Women: Missing faces in Afghan picture
Chive Mynde
By Ellen Goodman, Globe Staff, 11/1/2001
HERE'S A photograph on my desk that's been there for a week now. It's
a newspaper portrait of Afghan tribal leaders gathered at a Pakistan
border town to plan for a post-Taliban government.
The picture shows a diverse group of elders, colorful in their turbans
and varied in the robes of their clans. The caption that I have
scrawled across the bottom reads: What's wrong with this picture?
You see, these elders, indeed all the 1,500 leaders who assembled,
didn't include a single woman. Those who were deciding the shape of
the negotiating table had already decided that there would be no women
at the table.
Have we gotten so used to the absence of women in Afghanistan,
invisible under the burqa, anonymous and mute, that this picture
passes without comment? Have we seen them as victims of the war for so
long that we can't envision them as builders of the peace?
Looking at this portrait, I wonder if the Taliban haven't succeeded in
erasing memory, even history - and especially the history of Afghan
women. ''We see Afghanistan in rubble and say rubble is their normal
state. But it's not,'' says Eleanor Smeal, whose Feminist Majority
highlighted the plight of Afghan women long before this fall. ''We see
women treated like nothing and we say, `Oh, we have to start with
nothing.' But we don't.''
In fact, Afghan women, who are now 54 percent of the population,
gained rights slowly during the 20th century. In 1964, they helped
write their country's first constitution. Even before the Soviet
takeover, women served in parliament, went to universities, became
doctors and teachers.
Afghanistan wasn't a showplace of feminism, but it was by no means the
same country that placed women under house arrest and forced families
into exile simply to educate their daughters. Even today, Afghan women
living in the diaspora are leaders in humanitarian work and in refugee
camps.
As Jamila, a founding member of the Afghan Women's Network engaged in
the politically charged work of educating and training refugee women
and girls, told a session of the United Nations Security Council on
Tuesday: ''I often heard that Afghan women are not political. That
peace and security is man's work. I am here to challenge that
illusion.''
Our government has shared the illusion that Jamila challenged. We've
been more willing to condemn the Taliban for destroying women's rights
than to insist on those rights in a post-Taliban world. Indeed, one
senior administration official told The New York Times, ''We have to
be careful not to look like we are imposing our values on them.''
I understand that caution. It is true that the West used the
''emancipation of women'' as something of a con game. In the late 19th
century, Lord Cromer famously blasted Egyptians for degrading women
while back home in Britain he helped found the Men's League for
Opposing Women's Suffrage.
On the other hand, we had no such fear of ''imposing our values'' on
the Japanese when equal rights for women were written into their
postwar constitution. Even General Douglas MacArthur, no liberated
male, became convinced that if the world wanted to end fascism, if we
wanted freedom, we needed to ensure rights to women.
That's where we are today. The international community has begun to
acknowledge that women's rights are universal. On Oct. 31, the United
Nations celebrated the first anniversary of a groundbreaking Security
Council resolution on women, peace and security that, among other
things, committed governments around the world to involving women in
peace negotiations.
Meanwhile in Washington, Senator Barbara Boxer added an amendment to
the foreign appropriations bill calling for the inclusion of women in
any new Afghan government.
Finally, we also have begun to see women's rights not just as a moral
question but as a strategic question.
Rina Amiri, an Afghan-born associate with the Women Waging Peace
network at Harvard, may have put it best when she recited a different
history. ''When it comes to war, women's issues always get put to the
side,'' she said. ''People say, `Let's make sure everyone puts down
their arms first, let's get food on the table first.''' But, she asks,
who will help build that civil society - the warlords or the women who
have been finding ways to feed their families now?
In many ways, the women of Afghanistan were reduced to anonymous
symbols: nothings. But we learn from their history and our own that
peace and security and freedom are ''cultural values'' that we should
not be afraid to impose.
As long as women are excluded, the Afghan future remains decidedly
unphotogenic.
Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is elleng...@globe.com.
This story ran on page A19 of the Boston Globe on 11/1/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.