Afghan women still in chains under Karzai

The Scottish Sunday Herald, one of two great newspapers from a country of less than 7 million people, reports that Kabul’s central jail holds female prisoners whose only ‘crime’ is their refusal to be second-class citizens.

The paper cites the case of Sharifa Daadekhoda.

[Her]two-year-old daughter, Krishma, has never seen the outside world. She was born in prison and she’ll be at least three when she is released. Her mother’s crime? Running away from home.
Sharifa was 12 years old when she was forced to marry a 30-year-old man. He immediately began prostituting her, but Sharifa was too ashamed to tell her family and he would beat her if she complained.

After three years she gained enough confidence to run away but was caught 15 minutes from her parent’s house by the Taliban. As a woman travelling on her own, unaccompanied by a male family member, she was committing a crime.

When the Taliban realised she was also fleeing her husband she was instantly imprisoned. She was released after six months but forced to return to her husband.

A year later she fled and was caught again, receiving a longer sentence – only this time her captors had been installed by the American-led coalition. In President Hamid Karzai’s Afghanistan, women are still imprisoned for running away from home.

Here is the truth, three years after the fact, about Bush's announcement that “The mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school – today women are free.”

Most women still wear the all-encompassing burqa, through fear of attack and social pressure.

A third of women in Kabul do not leave the house, forbidden from doing so by the male members of the family.

Since the fall of the Taliban, only 2-3% of women have returned to work.

After years of being banned from education, 90% of Afghan women are illiterate.

60% of Afghan girls are forced into marriage before they reach their 16th birthday and few husbands will allow their wives to go to school.

Only 35% of girls attend school - which is still the highest percentage in the country's history.

Even Dr Massouda Jalal, the minister for women’s affairs, cries:

“The West believes in equal rights, but why don’t they help us bring it here?”