It’s not just the Taliban

Excerpt from “An Open Letter from the "Women of Afghanistan” by Samira Hamidi:

“How fragile have been our gains, how meaningless have been the laws we’ve fought to have passed. How useless have been the policies we struggled to see implemented in this land where there is no belief in women’s rights.”

This cry of despair by a well-known women’s rights activist has been prompted by a recent move by the government to place women’s shelters under the control of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs.

It’s actually worse than it sounds: the Ministry, established by President Hamid Karzai back in 2001 to demonstrate the state’s commitment to women, has never done very much to advance the cause of Afghanistan’s most vulnerable segment of the population.

In some ways, this was the way it was set up. The ministry has always been more ornamental than actual. Aid workers assigned to “build capacity” in MoWA sigh and complain that it has no real budget, no executive authority, and a distinct lack of qualified personnel.

But incompetence and inefficiency might be preferable to what is happening now: the ministry seems to be conspiring with the most regressive elements in Afghan society to take away even the modest gains made over the past few year.

Afghanistan now has several women’s shelters that try to help girls and women in untenable situations.

The first ones were set up by women’s advocacy groups in Herat and Kabul, to provide guidance, legal advice, access to medical help, and a place to stay when it was impossible to go home.

Stories of horror are too numerous to ignore: underage marriages, which are against the law but still more the rule than the exception; domestic abuse, ranging from routine beatings to the shocking case of Bibi Aisha, whose husband and father-in-law cut off her nose and ears as punishment for running away from what she saw as an intolerable situation. “Honor killings” are not uncommon — a woman or girl can be killed with impunity if she is perceived to have brought shame on her family.

The law supposedly prohibits these outrages. But many studies have shown that women have much less access to the court system than men do. Even when they do seek redress, the corrupt and male-dominated judiciary is unlikely to provide relief.

Shelters gave these women options. In some cases intermediaries would talk to their families, seeking reconciliation where possible, providing alternatives when it was unwise or unsafe to send a girl back to an abusive environment.

But the shelters raised hackles in this deeply conservative state, where women’s problems neither began nor ended with the Taliban. Fathers and husbands railed against being denied absolute power over their women. The shelters were accused of being bordellos, the girls who ran away were labeled prostitutes.

So the government set up a commission to study the problem. The commission, not surprisingly, confirmed many of the worst fears. These shelters, said the study, were against Afghan culture, and were actively encouraging girls and women to defy their male relatives. They disgraced the Afghan state, and should be shut down.

I am reminded of a conference on self-immolation I helped to organize in Herat several years ago. The problem had been growing; hospitals were filled with burn victims, many of whom had set themselves on fire to escape abusive relationships.

The head of the local department of Women’s Affairs was invited to speak. We had hoped she would provide a strong voice to support women’s rights.

How wrong we were. This government “advocate” for women refused to acknowledge that there were any real problems for women and girls in Herat, which lies on the border with Iran. Instead, she insisted, the problem was the media, the Indian soap operas and other foreign programs that gave girls unrealistic expectation of life.

“These girls set themselves on fire because they cannot have pretty dresses like the actresses on televison,” she said. She then gave a hard look at a women’s rights activist on the panel. “And these shelters just encourage them.”

So now the shelters will become an arm of the government. A court will decide whether a girl was justified in running away from her family. If not, she could be imprisoned, or she could be given back to the same situation she fled.

“The government is using the Women’s Ministry as a tool for curtailing women’s rights,” writes Hamidi in her open letter, which is being widely circulated in Afghanistan.

The minister, Hussan Bano Ghazanfar, is certainly taking an active role in the proceedings. In a press conference she called Tuesday to defend the new moves, she accused the shelters of mismanagement and corruption.

"These shelters do not care about the women in them,” she told the media. “They are only concerned about their budgets.”

Many shelters are supported by foreign charities with minimal funding. But even this modest influx of cash has to be brought under government control.

But much more than money is at stake, as Hamidi points out in her letter.

“The biggest question is not the funding … No, the biggest question is what will happen to the women,” she writes.

A good question to ponder as U.S. policy weighs demands from activist groups that Afghan women’s rights be protected in the event of negotiations with the Taliban.

Perhaps they need to be protected just as much from their own government.