Women’s rights in Afghanistan worsen in 2013: report

Here is more of the poisonous fruit of Obama’s pro-Taliban policies in Afghanistan, coupled with his vicious Islamic supremacist agenda throughout Africa and the Middle East.

“Nazia, 16, was wedded to a 40-year-old man who brutally cut off her ears and nose, shaved her head and burnt her feet with boiling water. The Ministry of Justice — with parliamentary approval — revised the criminal code, adding a provision that bans family member testimony in criminal cases. This, the report argues, ‘makes it extremely difficult to prosecute domestic violence and child and forced marriage.’

“Although the law remains valid, its enforcement is weak, the report states. A brief debate on the law ‘heralded, and perhaps triggered, subsequent attacks and setbacks within the government during the year,’ said the Human Rights Watch report.”

“Women’s rights in Afghanistan worsen in 2013: report,” by Jamieson Lesko, NBC News, January 24, 2014, via RAWA News (thanks to Sharia Unveiled):

KABUL – Women’s rights in Afghanistan have regressed in the past year, increasing worry about what the future holds, according to a Human Rights Watch report released Thursday.

As the country faces a large-scale troop withdrawal by the end of 2014, the organization expressed concern that, “with international interest in Afghanistan rapidly waning, opponents of women’s rights seized the opportunity to begin rolling back the progress made since the end of Taliban rule.”

The comprehensive global report outlines actions it says Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government has taken to specifically undermine rights for women and girls.

Among those actions was a parliamentary attempt to appeal the groundbreaking law on the “Elimination of Violence Against Women,” which was passed by presidential decree in 2009.

Another setback was the reduction of parliamentary seats reserved for women from 25 percent to 20 percent, triggering concern that female representation may even wane further in years to come.

Also, the Ministry of Justice — with parliamentary approval — revised the criminal code, adding a provision that bans family member testimony in criminal cases. This, the report argues, “makes it extremely difficult to prosecute domestic violence and child and forced marriage.”

During 2013 there was also an uptick in violence against high-profile women in positions of authority. Targeted assassinations included the shooting of a member of parliament, Roh Gul, as she was traveling through Ghazni province with her family in August. She survived the attack but her 8-year-old daughter and driver were killed.

Meanwhile, world-renowned author Sushmita Banerjee was also found murdered in September. Her dramatic memoirs about marrying an Afghan man and escaping the Taliban were turned into a Bollywood movie, “Escape From the Taliban,” before she moved back to Afghanistan.

And the highest ranking police officer in Helmand Province, Lt. Nigar, who was known by just one name, was killed just months after her predecessor’s assassination.

Beyond attacks on women’s rights, the report outlines other general examples of “declining respect for human rights” across the country.

“Impunity for abuses was the norm for government security forces and other armed groups,” it states, which raises concerns about the “fairness of the upcoming presidential election.”

UPDATE: Oh what a difference Islam makes.. Here’s a photo essay that brings it all home via The Daily Mail (thanks to MCD).

Women in Afghanistan were brutally repressed under Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001 – but a series of fascinating old photographs show how women there used to live freely.

The Taliban were condemned around the world for their treatment of women.

Under their rule they were forbidden to be educated, publicly beaten for showing disobedience and forced to wear burqas – a garment that covers the whole body, apart from the eyes.

Women browse in a Kabul record store

Women in a biology class at Kabul University

However, Mohammad Humayon Qayoumi, who was born in Kabul in Afghanistan, and went on to become an engineering professor at San Jose State University, wrote a photo-essay book called Once Upon A Time in Afghanistan that documented how life before the Taliban used to be very different for women.

His photographs from the 1950s, 60s and 70s show how they used to be afforded university-level education, browse record shops in short skirts and study science.

Indeed a State Department report from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from 2001 explains how women were given the vote in the 1920s, were granted equality in the Afghan constitution in the 1960s and by the early 1990s formed 70 per cent of school teachers, 50 per cent of government workers and in Kabul, 40 per cent of doctors.

This picture of Afghan women attending university in 1967 could have been taken anywhere in the Western world

Women nurses tend to babies in a hospital infant ward

A laboratory at a Vaccine Research Center

Afghan women being taught biology

Kabul university students chat in-between classes

Mr Qayoumi said: ‘Remembering Afghanistan’s hopeful past only makes its present misery seem more tragic. But it is important to know that disorder, terrorism, and violence against schools that educate girls are not inevitable. I want to show Afghanistan’s youth of today how their parents and grandparents really lived.’

Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai recently endorsed a code of conduct that would prohibit many of the scenes shown in these photographs.

It states that women are not allowed to travel without a male guardian and must not mingle with strange men in public places such as schools, markets and offices.

Happier times: Afghan women taking part in a Scout scheme

The modern transport of the day: Female bus passengers in Kabul

Afghanis mingle freely in a cinema

Wife-beating is only prohibited if there is no ‘Shariah-compliant reason’, it said.

Mr Karzai insisted the document was in keeping with Islam and did not restrict women.

‘It is the Shariah law of all Muslims and all Afghans,’ he said.

Nurses arrive at the house of an elderly villager

Mothers and children pictured having fun in a city playground

Women look on as a nurse at a hospital shows them how to bathe a baby

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