Human Rights Afghanistan wrote:

Cash not compassion is what women need
Minister must first win funds before she can secure rights

Suzanne Goldenberg in Kabul
Thursday January 17, 2002
The Guardian

Sima Samar is fed up. The minister of women's affairs has no office, budget or staff. She cannot afford her telephone bill and she is growing weary of western protestations of support for the oppressed women of Afghanistan.

"Everybody promises me they are with me, but I'd like to ask them 'how'?" she told the Guardian. "How can I even hope to change the situation without money. There is so much to do, and I don't even have enough money for a literacy course."

When the interim Afghan administration was installed, Ms Samar, 45, was so overcome by the accounts of women's suffering under the Taliban that she spent her first days on the job in tears.

Three weeks later, as she receives guests in the living room of her rented home dressed in an over-sized grey sweatshirt and with no veil over her close-cropped brown hair, she is merely angry: at cabinet colleagues who are suspicious of her mission, at the delays in getting her ministry off the ground, and at the international community for making a cause celebre of Afghan women and then failing to stump up the cash as quickly as she would like.

Ms Samar has the openness and direct manner of a long-time activist. A medical doctor, she oversaw women's health organisations near the Pakistani city of Quetta, where she has lived in exile since 1984, and ran medical training programmes inside Afghanistan.

But she is not alone in her impatience as the size of the challenge of rebuilding Afghanistan after a generation of devastation and war begins to sink in. The United Nations has increased its appeal for the "start-up" fund for the Afghan interim administration from $20m to $100m.

Britain has donated $2m to the fund, but the UN spokesman in Kabul, Ahmed Fawzi, said only $7m had been collected to date. Mr Fawzi said the interim government needed an immediate infusion of an extra $70m just for its payroll of 230,000 civil servants and policemen, who have not received their wages for six months.

Ms Samar's task is daunting. Five years of Taliban rule left women encased in the all-concealing shroud of the burqa and trapped in their homes, denied education or the right to work. A society where women accounted for 60% of civil servants - and more than half of university students - shuddered to a halt.

It will be hard to coax women back out, Ms Samar says, while there is no real security on the streets of Kabul and roads of Afghanistan.

On a practical level, she is starting from scratch. As Afghanistan's first women's affairs minister, she inherited no building or staff. Although persistent lobbying won her space in the social welfare ministry last week, the bureaucrats have refused to vacate, so Ms Samar is operating from the living room of a rented home. She says she can barely afford the rent of $800 a month.

"I keep telling people in the US and Canada I have much bigger problems than the other ministers. All the other ministers at least have a broken building. I have nothing," she says. She would like to seek donor funds abroad, but she is nervous about using a donated satellite phone because of the high charges.

"It's so expensive," she says. "We would like to contact people and ask for money, but who is going to pay the bill."

Despite her frustrations, Ms Samar says she has mapped out a clear plan of action for the next five months of the interim administration.

She wants to use her new powers to lobby for legislation - including a new constitution - that will enshrine equality for women. She envisages a legal aid system for women undergoing divorce or property battles and wants to create a network of protection centres.

Ms Samar estimates she needs to recruit a staff of 750 just to get started. "Just because the Taliban are gone, it does not mean the situation is solved. We still have to bring a lot of changes in society," she says.

"I keep telling people the situation of women is not the product of the Taliban. It's a product of 23 years of war.

"The Taliban were extremists. They achieved the maximum peak of human rights violations after all those years of war, but the violations were already on the ground."