Forever Victims

December 7, 2001
Anuradha Chenoy
Times of India

Media and eminent persons the world over has recounted the horrors inflicted by the Taliban on women in Afghanistan. The injustices leveled against Afghan women became symbolic justification for military intervention several times.

Now that the UN-led peace process is on, what is in store for these very women who fought this regime, sustained the voices and sanity of thousands of women in despair, risked their own lives to give some relief and political vision to others behind closed doors, barred windows and veils?

Although there has been the token inclusion of two women in the newly-constituted interim government, UN negotiator Lakhdar Brahimi called only the Northern Alliance and three other groups, including one that supports former King Zahir Shah for the talks in Bonn.

Women's groups as independent, responsible, political bodies were not included. Mr Brahimi only added the caveat that the groups called must include women. Can the very same groups which excluded women from public vision and citizenship rights call women as equal negotiators?

Women have no more than token representation in the peace talks as relatives/sympathisers of those who held the guns in war and in peace. Civil society is thus being excluded from the very start of the process itself.

The UN negotiator has said that it is the Afghan people themselves that must decide their future. Does 'Afghan people' mean excluding women's organisations?

The purpose of the Bonn meeting was to try and work out a truly representative and broad-based government that will take Afghanistan from civil war to civil co-existence. Women make up 60 per cent of Afghanistan's population.

The international community has acknowledged that they are the most oppressed women in the world. Despite the abuse heaped on them for years, unknown to the rest of the world, they organised themselves as vibrant underground groups like the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (RAWA), Negar support group, Afghan Women's Association and others.

RAWA has intervened politically in all major issues during the civil war since its inception in 1977. Its founder member Meena was assassinated in Quetta before the Taliban came to power.

Many other RAWA members have been killed first by the jehadis who made up the Northern Alliance and then by the Taliban, for upholding women's rights and speaking for secularism and democracy.

RAWA is not dear to any of the groups in Afghanistan or outside it that will now dictate the terms of peace. Its members have long been critics of the Northern Alliance, its opportunistic politics, the pillage and rape that it indulged in when it was in power between 1992 and 1996.

RAWA documented the abuses it meted out to women and its curbs on women's rights after the Soviet withdrawal and civil war. RAWA's appeals to the international community to take note of these atrocities have fallen on deaf or embarrassed ears.

During the oppressive Taliban rule, it was RAWA that brought succour to women lashed by the regime for showing their ankles, who held secret classes for Afghan girls and more.

It also distributed leaflets against fundamentalism, did not side with any faction on the basis of ethnicity or religious preference, calling for secularism and pluralism all along. RAWA criticised UN economic sanctions against Afghanistan as harmful for a starving population.

RAWA was attacked when it took out political demonstrations in Pakistan. It called for a halt to US bombing and labelled it an act of aggression, criticising the US for its earlier support to the Taliban. It saw the fight against the Taliban as the fight of Afghan people for a secular and equal society.

Women's organisations are the only ones that have spoken out against the Taliban since 1996. These were times when US presidents and vice-presidents were making deals with the Taliban over the oil and gas pipe routes from the Central Asian and Caspian Sea reserves through Herat to Kandahar and then to Multan.

These routes planned by US companies like Unocal, Halburton and Carlyle are associated with big names in US politics who negotiated with the Taliban until a few months before the September attacks.

A friendly regime in Afghanistan will re-start these lucrative deals. Women's groups that would like to engage in nation-building and keep out of the great games of that region would be inconvenient for such deals.

If the terms of peace are written by the very people who wrote the terms of war and have been indicted for war crimes and gender abuse, then for many in Afghanistan, war will continue under the cloak of an unjust peace.

In these circumstances, ethnic and religious rivalries will influence popular politics, political culture and processes. The demands made by women's organisations for a just peace, human rights and transformatory politics that will change unfair relations between genders and peoples
will be overlooked.

Peace like war is not gender neutral, and will have interests that will affect men and women differently. The history of wars and post-war settlements have shown repeatedly that when women and civil society actors are left out of the peace process, it is yet another step to leave them out of the political process.

Once someone else appropriates the right to speak for civil society or women, they take away the right of an entire people and rob them of their future.

Women's organisations world over, including from India, and other civil society groups have begged that Afghan women be included in this process.

Most feel that by including only representatives of armed factions, the UN and the international community risks endorsing violence as the only legitimate means for people to participate in shaping their countries' future.

Feminists have written reams to show the multiple roles that women play in war and peace. They analyse how women combine the social, the economic and psychological with the political to address issues of post-conflict rebuilding, which is not dissimilar to what UNDP and others call human security.

Yet in the first peace process of the 21st century, where are the women? Within the peace process or outside it, RAWA and other civil society groups like them will continue their work. Their place and role in history has already been established. Now it is up to the rest of the international
community to decide which side it is on.