achakzai was in the protection of a sole bodyguard, not the five normally apportioned for women legislators. She had been living in exile for years with her husband, a doctor and university lecturer. Their children remained behind, in Germany. Her mother and sisters, living in Canada, were anticipating a planned visit from her, to Toronto. That visit has vanished as surely as the hopes of Afghan women for a surcease of violence.

According to a spokesman for the Taliban, Mrs. Achakzai was targeted for the very explicable reason that she did not have a "good background".

Labels: Religion, Terrorism, Traditions, World Crises

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, April 14, 2009