A People's Anguish
With Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai on the cusp of re-investiture, the people of Afghanistan have been given no renewal of trust or hope for their future through his administrative auspices. He has had more than ample opportunity to demonstrate that he is worthy of trust. Instead, he has advanced the fortunes of friends and colleagues, and shunned the need of the people to rely on state infrastructure to deliver services and some measure of security. Without which there can be no advance toward a future of civil fulfillment.The Afghan army and the national police have retained traditional practises of corruption. Without any kind of credible demonstration that they can fulfill their mandate of protecting the population from the violence of insurgents determined once again to take up their former governing positions with fanatical Islamist sharia instructing the country how it must live. Leaving all active resistance to NATO forces, instead of committing themselves to the service of their own country, they exist to exist, not to perform their duty.
Although medical centres and schools have been built, thanks to the efforts of foreign governments which have invested, along with the United Nations presence in the country, huge amounts of their treasury, there is no stability. Half of Afghan children still do not attend primary school. Women are still largely illiterate. Customs of a patriarchal society still demand that women be neither seen nor heard, and young girls given over into matrimony to old men.
Women still die in childbirth in great numbers, and children and women continue to be physically and emotionally abused. Young boys and girls are still victims of rape. Girls and their teachers remain threatened by violence and death. In the past thirty years of upheaval the country was thrown back into the stone age of existence. Millions of Afghans were killed, and a like number forced to leave their homes and their communities in the face of war and the threat to human existence.
Ten percent of Afghans have seen the insides of prisons, where torture is routine. A third of those imprisoned and subsequently tortured have been the women of Afghanistan. One half of the population exists, tentatively, below the poverty line. A poverty line consistent with values in poor countries, not those of the advanced world. The trauma visited upon the population as a result of thirty years of conflict; the Russian invasion, the civil war, the Taliban, and now NATO conflicting with the Taliban, has left people with severe psychological damage.
A quarter of a million Afghans are refugees within their own country. And three million Afghans have sought refuge within the borders of Iran and of Pakistan. Afghans have seen their property destroyed, with no opportunity in the near future of returning, and re-building. Attacks by the Taliban have surged to incredibly high levels over the past year. And increasingly those attacks target civilian populations, not the military, domestic or foreign.
This is called a living nightmare.
Labels: Human Rights, Political Realities, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, November 18, 2009
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