Back to the Burqa

A 65-YEAR-OLD grandmother was leaving for work in a taxi from outside her home in the suburbs of Kandahar, Southern Afghanistan. When she stepped into the car, two men on a motorcycle pulled alongside and shot her four times in the head through her burqa. She died on the spot, as they sped away. Safia Ama Jan – whose name means ‘Gentle Aunt’ – was murdered on September 25, 2006. Taliban gunmen had carried out their first assassination of a female Afghan government official. She had defied fundamentalist death threats to campaign for women’s rights and education in the former Taliban stronghold.

The death of Safia

During the Taliban’s oppressive rule, between 1996 and 2001, Safia Ama Jan ran an underground school for girls and had already been a champion of women’s education for more than three decades. After the US invasion in 2001 and the setting up of a fledgling democratic government, Safia Ama Jan became a provincial director for the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in Kandahar, an area where adherents to the hardline Islamic movement have since been re-grouping. Despite covering herself with a burqa when she ventured outside her home, she was a target and the Taliban took responsibility for her murder. Mullah Hayat Khan, a Taliban commander in Kandahar, said that Safia Ama Jan had been killed because she worked for the government. “We have told people time and time again that anyone working for the government, including women, will be killed,” he said. Soraya Sobhrang, a close friend of Safia who worked for the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, said that she was not a government-appointed official, but had been elected by local people. “Safia Ama Jan was a very good woman and a very good Muslim,” she said “and she just tried to work hard for the women of Kandahar”.

Gender violence

For most Afghan women, the only thing that has changed since the fall of the Taliban is mounting insecurity. There are regular reports of women being abducted by gunmen who rape and sell them. With no functioning law and order in Afghanistan outside the capital, women have almost no protection other than that provided by armed fathers, brothers and husbands. Local councils can order that women and girls be ceded by one family to another to settle a dispute. Widows are perceived as the property of their in-laws, and they can be forced to marry brothers-in-law.

In the countryside, worsening poverty has been linked to a small but notable increase in the sale of child brides. Marrying off girls as young as 11 to men in their 30s and even older has been common in Afghanistan for centuries, but now, with drought and war leaving family economies in ruin, daughters are being sold off with greater frequency. Violence inside the home is epidemic, according to the United Nations, and it is believed to be the root cause of increasing attempts by women and girls to commit suicide by setting themselves on fire.

Education neglected

More than half of Afghanistan’s children are not going to school because of a shortage of places and teachers, the aid agency Oxfam said last November. Despite a five-fold increase in school enrolments since 2001, the education system simply cannot cope, the charity said. The report urged rich countries to invest some $800m to rebuild Afghan schools over the next five years. Many pupils have lessons outdoors, and others make do in makeshift structures such as tents while they await proper buildings. Oxfam pointed out that there are insufficient classrooms, books or desks. Teachers, especially women teachers, are in short supply. Pay is so low – about $50 a month at best – that well-qualified staff prefer other work if they can get it. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan’s girls could only attend classes in secret, and today there are still many fewer girls than boys going to school. “Girls are particularly losing out with just one in five girls in primary education and one in 20 going to secondary school,” the Oxfam report said. Girls’ schools need to be guarded as well, for in the latest Taliban insurgency hundreds of them have been burned down.

A national campaign to boost girls’ enrolment was launched in Afghanistan during March 2005, led by the Ministry of Education and supported by UNICEF. However, there are big regional differences in attendance levels. In major cities, such as Kabul, about 50 percent of girls go to school, yet in five Afghan provinces at least 90 percent of school-age girls are not attending. These are the provinces in the south and on the border with Pakistan, where it is still a tradition among families to keep their daughters from school. Girls are only allowed to go to mosques between five and eight years old to learn the holy book of Qur’an. When they turn nine – the age they are considered to be approaching puberty – they are not allowed to leave their houses as parents believe they should not be seen by other men. The new campaign is expected to support the establishment of community-based classes for up to 500,000 girls in villages with no formal school, enhanced teacher training programmes for 25,000 primary grade teachers, and the supply of education materials to more than 4.5 million children and 105,000 teachers.

Denied health care

Most rural Afghan women still have no access to healthcare during pregnancy. The country has the highest maternal death rate in the world, with 1,600 women out of every 100,000 dying in childbirth. At least 50 women die every day from obstetric complications, linked to low rates of female literacy and poor education. The difficulties in providing care to women in childbirth highlight the problems which are still being faced in Afghanistan. There are very few hospitals in the country, and men and boys take precedence in those emergency departments which do exist.

Few Afghan women will use health services offered by solely male health workers. In 2002, Afghanistan had only 467 midwives, but Afghanistan’s Ministry of Public Health, with the support of partners including the World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNICEF, is training community midwives and female community health workers to serve in the country’s rural areas, where 77 percent of the population lives. Based on population data and government targets, Afghanistan needs up to 10,000 midwives to deliver babies and manage life-threatening complications. The new initiative’s aim is to train 1,200 midwives annually over an eight year period. Afghanistan also needs thousands more female community health workers, but to date just 5,000 male and female workers have been trained. Significant change in access to healthcare for women is going to take time.

Victims of drought

Afghanistan’s northern, southern and western regions have been coping with a devastating drought for the last six months which has caused great hardship to families. When rains failed in April and May 2006 families who lived off the land lost between 80–100 percent of their crops. Girls and young children have been hit particularly hard. In the Western province of Herat young children are dying from hunger every week, according to the British-based charity Christian Aid. Children as young as six have to walk for up to four hours to get to the nearest fresh water, and this task usually falls to girls. Droughts tend to occur every 15-20 years, but the last drought was just two years ago. If global warming is responsible, then dry river beds and parched landscapes all the year round offer a chilling scenario for the future of Afghanistan’s rural poor.

Many rural villagers feel that that the international community has been so focused on the Taliban insurgency that those suffering from the drought have been forgotten. “The world does not know that people in Afghanistan are only thinking about what they can find to eat, not about fighting,” said one 40-year-old farmer in Herat who lost all his crop. Amongst his friends, several had lost all their children, especially those with very young children.

Vulnerable women

Under the Taliban, women in Afghanistan were severely oppressed, but the condition of women in the new Afghanistan is precarious at best. True, women hold 27 percent of the seats in the National Assembly and one-sixth of the seats in the Upper House, but most Afghan women remain illiterate, impoverished and vulnerable to political and criminal violence. The United Nations has described Afghan women as being “among the worst-off in the world”. On average, they die at least 20 years younger than women elsewhere. Only 15 percent of them can read.

As the Taliban re-establishes itself through much of southern Afghanistan, and the rule of power rather than the rule of law continues to be the norm in the country, women like Safia Ama Jan are putting their lives at risk daily when they struggle for a better future. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission reflects that the slaying of Safia Ama Jan calls into question the credibility of claims by both the Afghan government and the international community that they are protecting women.