World is silent while Afghan women suffer

Udara SOYSA

"History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamour of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

HUMAN RIGHTS: For the Western world, Afghanistan was once the crucial key to defeat the Big bad Soviets and later it was once again the crucial key to defeat the Islamic terrorists.

However, neither the Western world nor their own Muslim Arabic brethren had an honest policy in dealing with the people of Afghanistan. The result was the continued suffering of innocent Afghan civilians.

When the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan to find the terrorists and defeat the Taliban, many Afghans had hopes that the country would have a better future. Alas, the reality has been much different.

The United States and allies, after defeating the fascist Taliban movement, decided to support the fundamentalist Northern Allies and warlords as an alternative measure to prevent the Taliban resurgence in the country.

However, the present US-installed warlords have not been the answer. In fact the warlords allow with impunity the raping of girls as young as twelve years on a daily basis.

The world media remains silent while the Western powers too are conspicuously inactive in preventing ongoing atrocities against innocent civilians in Afghanistan.

US-based Human Rights Watch in a statement last year said, "Warlords ...have been implicated in widespread rape of women and children, murder, illegal detention, forced displacement, human trafficking and forced marriage"

While the Western powers and the world maintain an appalling silence, women's suffering is at times worse than it was under the oppression of the Taliban fundamentalist authority.

"On October 21, 2004, 12-year-old Rahima, daughter of Abdul Karim, and a student of class four in Fatima-tul-Zahra school in Kundoz Province in northern Afghanistan was abducted while she was on the way home from school.

She was living with her family in the Madarassa-e-Khyaban area of Kundoz. She was abducted by gunmen in a red Broadway car. (It was done) by Anzar Gul from Panjsher, Daoud, son of Rajab, from Orta Blaq, Allah Mohammed, brother of Commander Abdul Kundozi, and Agha Jan Panjsheri, who all live in Konduz.

After abduction she was drugged by placing a cloth laced with a drug to make her unconscious. When she became conscious, she realised she was in Dashte-Abadan, where she was continuously raped for several hours.

The next day they took her to Agha Jan's house in Kundoz, where they spent the night, and again Rahima was gang-raped by a number of gunmen. The next day she was taken to the home of General Khalil Andarabi. Upon arriving at General Khalil's house she was again subjected to more torture and raped repeatedly.

On the next day she was taken to Charekar, to the residence of Haider Painsheri, where again she was tortured..... The case of Rahima was widely covered by Afghan media and Persian language radio, but unfortunately no foreign media published her sad story."

"Years after the ending of the Taliban regime, the international community and the Afghan transitional administration, led by President Hamid Karzai, have proved unable to protect women. The risk of rape and sexual violence by members of armed factions and former combatants is still high.

Forced marriages, particularly of girl children, and violence against women in the family are widespread in many areas of the country," according to an Amnesty International report.

The reality today in Afghanistan is that women in the country live sub-human lives under the dictatorship of warlords while the United States and the world remain politically silent about warlord atrocities.

While the nation's mortal wounds, caused by the criminal and puppet bandits of Taliban and Gulbaddin are still fresh, the Karzai government is busy dealing with a fraction of them that are being portrayed as "moderates". This is an attempt to impose the most filthy hirelings of Gulbaddin and Taliban such as Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil, who tries to act as moderate through changing his outlook.

Mutawakil was the so-called Taliban foreign minister, who in answer to a question about why the sports stadium was being used as slaughtering ground, said: "this is a form of entertainment when the slaughtering order is implemented, if the foreign countries don't want this stadium to be used for this purpose then please come forward and build a new place for it."

Is Karzai willing to grant human rights and democracy to our nation by allaying (sic) himself with such impudent and beast-natured players?" questions Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) in a media statement. Neither the cries of agony of Afghan women nor RAWA statements are published in international media as the world remains silent over warlord atrocities.

Last year, the world media and international community boasted of the "Democratic held election in Afghanistan, however the New York based Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International claim that the election was merely a farce.

"On Monday, Afghanistan's first democratically elected parliament in more than three decades will convene in Kabul. But many of the new legislators, including up to 60 per cent of deputies in the lower house, are directly or indirectly connected to current and past human rights abuses.

In the upper house, where one-third of the seats are appointed by President Hamid Karzai, new appointees linked to serious human rights abuses include: Mohammad Qasim Fahim, a former defence minister and vice president in Karzai's government, (who) is allegedly linked to war crimes and serious human rights abuses committed in the 1990's.

Arsala Rahmani, a former highlevel (official) in the Taliban's religious affairs ministry, imposed severe restrictions of basic freedoms, particularly for women. Sher Mohammed Akhunzada, currently governor of Helmand province, is linked to recent abuses committed by forces under his control, including private prisons.

Sam Zarifi, Asia research director at Human Rights Watch, is in Kabul to monitor growing insecurity, particularly in southern Afghanistan. The international community will try to portray the opening of parliament as a triumph," Zia-Zarifi said.

"But many Afghans are worried about a parliament dominated by human rights abusers," according to the Human Rights Watch statement on the Afghanistan elections.

The prevailing strong international support for the warlords has made it impossible for any local action against the warlords' atrocities to be taken.

"How can we take action against warlord atrocities? The United States and world powers are with them. If I stand against warlords today, they will kill and rape my whole family and declare myself (sic) as a 'hardcore Taliban member' and kill me in public," said Azard Khan in an interview with the author in 2005.

Just as Martin Luther King, Jr., told clergymen who questioned his actions against racist evils in Birmingham, silence leads to ignorance which creates perfect conditions for evil to thrive in the world.

Today the world remains silent and complacent over continuous human rights atrocities in the name of containing Islamic terrorism.

The US-backed warlords who have guns, power and official posts continue to abuse human rights under the very nose of United States and allied troops deployed in Afghanistan. If the current silence prevails in Afghanistan, the day that the Afghanistan volcano explodes will not be in the distant future.