---Tea Jadze <t.@ida.in> wrote:
>The Taliban's War on Women:
>
>Please sign at the bottom to support, and include your city and
>country.
>
>Then copy and e-mail to as many people as possible. If you receive
>this list with more than 50 names on it, please e-mail a copy of
>it to
>
>
> snde@brad.com
>
>Even if you decide not to sign, please be considerate and do
>not kill the petition. Thank you.
>
> Melissa Buckheit
> Brandeis University
>
>TEXT:
>
>The government of Afghanistan is waging a war upon women. The
>situation is so bad that one person in an editorial of The Times
>compared the treatment of women there to the treatment of Jews in
>pre-Holocaust Poland. Since the Taliban took power in 1996, women
>have been forced to wear burqas and have been beaten and stoned
>in public for not having the proper attire, even if this means
>simply not having the mesh covering in front of their eyes.
>One woman was beaten to DEATH by an angry mob of fundamentalists
>for accidentally exposing her arm while she was driving.
>Another was stoned to death for trying to leave the
>country with a man that was not a relative.
>
>Women are not allowed to work or even go out in public without
>a male relative; professional women such as
professors,translators,
>doctors, lawyers, artists and writers have been forced to leave
>their jobs and stay at home, so that depression is becoming so
>widespread that it has reached emergency levels.
>
>There is no way in such an extremist society to know the suicide
>rate with certainty, but relief workers are estimating that the
>suicide rate among women, who cannot find proper medication and
>treatment for severe depression and would rather take their
>lives than live in such conditions, has increased significantly.
>Homes where a woman is present must have their windows painted
>so that she cannot be seen by outsiders. They must wear silent
>shoes so that they are not heard.
>
>Women live in fear of their lives for the slightest
>misbehavior. Because they cannot work, those without male
>relatives or husbands are either starving to death or begging
>on the street, even if they hold Ph.D.'s. There are almost no
>medical facilities available for women, and relief
>workers, in protest and under threats from fundamentalists,
>have mostly left the country, taking medicine facilities and
>personnel needed to treat the skyrocketing level of depression
>among women.
>
>At one of the rare hospitals for women, a reporter found
>still, nearly lifeless bodies lying motionless on top of beds,
>wrapped in their burqas, unwilling to speak, eat, or do anything
>but slowly waste away. Others have gone mad and were seen crouched
>in corners, perpetually rocking or crying, most of them in fear.
>One doctor is considering, when what little medication that is
>left finally runs out,leaving these women in front of
>the president's residence as a form of protest.
>
>At this point the term 'human rights violations' has become an
>understatement. Husbands have the power of life and death
>over their women relatives, especially their wives, but an angry
>mob has just as much right to stone or beat a woman, often to
>death, for exposing an inch of flesh or "offending" them in any
>way.
>
>David Cornwell has told me that we in countries like the
>United States should not judge the Afghan people for such
>treatment because it is a 'cultural thing'. This is not true.
>Women enjoyed relative freedom to work, dress generally as they
>wanted, and drive and appear in public alone as recently as 1996.
>The rapidity of this transition is one of the main reason for the
>skyrocketing depression and suicide rates.
>>> >
>Women who were once educators or doctors and used to basic
>freedom are now severely restricted and treated as subhuman in
>the name of right-wing fundamentalist Islam.
>
>Besides, if we could excuse everything on cultural grounds,
>then we should not be appalled that the Carthaginians sacrificed
>their infant children, that little girls' genitals are mutilated,
>that blacks in the US were lynched, prohibited from voting, and
>forced to submit to unjust Jim Crow laws until as recently as the
>1960s.
>
>Everyone has a right to a tolerable human existence, even if
>they are women in a country in a part of the world that Americans
>do not understand or care to, now that it is no longer
strategically
>important to them.
>
>If we, in a UN forum, can threaten military force in Kosovo in
>the name of human rights for the sake of ethnic Albanians, we
>can certainly express peaceful outrage at the oppression, murder
>and injustice committed against women by the Taliban.
>
>STATEMENT:
>
>In signing this, we agree that the current treatment of women in
>Afghanistan is completely UNACCEPTABLE and deserves support and
>action by citizens of the world and countries represented in the
>United Nations. The current situation will not be tolerated.
>
>Women's Rights is not an irrelevant issue and it is UNACCEPTABLE
for
>women at the turn of the 20th century to be treated as sub-human or
>pieces of property. Equality and human decency is a RIGHT not a
>freedom, wherever one lives in the world.
>