AUT: Petition to Support Women's Rights in Afghanistan

[Patrick Gun_Cuninghame <P.Gun-Cuninghame@xxxxxxxxx>]

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date:          Sat, 16 Jan 1999 10:09:01 +0000 (GMT)
From:          rzdurand@xxxxxxxxxx (Rebecca)
To:            P.Gun-Cuninghame@xxxxxxxxx

Subject: Petition to Support Women's Rights in Afghanistan


This is a petition to support immediate interest and action about the
situation in
Afghanistan. Women's Rights are being violated and just because it is not a
issue
at "home" in the United States does not mean that it should not be
supported. This
petition, when large enough, will be presented to the Women's Majority on
Brandeis/and/or in the Boston Area, in addition to perhaps Amnesty
International,
and to other organizations and the President, as a representation of people
and
Brandeis students, faculty, administration who want immediate attention to
this
issue. The following information was prepared by Kathleen Barbosa, Connecticut
College, who is Representative and Officer of the Feminist Political
Majority on
her campus.

 **** Please Sign at the bottom to support and include your town. Open to non-
brandeis people of course!!. If you receive this list with more than 50
names on
it, please email a copy of it to sarabande@xxxxxxxxxxxx, even if you decide
not to
sign, please be considerate and do not kill the petition. Thank you. It is
best to
copy rather than forward the petition.


 Melissa Buckheit



 The situation is getting 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 had to wear burqua
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 from their
jobs and stuffed into their homes, so that depression is becoming so
widespread
that it has reached emergency levels. There is no way in such an extreme
Islamic
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 can never be seen by outsiders. They must
wear
silent shoes so that they are never 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, have mostly left the country, taking medicine and
psychologists and other things necessary to treat the sky-rocketing 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
burqua, unwilling to speak, eat or do anything, but are slowly wasting 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 peaceful protest. It is at the point
where the
term 'human rights violations' have 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 the the slightest way. David
Cornwell has told me that we in the United States should not judge the Afghan
people for such treatment because it is a 'cultural thing', but this is not
even
true. Women enjoyed relative freedom, to work, dress generally as they
wanted, and
drive and appear in public alone until only 1996 -- the rapidity of this
transition is the main reason for the depression and suicide; women who
were once
educators or doctors or simply used to basic human freedoms are now severely
restricted and treated as sub-human in the name of right-wing fundamentalist
Islam. It is not their tradition or 'culture', but is alien to them, and it is
extreme even for those cultures where fundamentalism is the rule. 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 are
circumcised in parts of Africa, that blacks in the deep south in the 1930's
were
lynched, prohibited from voting and forced to submit to unjust Jim Crow laws.
Everyone has a right to a tolerable human existence, even if they are women
in a
Muslim country in a part of the world that Americans do not understand. If
we can
threaten military force in Kosovo in the name of human rights for the sake of
ethnic Albanians, Americans can certainly express peaceful outrage at the
oppression, murder and injustice committed against women by the Taliban.

 Kathleen Barbosa



 STATEMENT:

 ****** In signing this, we agree that the current treatment of women in
Afghanistan is completely UNACCEPTABLE and deserves support and action by the
people of the United States and the U.S. Government and that the current
situation
overseas will not be tolerated. Women's Rights is not a small issue
anywhere and
it is UNACCEPTABLE for women in 1998 to be treated as sub-human and so much as
property. Equality and human decency is a RIGHT not a freedom, whether one
lives
in Afghanistan or the United States.*****



 1) Kathleen Barbosa, New London, CT
 2) Melissa J. Buckheit Waltham, MA
 3) Olga Broumas, Brewster, MA
 4) Heather Feldman, Waltham, MA
 5) Robert L. Hawkins, Waltham, MA
 6) Ann Vollmann Bible, Cambridge, MA
 7) Joy Garnett, New York, NY
 8) Cynthia Pannucci, New York, NY
 9) Ken Knowlton, Merrimack NH
 10) Eric Somers, Poughkeepsie, NY
 11) Faith Watson, Philadelphia, PA
 12) Sherry Branch, Orlando, Fl.
 13) Susie Ellis, Strasburg, VA
 14) Christine Jurzykowski, TX
 15.) John Steiner
 16) Wendy Volkmann
 17) Leonie Walker, Portola Valley, CA
 18) Kate O'Hanlan, Portola Valley, CA
 19) Rayona Sharpnack, Redwood City, CA
 20) Rita Hovakimian, San Francisco, CA
 21) Karen Andes, San Rafael, CA
 22) Carolena Nericcio, San Francisco, CA
 23) Kajira Djoumahna, Santa Rosa, CA
 24) Jo Falcon, San Francisco, CA
 25) Diane Fenster, Pacifica CA
 26) Carol Adelman, Seattle, WA
 27) Rebecca Durand, London, England




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