West's feminists under fire from female general

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

West's feminists under fire from female general

The Times
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2001540008-2001551489,00.html
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 28 2001


FROM STEPHEN FARRELL IN KABUL

THE general leans forward in the gathering gloom, her eyes glinting with
anger, and delivers a surprise attack on an unexpected foreign enemy.
Not the Soviet Union for invading Afghanistan, nor the Americans still
bombing her country. Not the Pakistani-backed Taleban, nor yet their Arab
legions, whose Wahhabi fundamentalism fuelled much of the regime's misogyny.
Instead General Suhaila Siddiq, 60, sighs with exasperation at Western
feminists and their obsession with the burka, the all-enveloping veil whose
forcible use symbolised for many outsiders the Taleban's oppressive rule.
"The first priority should be given to education, primary school facilities,
the economy and reconstruction of the country but the West concentrates on
the burka and whether the policies of the Taleban are better or worse than
other regimes," she says dismissively. "Let these things be decided by
history."
She believes that the burka, which was worn long before the Taleban and
still is by most women around Kabul, is not the battlefield upon which to
fight their war.
General Siddiq is Afghanistan's only woman general, a surgeon, hospital
director and heroine to a generation of young women who remained in the
country. Born in Kandahar the daughter of a powerful regional governor, she
is that rare thing: an Afghan Pashtun who is not comfortable speaking her
own language and prefers Persian, historically the language of the Kabul
elite.
Now head of the Women and Children's Hospital in Kabul, she is scornful of
exiled Afghan women's rights campaigners and Western feminists who champion
their agenda. Her most withering comments are reserved for such vaunted
women's champions as Emma Bonino, the former EU Commissioner, who brought
the wrath of the Taleban down on Afghan women when a CNN crew accompanying
her filmed women patients in Kabul in 1997.
Of Hillary Clinton, another supposed advocate, she simply says: "She cannot
defend her own rights against her husband. How can she defend the rights of
my country?" At the 400-bed hospital in Kabul, where she now heads a
separate women's section, her colleagues speak reverentially of the woman
who took on the Taleban on their own ground.
"General Siddiq, General Siddiq," repeated nine times, was the universal
answer from women medical students asked to name the person they most
admired in the world.