Please spare a minute to read this mail.
Thank you.

One woman was beaten to DEATH by an angry mob of fundamentalists for
accidentally exposing her arm while she was driving. The government of
Afghanistan is waging a war upon women.

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. 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 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' 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 the slightest way.

David Cornwell has said that those in the West 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 same 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 US 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 Westerners may not
understand. If Iife can threaten military force in Kosovo in the name
of human rights for the sake of ethnic Albanians, then NATO and the
West 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 the people of the United Nations and that the current situation in
Afghanistan will not be tolerated. Women's Rights is not a small issue
anywhere and it is UNACCEPTABLE for women in 1999 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 anywhere
else.
1) Marianne Giroud, Zurich, Switzerland
2) Vera Koehli, Zurich, Switzerland
3) Hartmut Stiess, Zurich, Switzerland
4) Michael Sturm, Zurich, Switzerland
5) Adrian Jakob, Berne, Switzerland
6) Christian Jakob, Zurich, Switzerland
7) Barbara Rieker, Zurich, Switzerland
8) Chiara Lo Presti, Zurich, Switzerland
9) Kathrin Koch, Zurich, Switzerland
10) Fred R. Willitzkat, Kiel, Germany
11) Susanne Heckoetter, Giessen, Germany
12) Beate Schugk, Turku, Finland
13) Mike Cofferon, Dublin, Ireland
14) Paul Crossan, Dublin, Ireland
15) Martin Vahey Dublin,Ireland
16)Wendy Vahey,Dublin Ireland
17) Steven O'Conor, Dublin, Ireland
18) Deirdre O'Kane, Mullingar, Ireland
19) Sara O'Kane, Dublin, Ireland
20) Eileen O'Connor, Dublin, Ireland
21) Amy O'Kane, Mullingar, Ireland
22) Oscar O'Connor, Mullingar, Ireland
23) Hugo O'Connor, Mullingar, Ireland
24) Pauline Mossop, Dublin, Ireland
25) Kay Tyrrell, Dublin, Ireland
26) Peggy Tyrrell, Dublin, Ireland
27)Mary Rose Tobin, Dublin Ireland
28) Ita Flynn, London UK
29) Laura Empson, Henley-on-Thames, UK
30) Gillian Hughes, London UK
31) Anne-Marie Logan, London UK
32) Alex Lennane, London, UK
33) Angela Snuggs, London UK
34) Jo Pratt, London, UK
35) Lori Worley, London, UK
36) C Burton, London, UK
37) Clare Haynes, London, UK
38) Lucy Short, London, UK
39) Andrew Downs, London, England
40) Steve Peake, London, England
41) Dag Kristensen, Trondheim, Norge
42) Peter Svegrup, Malmö, Sweden
43) Thorsten Stroht, Gelsenkirchen, Germany
44) Andreas Kempf, Hamburg, Germany
45) Alan Frostick, Hamburg, Germany

46) Yves Ruffenach, Sainte Marie, France
47) Stéphanie Ruffenach, Sainte Marie, France

 

Please sign to support, and include your town 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: Mary Robinson, High Commissioner, UNHCHR,
webadmin.hchr@unorg.ch
and to:
Angela King, Special Advisor on Gender Issues and the Advancement of
Women, UN, daw@undp.org

Thank you.

 

Alan Frostick, Rutschbahn 35, 20146 Hamburg, Germany
Tel. and Fax +49(0)40 451129

 

EZ