Thank you for your invitation to appear before the committee. The issue of women's rights will shed light on the issue of security as regards women's rights in Afghanistan.
The rights of women in Afghanistan are a way of measuring the progress made with respect to the promises made to Afghans when the international community was developing its foreign policies in 2001 regarding Afghanistan and when the war against terrorism was getting underway. Women's rights are also a way of measuring progress in the promises made regarding equality, the militarization of peace and efforts to combat poverty in this era of the Millennium development goals. Women's rights in Afghanistan also lead us to ask questions about the type of security we choose to favour, about the type women first and the Afghan population generally are calling for, and the type of security required by a state of law, an effort to rebuild and develop the country.
All the reports that have come out in the past six months are clear: if there was a glimmer of hope in 2002 and 2003, if basic principles were enshrined both in the Afghan Constitution and in various programs established by the Afghan government, the international community and the NGOs, the deterioration of the tenuous relative security that had existed until then meant that violence against women assumed endemic proportions. Women's rights are, and for the time being, will remain something that is merely talked about.
What are we talking about here? The vast majority of Afghans do not enjoy such basic rights as access to water, food and housing. The shortage of electricity in cities such as Kabul remains a major problem. Last year, the per capita income of households was $13. There are no statistics, but everyone will tell you that unemployment is one of the significant factors feeding conflicts, war lord militias, drug trafficking and other types of criminal activities. The lack of infrastructure, the lack of jobs, a dysfunctional security system, the military concentration of the international community, whose first objective is to fight terrorism, the lack of a policy regarding support for the Taliban by Pakistan, the lack of coordination by the international community in the area of development and reconstruction—all of this combines to mean that women's rights are and remain the least important priority. And yet, women and children account for 71% of the population and the average age is 18.
In the 20th century, Afghani women have seen many attempts at modernization that have been structured around advances for formal rights for women. Each time, the reforms are accompanied by an ultra-conservative backlash. Women have been the bartering chip in the constant battle in the complex dispute over power throughout the 27 years of war in Afghanistan.
Today women have also been the subject of harsh turf battles, as certain forces in Afghanistan see women's rights as part of the westernization that the massive presence of the international community is bringing to the country. The continued rise of violence against women in the past five years has to do with the extreme level of stress the population is under and the profound deception of people who are confronted with a warped and distorted peace process that benefits the prolonged war on terrorism.
As they saw UNAMA's compound being built and the ISAF coming to protect the capital, Afghanis recognized that the international forces were making a valuable contribution to the rebuilding of a central state and were protecting the people from a renewed civil war. Afghanis were expecting a protective social mechanism to be put in place, as well as measures to start eradicating poverty, but security wasn't really happening in the sense in which Afghanis needed it. Women hoped for general law enforcement, and most Afghanis remain particularly concerned by the illegal occupation of land and houses by gunmen and their supporters. In rural areas, women hope to see a stop to constant threats from local armed factional groups, drug networks, and other smuggling groups.
In the spring of 2005, the report of the UN independent expert on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Mr. Cherif Bassiouni, documented illegal arrests and torture and the death of Afghanis held by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. At the same time, counterterrorist operations claimed more and more civilian victims. In May of 2005, Washington announced it would institutionalize its military presence.
A year before, the Human Rights Research and Advocacy Consortium, a consortium of six Afghani NGOs and six international NGOs whose role is to survey the Afghan population twice a year on issues of civil and political rights, security, and economy, produced its second survey. It indicated that security was a pressing issue. Rights and Democracy is a member of this consortium. Security, in the minds of people, meant taking the guns away from militias and warlords, effective disarmament, and an increase in the national and international security prisons to keep the peace and the threatened rule of law.
The facts about security from a gender perspective are these: marital rape, sexual assault, child marriages, enforced marriages, and other forms of domestic violence are present in the lives of Afghani families. The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission estimates that between 60% and 80% of all marriages in Afghanistan are forced marriages, and approximately 57% of girls are married before the age of 16. As the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women has noted, no relevant laws are in force and the perpetrators are never punished. She also pointed out that economic reasons play an important role in such marriages. Indeed, the practice of bride money causes girls to be seen as valuable assets that are exchangeable for money and goods.
At its 50th session in March 2006, the UN Commission on the Status of Women noted, and I quote:
...kidnapping, forced seclusion, so-called honour killings, and the exchange of girls and women for debt or feud...continued to be a major part of women’s and girls’ lives in Afghanistan and remained one of the pervasive barriers to women’s empowerment and gender equality. The lack of adequate support and responses to women victims of violence has been linked to the high rate of incidents of self-immolation...during 2005. Women are often discouraged or forbidden from pursuing activities outside the home.... Cases of forced prostitution and trafficking among foreign women and Afghan women and children were also reported....
Qais Bawari, acting head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission for the southern region, based in Kandahar, said that they received 69 cases of self-immolation and murders from Helmand and Kandahar provinces in 2006 alone.
As reported by IRIN, the UN news service, Qais Bawari added that several “were related to marriages in exchange for drugs”. IRIN also mentioned that the “head of the women's affairs department in Helmand, Fawzai Ulomi, said more than 20 women and girls had committed suicide over the past 10 months—most of them had been handed over to dealers instead of drugs, or to settle family disputes”.
The Taliban and other militias continue to use death threats and physical attacks to intimidate women, particularly those working within the NGO community. Finally, as mentioned in Human Rights Watch World Report 2007, insurgents have carried out hundreds of attacks against teachers, students, and schools. More than 200,000 students attending school in 2005 have been deprived of an education in 2006. If a large number of girls went to school immediately after the fall of the Taliban, Human Rights Watch estimates that only 35% of school-age girls were in school in 2006. Girls' schools have been directly targeted.
The intensive organization of Afghanistan around the need for security, not only for itself but also for regional and international purposes, has changed our understanding of humanitarian assistance and of the promotion of human rights. The presence of both the International Security Assistance Force and NATO, the role of private security companies, the varied role of the U.S. Army and private security agents hired by the U.S. Army, the presence of the coalition forces, the continued control of territories by warlords working along ethnic lines, the continued tensions at the borders, the soldiers of the drug trafficking and sex trafficking trades, demands of both the donor agencies and NGOs and the capacity to frame their work, taking into account the militarization of a society that has already known over 25 years of war--this does change gender relations.
From a human rights perspective, working in Afghanistan for women's rights is a daunting task. The militarization of peace, hence the normalization of violence, combined with the effects of years of conflict, poverty, and natural disasters, the weak and contested central authority, and a population that is overwhelmingly rural and with little connection to institutions of state control renders the struggle for acceptance of democracy and human rights a multi-pronged task. It requires that we better understand the effects on women of the brutalization through militarization of their society, their community, and their families.
Women are controlled through tribal relations. As stated by Deniz Kandiyoti, “women have always been, and remain, wards of their families and communities”. The state is not central to the fabric of Afghan society, and it is within this constant tension between state and tribal law that we work on the normative framework of women's human rights in Afghanistan. “The domestic domain and the control of women are among the most jealously guarded areas in the reproduction of sub-national identities.” This is the context within which the government, development aid agencies, and NGOs have to work together in giving a sense of citizenry to Afghan women.
Finally, the combined conservative forces and the export of fundamentalist ideologies, practices still in use from the days of the edicts of the Taliban regime, and tribal and customary practices must be factored in when analyzing the ways and means to promote and defend women's human rights. Women in general, as well as women's groups, are keenly aware of the hostile and unsupportive environment within which their rights evolve.
One more stumbling block we cannot ignore is the public administration in the country. As Barnett Rubin and other Afghanistan experts have pointed out, the origin of the modern state is a recent phenomenon that lies in the confederation of the Pashtun tribes, which evolved into a dynastic state. While the state requires unity, the tribes need the state to remain at the periphery. It is in this conflicting relationship that women's rights lie. The enforcement of the shariah in the 1900s represented the modernist view, if we are to compare it with customary and tribal practices. Today, the Islamic mujahedeen victories, the years of war hero worshiping, the legacy of the Taliban regime, and the need to protect one's own culture from a western presence on Afghan soil has hardened the interpretation of shariah law.
Other indications of the difficulties in promoting women's rights within the state's apparatus were noted in the recent discussion Rights and Democracy had with Afghan women parliamentarians on the issue of mahram, the military male guardians. This was raised after some female parliamentarians were invited to participate in meetings abroad. Many male parliamentarians objected to the travel of these women without accompaniment of a mahram. The elected Parliament will not be an immediate ally to women's human rights struggle.
As in many other countries, tangible gains have been achieved in the area of legal rights. The ratification of CEDAW, without reservation—it's the only Muslim country in the world to ever have done so—and the guarantee of equality entrenched in the new constitution attest to this. Yet many will say that without resolving the role of Islamic and tribal laws and the requirements of international treaties without consensus-building, women's rights will continue to be a powerful bargaining chip in factional politics.
A much longer timeline is needed to be able to analyze whether those international human rights binding instruments have implementation mechanisms. Furthermore, unless these achievements are measured, taking into consideration Islamic law and tribal laws, equality and non-discrimination are principles that remain on paper only.
In her mission report of July 2005, Yakin Ertürk, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, concludes:
Efforts to improve the status of women are closely linked to the challenge of multiple transitions confronting Afghan society today. Broadly speaking, these transitions include the transition from conflict to peace from a fragmented war economy to a sustainable growth economy, from factional struggles to national reconciliation, and from rule of power to rule of law. The realization of these tasks will take time. Asserting government control over and ensuring security in all parts of the country are certainly necessary preconditions to the establishment of the rule of law in the entire territory and to allowing all citizens to benefit from reconstruction and development. In the meantime, women and girls must be protected from violence as a matter of urgency.
These multiple transitions truly require genuine peace-building activities accompanied by security strategies geared toward state-building.
Six years down the road, women need much, much more time to be able to be counted in peace processes and the reconstruction and building of their society. Right now, they are faced with broken promises and renewed violence. Women need time to organize and build a constituency and support. They need time to heal and time to learn, time to strategize and time to trust, time to build local capacity and engage in advocacy campaigns to end the culture of impunity. Canadians have strongly indicated their support for women in Afghanistan. This should translate not into more money or military, but into more time and less pressure.
Thank you.