While
outrage over the Taleban’s requirement that Afghan women wear a head-to-toe veil
continues, a new comprehensive study shows that the majority of Afghan women
consider the Taleban’s dress codes a non-issue, and many choose to wear the
burqa or chadari whether the Taleban decrees it or not.
Physicians for Human Rights’s 2001 study corrects for some biases in its hugely
influential 1998 report, The Taliban’s War on Women. "We made a huge deal in the
last report about the clothing edicts," says PHR’s Susannah Sirkin, sparking
nationwide feminist outrage with the Taleban regime. But that report "was not a
randomized sample," says PHR’s Dr. Lynn L. Amowitz. "It was a discussion of what
was happening to educated Kabulese women who had abandoned traditional
practices." For their first study, researchers interviewed about 80 women in
Kabul, the country’s most modern city, and 80 refugees in Pakistan. Amowitz led
last year’s 3-month study in Afghanistan, which entailed interviews with over
200,000 Afghan women and men, from both rural and urban areas, some under
Taleban control and others not.
While
the media were “all over” the first study, PHR says, there’s been precious
little attention paid to this latest one. A wire service report was apparently
ignored. The Los Angeles Times buried a brief mention on the most obvious
finding—that the majority of Afghan women and men say the Taleban has worsened
their lives—at the end of a story. Barbara Crossette’s article on the study has
yet to be published by the New York Times.
The
results paint a more nuanced and complex view of Afghanistan’s closed society
and the brutal Taleban regime, in particular the vast differences between Kabul
and other urban areas and the Afghan countryside. Whereas many women in Kabul
worked, went to school, and wore Western clothing, in rural areas, tradition,
poverty, and war had prevented many women from entering public life even before
the Taleban rode into town. Most of the adult women in the new survey–subject
to mandatory education during the 1970s and 1980s–attended school for less than
2 years. Today, while Taleban edicts drastically restrict women’s access to
health care, over half of Afghan women say the main reason they can’t get
medical attention is because they can’t afford it.
Most
striking in the face of U.S. feminist campaigns against the veil is the finding
that over 80% of women in non-Taleban controlled areas say they wear the chadari
all the time and over 90% say that their dress rarely affects their daily lives.
Over 80% of all respondents consider persecution for dress code infractions an
unimportant issue.
Feminist campaigns have been crucial in educating Americans about Taleban rule
in Afghanistan. Amowitz, however, says she’s concerned that the attention "is
not for the issues that are most important." Feminist campaigns raised public
awareness in many cases by making the burqa–and American repulsion to it–the
emotional center of their projects. Oprah Winfrey’s critically acclaimed reading
of Eve Ensler’s "Under the Burqa," to 18,000 people at New York City’s Madison
Square Garden told the story of an Afghan woman under Taleban rule, ending with
the appearance of a burqa-clad Afghan woman. Audience members, who afterward
signed petitions against the Taleban in the thousands, pinned bits of fabric
from burqas on their lapels in remembrance.
The
burqa is a "symbol of the total oppression of women," says Feminist Majority
Campaign’s Norma Gattsek. Thus, the centerpiece of the Feminist Majority’s
Campaign to End Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan, launched in 1997 as the group’s
first foray into international politics, is a project that distributes burqas to
schoolchildren across the country. Over 600 groups participate in the Feminist
Majority’s "Back-to-School" campaign. The campaign draws attention to the fact
that the Taleban outlawed female education and employment (today, they allow
girls’ religious education up till the age of 8). In addition to viewing a
wrenching Marlo-Thomas-narrated video, hearing lectures, and donating money to
Afghan girls’ home schools and NGO-run schools, participants are lent burqas to
try on. Thousands of others buy the group’s "symbol of remembrance," a small
swatch of mesh material representing the burqa
"It
is the most smothering experience to put one on," says Gattsek. "Anytime a group
has used one, they have told us that that moment of putting that on was
overwhelming. Because it really made them feel, how could I live like this,
totally cut off from the world?"
A
more accurate rendition of women’s Taleban-induced problems would probably
entail an enforced fast and/or being stoned by classmates. The Taleban continues
to impose hangings, amputations, and deaths by stoning, in a society of gross
deprivations and ongoing civil war. International repugnance with their regime
has isolated the country. This January’s latest round of UN sanctions aimed at
pressuring the Taleban to hand over Osama bin Laden may intensify the civil war
and deepen poverty, human rights advocates say. International flights have been
banned, and a lop-sided arms embargo prohibits military aid to the Taleban but
not to the factions fighting against them, which have openly stated that foreign
powers continue to fund their war.
All
of this has especially dire ramifications for women and children, who comprise
three-quarters of all refugees from the country, making feminist activism in
defense of Afghanistan’s women especially critical. The work of the Feminist
Majority and other women’s rights groups–drumming up humanitarian aid,
funneling funds to women’s clinics and home-schools, petitioning the
administration to pressure Pakistan and other countries to stanch the flow of
arms to Afghanistan–is exemplary. But the tactic of capitalizing on American
horror of the Muslim veil, while it may work well in drawing attention to the
heartbreaking plight of women in Afghanistan, has now been undeniably uprooted
from reality. Let’s drop it.