Women may have, nay have, made vast strides to equality in some places but in other places things go the other way.
Afghan friends have told me about life in Kabul in the 1960's -- women wore whatever they wanted, girls went to scholl with boys and they sat together, there were dances etc -- it was far from true equality, especially out of the city, but it was light years ahead of today... .
Excerpted from The Guardian, see full text at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/14/afghanistan-womens-rights-rape
Afghanistan passes 'barbaric' law diminishing women's rights
by Jon Boone, Kandahar, August 14, 2009
Afghanistan has quietly passed a law permitting Shia men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands' sexual demands, despite international outrage over an earlier version of the legislation which President Hamid Karzai had promised to review.
The new final draft of the legislation also grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work.
"It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying 'blood money' to a girl who was injured when he raped her," the US charity Human Rights Watch said ( . . . )
Islamic law experts and human rights activists say that although the language of the original law has been changed, many of the provisions that alarmed women's rights groups remain, including this one: "Tamkeen is the readiness of the wife to submit to her husband's reasonable sexual enjoyment, and her prohibition from going out of the house, except in extreme circumstances, without her husband's permission. If any of the above provisions are not followed by the wife she is considered disobedient." The law has been backed by the hardline Shia cleric Ayatollah Mohseni, who is thought to have influence over the voting intentions of some of the country's Shias, which make up around 20% of the population. Karzai has assiduously courted such minority leaders in the run up to next Thursday's election, which is likely to be a close run thing, according to a poll released yesterday ( . . . )
Human Rights Watch, which has obtained a copy of the final law, called on all candidates to pledge to repeal the law, which it says contradicts Afghanistan's own constitution. The group said that Karzai had "made an unthinkable deal to sell Afghan women out in the support of fundamentalists in the August 20 election" ( . . . )
2 comments:
Well obviously we're not there to spread tolerance and democracy. Or to keep the 'terrists' out of Canada. And people don't want to talk about the fact the burqa was only re-introduced after 2001 nor that women won't be voting tomorrow, so when articles in the newspapers say 'people' they mean men. Well gender male, they are certainly not men.
You know and I know that we will tolerate a great deal of oppression and injustice because they are 'allies'.
After all, we have been more than happy to deal with an even more repressive regime in Saudi Arabia for years.
From where I sit, unless your policy applies equally to all the countries with whom we deal, you are shedding crocodile tears.
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