|
About
thirty people gathered on the Upper East
Side to hear two experts speak about the
plight Afghan and Muslim women Tuesday
morning.
The
event was sponsored and moderated by the International
Women's Heath Coalition, a New York based nongovernmental
organization (NGO).
"Any political solution in Afghanistan
needs to take into account women's rights issues," said
Farhat Bokhari, a researcher for the Women's
Rights Division of Human Rights Watch. "There
should be a repealing of laws and practices
that are against women, and Afghan women's
NGOs need to be funded and brought to the table.
They are at the forefront of sustaining women
there now."
Bokhari spent
three weeks at various Afghan refugee camps
along the Afghanistan-Pakistan
border, and returned to the US on September
10. "Coming back to the attacks was just
shocking, and it changed the context of our
whole trip," she said.
"Our aim was a comprehensive overview
of women in Afghanistan," said Bokhari. "We
had heard that there were some disparities
of treatment between rural and urban settings.
How do they resist? There is more fear in urban
settings, in Kabul for example. Women's movement
is very restricted, they must be accompanied
by a man every time they leave home. So what
are the levels of resistance? Well, many former
teachers manage to operate home schools for
women. They are very brave and often the targets
of abuse."
The other speaker, Rounaq Jahan, is a Senior
Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of International
Affairs at Columbia University. She spoke of
a time when her home country, Bangladesh, was
also at war and coping with genocide.
"What may happen in Afghanistan is what
happened in my home country. The young men
all went off to fight, and the women had to
live somehow, so they learned to work," she
said. "When they [the men] came back...many
didn't accept it at first, but they grew to
see it as another source of income."
In the question
and answer session after the presentations
many audience member asked about
what they, as Americans, could do to help Afghan
women. "I think that we all should write
our senators and congress women," said
one. "There is a good group of women leaders
in Congress right now and we should write them,
contact them and see what they can do."
Others asked
about democracy. "What about
cases like Algeria where fundamentalists actually
win the elections? How do we prevent that?" a
woman asked.
Jahan responded
to the question. "I think
that you must understand that in the world
Muslims are not the way they are perceived.
The images from the media of Muslims are mostly
a minority--the Gulf Arabic Muslims. When they
really live in Indonesia, the largest Muslim
population in the world with 160 million people,
Pakistan with 140 million and Bangladesh, my
home, with 128 million. Even largely Hindu
India has 122 million Muslims."
This is the face of Islam, she argued, not
the most familiar image of Osama bin Laden
and other fundamentalists.
"Be aware that fundamentalist numbers
are small in every Muslim country, but they
organize local ministries, forcing the governments
to deal with them," she said. "Say
10 percent of Bangladesh is fundamentalist,
that's still six million people. Say 10 percent
of half the Muslims in the world are fundamentalist,
that's still 50 million people. There are a
billion Muslims in the world today," said
Jahan. "They are African, and Asian, and
even American faces-- did you know that the
majority of the 6 million American Muslims
are African American?-- as well as Arabic [faces]."
|
