May 21st, 2006

Speech by Manizha Naderi, currently the Director of Women for Afghan Women’s Community Outreach Program and soon to be starting WAW’s new project in Afghanistan, Lana-E-Omid, Haven of Hope.

The situation of women in Afghanistan is, in my opinion, the most serious problem that country faces.  I say this despite the success of Gold’s Gym in the conservative city of Herat, where women are pumping iron in their hijabs, and despite other widely publicized indications of improvement.

People point to the general lack of security in Afghanistan, about the resurgence of the Taliban, about poverty and the drug industry as the most treacherous blights in the country.  But these problems take second place to the fact that the majority of Afghan women, who make up more than 50% of the population, lack any vestige of rights and are systematically abused. Ann Jones has described in vivid and unforgettable detail what this means. But allow me a few minutes for a brief review of the facts—because facts like these cannot be repeated too often.

It means that untold thousands of females are forced into marriage when they’re children. It means that women are systematically beaten, tortured, and raped, that they’re given away as payment for debts and to settle disputes between feuding families, that they are forced into polygamous unions, burdened with far too many children, denied freedom of movement, denied the right to participate in civic life, kept illiterate, denied health care, thrown in jail if they run away, denied the right to divorce, denied any legal protection, punished as the perpetrators of a crime when they are actually the victims.  All the injustices human beings are capable of visiting on each other are visited upon women in Afghanistan, and this is the cultural standard.  To be a real man throughout much of Afghanistan, you do not have to join the Taliban or carry a gun, and you probably want peace in your country more than anything else. To be real man throughout much of Afghanistan, you do not have to grow poppies and you can even go to school and learn to read and write. But to be a real man in much of the country, you must regard the female as not really human, as your possession, as chattel, alive for the main purposes of serving you sexually and to breed—to breed sons in your image.

Research on domestic violations against women conducted by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, AIHRC, shows that more than 50% of women have been beaten or are beaten regularly in addition to suffering other types of violence. Other studies raise that figure to 95%.

The maternal mortality rate of Afghan women is among the highest in world. If we had reliable data on the actual numbers of girls and women who die in childbirth, we would find that the maternal mortality rate is far higher than is generally acknowledged. A woman in Afghanistan dies giving birth every 30 minutes; this amounts to 60 deaths per 1000 women. A UNICEF survey placed maternal mortality in four Afghan provinces as 130 times higher than it is in the United States.  In rural Afghanistan, where most women live, there are no doctors and no hospitals. Throughout the country, there are one doctor and five nurses for every 100,000 persons, and one bed for every 300 persons.  According to the report on the Millennium Development Plan for Afghanistan, this figure should decrease by 50% by the year 2015, but the research and evaluation by the commission indicates that this goal cannot be achieved.

But another reason for this stratospheric maternal mortality rate, not often cited in reports but true, is that thousands of females who make up these statistics are simply too young to give birth. They are girls, 11, 12, 13 years old, forced into marriage by families eager to receive a dowry, no matter how pitifully low, or to get rid of a debt, or to feed one fewer mouth.

Ann Jones’s book makes clear that in terms of escaping from abuse, women have few options. That is why the suicide rate among Afghan women is reaching epidemic proportions.  The current method of choice is self-immolation. From September 22, 2003 until April 19, 2004, the AIHRC office in Herat documented 380 cases of self-immolation.  Eighty percent are attributed to family violence. That is, in some cases the family sets the woman on fire, but in most cases, she chooses this method of escape—probably the only important choice she has made for herself in her entire life.  From March 20 to September 21, 2004, 184 cases of self-immolation were reported with the overwhelming majority of the victims, 80%, reporting that they had attempted to kill themselves because they were victims of continual domestic violence. Our board member, Fahima Vorgetts, who directs the work WAW does in Afghanistan under the name Afghan Women’s Fund, visited the burn ward of Herat Hospital last year.  Women were wrapped in filthy bandages, which have to be reused because they’re in scarce supply. Horrified by this situation, she ran out and bought the hospital a washing machine and dryer, the first and only washer/dryer on the premises.

Considering the breadth of the problem, the government’s efforts to improve the condition of women in Afghanistan are a farce. Since the inception of the Afghan Transitional Government of 2002, there have been 3 ministers at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, and the 3^rd has already been fired. Obviously, switching ministers is a means of destabilizing the agency and undermining its work and its credibility. About a month ago, the Afghan Parliament rejected her replacement because she is known to be liberal and progressive, particularly with respect to the woman issue.  Fewer than half of the girls of primary school age currently attend classes. President Karzai says the right things, but his actions expose him as a hypocrite of the first magnitude.  Consider, for example, his appointment of the ultra conservative Shinwari as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  This appointment means that we can say goodbye to any progress for women on the judicial level, which is currently primitive and unformed and where the idea that women should have legal rights equal to those granted men has never seen the light of day, let alone been taken seriously.  Poor Justice Shinwari is baffled by a problem, which he expressed in the following way:  "If a woman becomes a top judge, … what would happen when she has a menstruation cycle once a month, and she cannot go to the mosque?”

I am an Afghan woman who identifies strongly with the women I left behind when my family immigrated to the United States.  I’m sure that if we hadn’t emigrated, I would have been forced into a marriage, as my educated cousin was—forced by a gun held to her head to marry a man even though he had another wife. When I returned to Afghanistan in 2003, to help organize Women for Afghan Women’s conference in Kandahar on Women and the Constitution, I saw women stagnating in prison for the crime of running away from abusive families. I watched my colleagues in WAW, the organization’s founder Suni Mehta and Masuda Sultan, as they conceived the audacious plan of rescuing one of these girls, Lena, bringing her to Kabul, and getting her into school. Last month we got a letter from our once illiterate Lena, written entirely by her in Farsi and partly in English.  She attends high school in Kabul, takes Karate lessons, and is going to Norway for three years to continue her education there.

Watching Suni and Masuda fast talking the police chief of Kandahar into letting Lena come with us, not taking no for an answer, watching them bundle her into the tiny plane that was about to fly us over the Hindu Kush mountains to Kabul—this was a pivotal moment for me. I understood that what had to be done could be done, and I decided then and there to enter the realm of the movers and shakers of this world. My colleagues at WAW know that I am a quiet person, not given to saying a lot, not comfortable speaking before a large audience. But I am a doer, and the project we have invited you here to support needs to be done.

Safe houses are crucial because women have to be taken out of immediate danger. We can’t educate women if they are being beaten and abused. We can’t train them if their lives are in jeopardy every second of the day. We must ensure their safety, provide them with psychological counseling, educate them, train them in a vocation, and then help them reenter society so that they can become successful in their own right.

Building safe houses is a humanitarian program, but human rights advocacy is its ultimate goal. We expect that this project will be a factor in spurring the government to take appropriate steps to protect women. Since in some cases entire families and even rural communities will be involved in securing the safety of a woman, it will be a kind of training ground on the subject of women’s rights.  It is a way to penetrate remote areas, where the real evil—fanatical gender discrimination—breeds and festers.

What is most important to me is building a woman’s movement in Afghanistan. This is my ultimate goal: to work until women there become advocates on their own behalf and no longer need outsiders to do it for them. Women in the cities of Afghanistan are already on their way to realizing this goal.  I have painted a bleak picture of the situation of women in Afghanistan, a picture more than verified by the recent reports of Amnesty International and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, but I want to leave on a more positive note. When I arrive in Afghanistan,  I will be joining a cadre of thousands of strong, courageous women, mainly in the cities, who are taking steps every day to reduce and ultimately eliminate gender discrimination.  You don’t know what a strong woman is until you’ve met them. You don’t know what resilience means until you know their histories, what they have endured and what they have overcome in the past three decades. But for women’s human rights to take root in Afghanistan, the huge rural population of women must discover and embrace their humanity and add their voices to those of their urban sisters.

I recently stumbled upon an essay written by my eleven-year old daughter Karima, who has been living in Afghanistan since September, in advance of my own arrival. One night I was really missing her, so I typed her name into Google—and lo and behold, there she was, along with her classmates from the American school she attends in Kabul. Their teacher, Mr. Drew, had instructed them to write a paragraph on making a difference and he put the results on the web. This is her paragraph (with a few corrections because I couldn’t help myself).

My mom has already started it, but I want to help. My mom is standing up for Afghan ladies. The Afghan ladies are mistreated like donkeys. The people don't really like ladies. My mom works in a nonprofit organization named ''Women for Afghan Women''. This organization is based in NYC.  As the name says, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and other religions help the Afghan ladies. I am already helping as much as I can and I want to help more. I want to help so that the Afghan ladies will be free. These ladies have been suppressed for a while and I want to end it.

So do we all want to end it, and so we will.

Thank you all for coming. Thank you for supporting this project, for spreading the goals of the feminist movement to the fragile but hopeful, beleaguered but reawakening country of Afghanistan.