The Witness, April 2002
Women for Afghan Women: Solidarity For The Long Haul
by Sunita Mehta

Women for Afghan Women (WAW) is a women’s collective in New York founded in April 2001, a full five months before the Twin Towers were razed to the ground. Fahima Danishgar and I co-founded WAW because we were both distressed by the oppression of Afghan women by the Taliban – and disturbed by the absence of Afghan community women in the world discourse upon this matter. Fahima is a 23-year-old Afghan activist and political scientist; and I am a 33-year-old women’s rights and South Asian community activist.

On September 10, 2001, Fahima and I drove together to Falls Church, Va., to visit an organization working with Afghan asylum seekers. On the drive back, we talked about jihad. Fahima explained that she was brought up with the understanding that jihad is a very personal struggle, and certainly not a violent struggle. A Muslim must always expose and condemn evil, external and within oneself, never tolerate it: This is the core of jihad for my friend.

The next morning, when I saw the black cloud in the sky above my son’s school in Brooklyn – and then the repeated TV images of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center – Fahima’s interpretation of jihad rang in my ears. If jihad was a personal and internal battle with one’s demons, what was this? I have come to know many feminist Muslim women through this work who believe that women’s rights are guaranteed under the Qu’ran. It seems that the Islam that these women embrace has also been hijacked.

I remember walking with my sister and cousin through Manhattan on that piercingly bright and desperate day – I had never been more acutely conscious of being an immigrant, a South Asian; and yet I had never felt more a New Yorker, an American. Terrorists had intended to attack the ultimate symbol of America – only the victims of 9/11 hailed from all corners of the world, and were of every possible religion and class. It was instantaneously apparent that a bloody retaliation was inevitable against Afghanistan since Osama bin Laden was harbored there.

WAW co-sponsored the earliest Muslim peace rallies and teach-ins in New York. We advocated that every effort to address Afghan women’s rights, in order to be effective, must be built upon a sincere acknowledgement that the vast majority of Afghan women are Muslim. We asked that the feminist debate shift beyond a fixation with the burqa or chadori. While we were tortured by the jingoism and war-mongering that pervaded the media, we could not adopt the unrealistic pacifism of the American peace movement. We knew the urgency of Afghanistan’s liberation from terrorist rule, and asked how peace might come about without forceful intervention. We did not desire a unilateral invasion by the U.S., but rather by a global coalition under U.N. auspices, which would remain with Afghanistan until peace and economic stability were not a distant pipe dream.

The U.S. did retaliate: We dropped food and bombs on the innocent men, women and children of Afghanistan. In December 2001, WAW Board member Masuda Sultan went back to her place of birth, Kandahar, with a film crew. Masuda found 19 members of her extended family dead, killed by U.S. bombs. Despite her pain, she believes that an intervention was necessary for Afghanistan to be led by a government chosen by its people.

In January 2002, when the Interim Prime Minister Karzai spoke to the Afghan community at a public meeting in New York, we shared the community’s hope, faith and optimism, laced with a chilling realization that the odds were steeply stacked against him.

The reality is a mixed bag. There are two women in the interim government, one the deputy to Karzai himself. We read that girls are beginning to attend school, women’s magazines are being started, there is radio transmission for a few hours a day, and newspapers are being published. There is even an effort to ensure an Afghan presence at the 2004 Olympics. And yet, the Tourism Minister has been assassinated, brothels are proliferating, poverty has led some families to sell their children, and widows continue to beg on the streets. Security is the foremost concern: We hear of pervasive warlordism and rape.

Noeleen Heyzer, of UNIFEM, warns that gross women’s rights violations are the surest sign of broader and more entrenched human rights abuses. UNICEF’s Gulbadan Habibi asks the world to stay with Afghanistan for the long haul, since a country which has been destroyed by over two decades of war cannot be rebuilt overnight. These sentiments will guide WAW in the years to come. l



Sunita Mehta is the Grants Director at the Sister Fund.