Rights still lag for Afghan women

Ariana is nearly invisible beneath her blue burqa, which billows in the wind just outside the huge canvas tent where hundreds of Afghans, mostly men, are meeting to help decide her future.

Still, there are hints that a real person exists underneath. The bottoms of leopard-patterned slacks and a pair of black high heels whisk along the sidewalk as she struggles to cradle her young son in her arms.

"We hope this loya jirga [grand assembly] will be useful, especially in terms of safeguarding our rights, which have been abused for decades," she says. "We want to live like modern women in the rest of the world with all of our freedoms."

Ariana explains her love of literature and fading dreams to become a university professor. And just as she concedes that she still lives in fear of armed men who shadow her and threaten her in the streets, a tall, helmeted policeman moves over and interrupts her. He stamps his boots, brandishes his Kalashnikov, and shoos her away from a foreign reporter.

When US air power and Afghan ground fire combined to chase the Taliban out of most big cities, women's groups both here and abroad had high hopes that Afghan women would begin to regain some of the freedoms they held decades ago, when Kabul was a city of upwardly mobile women sporting fashions as liberal as those in most Asian cities.

But although in some cases there are improvements – like more women being admitted to universities – there was something the optimists were forgetting, Ariana says. "We remember that many of the men in charge now were the same ones who repressed us between 1992 and 1995, before the Taliban arrived to take their place. They raped and kidnapped Afghan women."

A recent Human Rights Watch report says that, despite government-backed efforts to integrate women into the educational system and the workplace, most Afghan women continue to fear physical violence and repression even after the end of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

"Most Afghan women remain sequestered and largely invisible," says Widney Brown, advocacy director for women's rights at the New York-based Human Rights Watch. "That makes the courage of the nearly 200 women delegates attending the loya jirga stand out all the more profoundly."

Ms. Brown contends, however, that the West, which promised so much help to Afghan women, has let them down by refusing to provide the kind of security they need to fight for their rights and forge ahead in the new Afghanistan.

An estimated 1,500 delegates are meeting in Kabul this week, mostly to decide the framework of a new government. Women's rights, however, are also on the minds of many representatives.

"The female delegates are pushing for a special declaration on women's rights to protect them from suffering similar atrocities as those suffered under the Taliban," says Surya Parlika, a senior member of the Loya Jirga Commission, who ran an underground women's group in Kabul during the time of the Taliban. "It would give us the same rights that we had before, in the 1964 Constitution, and we hope that it can be passed by the loya jirga and then put to the test."

The tales that Afghan women and girls tell of continuing attacks and intimidation suggest that in many parts of the country, more than seven months after the fall of the Taliban, conditions have not improved much.

Yasmin Hasanat, a married mother with two young sons, is a representative to the loya jirga from Kandahar, the largest city in southern Afghanistan.

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