Afghan Women Spell Out Demands For Government Role

by Brian Kenety

Those appointments are just the beginning, said Sima Wali, one of three women delegates to the UN-sponsored talks outside Bonn last week, and the primary organizer of the parallel Afghan Women's Summit that convened at the European Parliament in Brussels.

"The ministries that were given to women were not considered very, very vital," by the overwhelmingly male delegations, the prominent U.S.-based Afghan women's rights activist told IPS.

Sima Samar, a doctor who has run health centers for Afghan refugees in neighboring Pakistan, was elected Minister for Women's Affairs and will also serve as one of the five vice-chairs in the new transitional government led by Hamid Karazi.

Another woman doctor, independent candidate Suhalia Seddiqi, a former army general still based in the Afghan capital Kabul, is to become Minister for Public Health.

UN special representative for Afghanistan Lakhdar Brahimi has said the two appointments would not represent the full range of women the UN eventually hoped to have in the government.

Wali aims to keep the international community to its word.

"We have pushed to make certain that once the list is finalized, we will have women as deputies also in the 'important' ministries that were not given to women," said the sole woman in former King Zaher Shah's delegation at the UN talks.

The proclamation demands "central inclusion of women in the Loya Jirga" -- the traditional grand assembly, which is to be opened by former King Zaher Shah -- and the "inclusion of Afghan women lawyers in the development of a new Constitution, which would include the principles of non-discrimination."

Under the Taliban, women in Afghanistan were denied education, could not work unless the position was health-related, were not permitted to leave their homes unless accompanied by a male relative, and ordered to wear the burqa, a traditional veil that covered their entire bodies.

"The next Constitution must include guarantees for women's rights -- there must be justice and equality for all people," said Qadria Yazdan Parast, a former professor at the University of Balkh in northern Afghanistan, who fled the country in the late 1990s and has refugee status in the Netherlands.

Dressed in a traditional headscarf and speaking through an interpreter, she said the most important thing was for the new Constitution to be based on UN principles "but also on Islam and traditional Afghan values."

But above all, said Parast, who gave a report on the work of the Afghan Women's Summit to a hearing in the European Parliament, "the world must never again forget the women of Afghanistan."

The Brussels Proclamation demands that Afghan women secure the right to vote and are granted equal access to healthcare, education and employment. It further calls for the implementation of an "emergency plan" to reopen schools by March 2002 for both boys and girls and a new curriculum that respects women's rights.

In the upcoming weeks, a delegation of Afghan women from the summit is expected to meet Secretary of State Colin Powell and members of the UN Security Council.

With such high-profile meetings in the works, Wali told IPS she was certain that the role of women in Afghanistan "will not be diminished, because there is a lot of attention on the issue and everybody is watching," but stressed that in order to keep the Afghan men in line, the international community needed to exert further financial pressure.

"The issue of money is going to be very important to the men who run the (new) government. It is something they cannot ignore; that's where the power really is. It is no secret the promise of money from international donor's helped push through measures like establishing the Ministry of Women's Affairs," she said.

Neither is the power of a dollar lost on MEP Glenys Kinnock, who sits on the European Parliament's development committee. She told a news conference yesterday that when the European Union budget comes up for review this week, she and other women would not only push for additional funding for Afghanistan, but make sure there was "strict conditionality on funding" and that there be funding for the "clear and practical" goals for health, education and other initiatives spelt out in the Brussels Proclamation.

Along the same lines, in a "Declaration of Solidarity" issued Dec. 6, Women's rights activists from Europe, the United States, the Middle East and Central Asia pledged to undertake an advocacy campaign to ensure that funds allocated for the reconstruction of Afghanistan are conditional on women's participation in decision-making over the granting of funds.

Anna Diamantopoulou, the European Commissioner responsible for employment and social affairs, said earlier this week that in the coming months the European Commission intends to launch a series of initiatives to integrate the gender dimension across the "full spectrum" of external politics.

"In the meantime, I will do whatever is in my power to support women in Afghanistan to achieve their rightful place in society," she said.

From the EU side, an initial step was taken on Dec. 4 by the EU Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Affairs, Poul Nielson, who formally re-launched a "Food for Work" project funded by ECHO (the Humanitarian Aid Office of the EU), implemented by MEDAIR, one of ECHO's non-governmental partners in Afghanistan.

"This food for work project will help hundreds of women with no other source of income to feed themselves and their families," said Nielson on a visit to the Kabul home of a participant in the home-based quilt production.