Violence Against Women - What we in the US take for granted

[Kobi]

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: January 9, 2012

CAIRO — At first Samira Ibrahim was afraid to tell her father that Egyptian soldiers had detained her in Tahrir Square in Cairo, stripped off her clothes, and watched as she was forcibly subjected to a “virginity test.”

But when her father, a religious conservative, saw electric prod marks on her body, they revived memories of his own detention and torture under President Hosni Mubarak’s government. “History is repeating itself,” he told her, and together they vowed to file a court case against the military rulers, to claim “my rights,” as Ms. Ibrahim later recalled.

That case has proved successful so far. For the first time last month, an administrative court challenged the authority of the military council and banned such “tests.” Ms. Ibrahim will ask a military court on Sunday to hold the officers accountable.

But nearly a year after Mr. Mubarak’s ouster, Ms. Ibrahim’s story in many ways illustrates the paradoxical position of women in the new Egypt. Emboldened by the revolution to claim a new voice in public life, many are finding that they are still dependent on the protection of men, and that their greatest power is not as direct actors but as symbols of the military government’s repression. It is not a place where Egyptian feminists had hoped women would be, back in the heady days of the revolution, when they played an active role, side by side with men, to bring down a dictator.

“Changing the patriarchal culture is not so easy,” said Mozn Hassan, 32, executive director of the seven-year-old group Nazra for Feminist Studies.

Female demonstrators have suffered sexual assaults at the hands of Egyptian soldiers protected by military courts. Human rights groups say they have documented the cases of at least 100 women who were sexually assaulted by soldiers or the security police during the time of military rule — including Ms. Ibrahim’s experience in March and the anonymous woman recorded on video last month as she was beaten and stripped, exposing a blue bra, by soldiers clearing Tahrir Square after fresh protests. The vast majority of cases have come during the three-month crackdown on demonstrations that has taken more than 80 lives since the beginning of October.

Even when women have pushed back, as they did late last month in a historic march by thousands through downtown Cairo — many carrying pictures of the “blue bra girl” — they have done so only with the protection of men. Men encircled the marchers and at times those male guardians seemed to direct the crowd or lead its chants; many chants led by women called for more “gallantry” from Egyptian men.

Famous mainly as silent victims, women like the “blue bra girl” risk becoming mascots of the male-dominated uprising, said Ms. Hassan, one of several Egyptian feminists who said they were thrilled by the size of the march — but winced at its dependence on men.

“If you are calling for men to protect you, that is bad, because then they define you and they stick to the traditional roles,” Ms. Hassan said. (Even among feminist groups, there were few all-women organizations in Egypt, and of the 13 founders of Ms. Hassan’s organization, 6 were men.)

At the same time, the revolution has opened the door for the ascendance of conservative Islamist parties, including religious extremists who want to roll back some of the rights women do have. The mainstream Muslim Brotherhood is poised to win nearly half of the seats in Parliament, when voting is completed this week, while the more extreme Salafis are on track to win more than 20 percent.

While Brotherhood leaders talk of encouraging traditional roles but respecting women’s career choices, many Salafis oppose allowing women to play leadership roles and favor regulating issues like women’s dress to impose Islamic standards of modesty. “We have major concerns because what they are proposing is very oppressive,” said Ghada Shabandar, a veteran human rights activist.

Even now, however, women have almost no leadership roles in the various activists groups that formed out of the original protests that ousted Mr. Mubarak and so far women have fewer than 10 of the roughly 500 seats in Parliament. The electoral debates have featured scant mention of women’s issues — from the pervasiveness of genital cutting to legally sanctioned employment discrimination, despite official statistics showing that a third of Egyptian households depend on female earners.

“We have no feminist movement now,” said Hala Mustafa, editor of Democracy, a state-run journal.

Feminists say that for decades Egyptian security forces have kidnapped or sexually abused women as a way to pressure the men in their families. In a celebrated case from 2005, a journalist, Nawal Ali, sought to press charges against the government-aligned thugs who had beaten and stripped her in an attack. It is not all bleak, though. Some argue that the revolution is helping to revitalize the dormant women’s movement, if only by opening up politics so Ms. Ibrahim could have her day in court or thousands could march for the woman stripped to her bra.

“That is the difference the Egyptian revolution has made,” Ms. Shabandar said. “The wall of fear is gone, and now when we march for the ‘blue bra girl,’ we march for Nawal Ali.”

A few younger feminists, though, say that philosophy keeps women in the back seat. “That is the same thing women were told after the revolution,” said Masa Amir, 24, recalling when the military council picked an all-male panel of jurists to draft a temporary constitution. But the result was a document implying that the president could only be a man — perhaps because no one at the table raised the issue.

But the stigma attached to victims of sexual abuse continues to force many to remain silent.

Six other women were subjected to “virginity tests” by the soldiers that night in March when Ms. Ibrahim was assaulted. The humiliation was so great, Ms. Ibrahim said, that she initially hoped to die. “I kept telling myself, ‘People get heart attacks, why don’t I get a heart attack and just die like them?’ ”

Her mother’s advice was to keep silent, if she ever hoped to marry, or even lead a dignified life in their village in rural Upper Egypt, Ms. Ibrahim said in an interview.

When she did speak out, Egyptian new media shunned her, she said, and only the international news media would cover her story. She received telephone calls at all hours threatening rape or death. But with the support of her father — an Islamist activist who was detained and tortured two decades ago — she persevered, and next week will go back to military court in an attempt to hold the perpetrators accountable as well.

When she saw the video of the “blue bra girl” being beaten, it redoubled her resolve. “I felt I had to avenge her,” she said.



http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/wo...rchy.html?_r=1

[Kobi]

JERUSALEM — In the three months since the Israeli Health Ministry awarded a prize to a pediatrics professor for her book on hereditary diseases common to Jews, her experience at the awards ceremony has become a rallying cry.

The professor, Channa Maayan, knew that the acting health minister, who is ultra-Orthodox, and other religious people would be in attendance. So she wore a long-sleeve top and a long skirt. But that was hardly enough.

Not only did Dr. Maayan and her husband have to sit separately, as men and women were segregated at the event, but she was instructed that a male colleague would have to accept the award for her because women were not permitted on stage.

Though shocked that this was happening at a government ceremony, Dr. Maayan bit her tongue. But others have not, and her story is entering the pantheon of secular anger building as a battle rages in Israel for control of the public space between the strictly religious and everyone else.

At a time when there is no progress on the Palestinian dispute, Israelis are turning inward and discovering that an issue they had neglected — the place of the ultra-Orthodox Jews — has erupted into a crisis.

And it is centered on women.

“Just as secular nationalism and socialism posed challenges to the religious establishment a century ago, today the issue is feminism,” said Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University. “This is an immense ideological and moral challenge that touches at the core of life, and just as it is affecting the Islamic world, it is the main issue that the rabbis are losing sleep over.”

The list of controversies grows weekly: Organizers of a conference last week on women’s health and Jewish law barred women from speaking from the podium, leading at least eight speakers to cancel; ultra-Orthodox men spit on an 8-year-old girl whom they deemed immodestly dressed; the chief rabbi of the air force resigned his post because the army declined to excuse ultra-Orthodox soldiers from attending events where female singers perform; protesters depicted the Jerusalem police commander as Hitler on posters because he instructed public bus lines with mixed-sex seating to drive through ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods; vandals blacked out women’s faces on Jerusalem billboards.

Public discourse in Israel is suddenly dominated by a new, high-toned Hebrew phrase, “hadarat nashim,” or the exclusion of women. The term is everywhere in recent weeks, rather like the way the phrase “male chauvinism” emerged decades ago in the United States.

All of this seems anomalous to most people in a country where five young women just graduated from the air force’s prestigious pilots course and a woman presides over the Supreme Court.

But each side in this dispute is waging a vigorous public campaign.

The New Israel Fund, which advocates for equality and democracy, organized singalongs and concerts featuring women in Jerusalem and put up posters of women’s faces under the slogan, “Women should be seen and heard.” The Israel Medical Association asserted last week that its members should boycott events that exclude women from speaking on stages.

Religious authorities said liberal groups were waging a war of hatred against a pious sector that wanted only to be left in peace.

That sector, the black-clad ultra-Orthodox, is known in Israel as Haredim, meaning those who tremble before God. It comprises many groups with distinct approaches to liturgy as well as to coat length, hat style, beard and side locks and different hair coverings for women. Among them are the Hasidim of European origin as well as those from Middle Eastern countries who are represented by the political party Shas.

As a group, the ultra-Orthodox are, at best, ambivalent about the Israeli state, which they consider insufficiently religious and premature in its founding because the Messiah has not yet arrived. Over the decades the Haredim angrily demonstrated against state practices like allowing buses to run on the Sabbath, and most believed the state would not survive.

The feeling was mutual. The original Haredi communities in Europe were decimated in the Holocaust, and when Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, offered subsidies and army exemptions to the few in Israel then, he thought he was providing the group with a dignified funeral.

“Most Israelis at the time assumed the Haredim would die off in one generation,” said Jonathan Rosenblum, a Haredi writer.

Instead, they have multiplied, joined government coalitions and won subsidies and exemptions for children, housing and Torah study. They now number a million, a mostly poor community in an otherwise fairly well-off country of 7.8 million.

They have generally stayed out of the normal Israeli politics of war and peace, often staying neutral on the Palestinian question and focusing their deal-making on the material and spiritual needs of their constituents. Politically they have edged rightward in recent years.

In other words, while rejecting the state, the ultra-Orthodox have survived by making deals with it. And while dismissing the group, successive governments — whether run by the left or the right — have survived by trading subsidies for its votes. Now each has to live with the other, and the resulting friction is hard to contain.

“The coexistence between the two is breaking down,” said Arye Carmon, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem research organization. “It is an extreme danger.”

Mr. Carmon compared the strictly religious Jews of Israel to the Islamists in the Arab world, saying that there was a similar dynamic at play in Egypt, with tensions growing between the secular forces that led the revolution and the Islamic parties now rising to prominence.

“Today there is not a city without a Haredi community,” said Rabbi Abraham Israel Gellis, a 10th-generation Jerusalem Haredi rabbi, as he sat in his home, an enormous yeshiva on a hill outside his window. “I have 38 grandchildren and they live all over the country.”

But while the community has gained increased economic might — there is a growing market catering to its needs — what is lacking is economic productivity. The community places Torah study above all other values and has worked assiduously to make it possible for its men to do that rather than work. While the women often work, there is a 60 percent unemployment rate among the men, who also generally do not serve in the army.

It is this combination — accepting government subsidies, refusing military service and declining to work, all while having six to eight children per family — that is unsettling for many Israelis, especially when citizens feel economically insecure and mistreated by the government.

“The Haredi issue is a force flowing underground, like lava, and it could explode,” Shelly Yacimovich, a member of the Israeli Parliament, and leader of the Labor Party, said in an interview. “That’s why it must be dealt with wisely, helping them to join modern society through work.”

While change has begun — thousands of Haredi men are learning professions, more are getting jobs and a small number have joined the Israeli Army — the community is in crisis. Many ultra-Orthodox leaders feel threatened by the integration into the broader society by some of their followers, and they are desperately holding on to their power.

“We have to earn a living,” said Rabbi Shmuel Pappenheim, a reformist Haredi leader from the town of Beit Shemesh. “We are a million people with a million problems. The rabbis can shout a thousand times against it but it won’t help them. And so we have the extremism — on both sides.”

Dan Ben-David, executive director of the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, said fertility rates in the Haredi community made the issue especially acute; the very religious Jews are the only group in Israel having more children today than 30 years ago.

“They make up more than 20 percent of all kids in primary schools,” he said. “In 20 years, there is a risk we will have a third-world population here which can’t sustain a first-world economy and army.”

And, Mr. Ben-David added, what children learn in the ultra-Orthodox school system — largely unregulated by the state as a result of political deals — is unsuited for the 21st century, so even those who wish to work are finding it hard to find jobs.

“Their schools do not give them the skills to work in a modern economy and no training in civil or human rights or democracy,” Mr. Ben-David said. “They don’t even know what we are talking about — what we want from them — when we talk about discrimination against women.”

The Haredi community thinks this is a wild misunderstanding of its views.

Rabbi Dror Moshe Cassouto, a 33-year-old Hasid, lives with his wife and four sons in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim, one of the centers of Haredi life in Israel. He never looks directly at a woman, other than his wife, and he believes that men and women have roles in nature that in modern society have been reversed, “because we live in darkness.”

His goal is to spread the light. “God watches over the Jewish nation as long as it studies Torah,” he said.

Still, the spitting and Nazi talk horrify him. He says hard-liners have caused harm to the Haredim.

Asked about the recent troubles, Rabbi Cassouto shook his head and said, “A fool throws a stone into a well and 1,000 sages can’t remove it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/wo...ewanted=1&_r=1

[Kobi]

KINGSTON, Ontario (AP) — A jury on Sunday found three members of an Afghan family guilty of killing three teenage sisters and another woman in what the judge described as "cold-blooded, shameful murders" resulting from a "twisted concept of honor," ending a case that shocked and riveted Canadians.

Prosecutors said the defendants allegedly killed the three teenage sisters because they dishonored the family by defying its disciplinarian rules on dress, dating, socializing and using the Internet.

The jury took 15 hours to find Mohammad Shafia, 58; his wife Tooba Yahya, 42; and their son Hamed, 21, each guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. First-degree murder carries an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.

After the verdict was read, the three defendants again declared their innocence in the killings of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, Shafia's childless first wife in a polygamous marriage.

Their bodies were found June 30, 2009, in a car submerged in a canal in Kingston, Ontario, where the family had stopped for the night on their way home to Montreal from Niagara Falls, Ontario.

The prosecution alleged it was a case of premeditated murder, staged to look like an accident after it was carried out. Prosecutors said the defendants drowned their victims elsewhere on the site, placed their bodies in the car and pushed it into the canal.

Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger said the evidence clearly supported the conviction.

"It is difficult to conceive of a more heinous, more despicable, more honorless crime," Maranger said. "The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your completely twisted concept of honor ... that has absolutely no place in any civilized society."

In a statement following the verdict, Canadian Justice Minister Rob Nicholson called honor killings a practice that is "barbaric and unacceptable in Canada."

Defense lawyers said the deaths were accidental. They said the Nissan car accidentally plunged into the canal after the eldest daughter, Zainab, took it for a joy ride with her sisters and her father's first wife. Hamed said he watched the accident, although he didn't call police from the scene.

After the jury returned the verdicts, Mohammad Shafia, speaking through a translator, said, "We are not criminal, we are not murderer, we didn't commit the murder and this is unjust."

His weeping wife, Tooba, also declared the verdict unjust, saying, "I am not a murderer, and I am a mother, a mother."

Their son, Hamed, speaking in English said, "I did not drown my sisters anywhere."

Hamed's lawyer, Patrick McCann, said he was disappointed with the verdict, but said his client will appeal and he believes the other two defendants will as well.

But prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis welcomed the verdict.

"This jury found that four strong, vivacious and freedom-loving women were murdered by their own family in the most troubling of circumstances," Laarhuis said outside court.

"This verdict sends a very clear message about our Canadian values and the core principles in a free and democratic society that all Canadians enjoy and even visitors to Canada enjoy," he said to cheers of approval from onlookers.

The family had left Afghanistan in 1992 and lived in Pakistan, Australia and Dubai before settling in Canada in 2007. Shafia, a wealthy businessman, married Yahya because his first wife could not have children.

Shafia's first wife was living with him and his second wife. The polygamous relationship, if revealed, could have resulted in their deportation.

The prosecution painted a picture of a household controlled by a domineering Shafia, with Hamed keeping his sisters in line and doling out discipline when his father was away on frequent business trips to Dubai.

The months leading up to the deaths were not happy ones in the Shafia household, according to evidence presented at trial. Zainab, the oldest daughter, was forbidden to attend school for a year because she had a young Pakistani-Canadian boyfriend, and she fled to a shelter, terrified of her father, the court was told.

The prosecution said her parents found condoms in Sahar's room as well as photos of her wearing short skirts and hugging her Christian boyfriend, a relationship she had kept secret. Geeti was becoming almost impossible to control: skipping school, failing classes, being sent home for wearing revealing clothes and stealing, while declaring to authority figures that she wanted to be placed in foster care, according to the prosecution.

Shafia's first wife wrote in a diary that her husband beat her and "made life a torture," while his second wife called her a servant.

The prosecution presented wire taps and mobile phone records from the Shafia family in court to support their honor killing allegation. The wiretaps, which capture Shafia spewing vitriol about his dead daughters, calling them treacherous and whores and invoking the devil to defecate on their graves, were a focal point of the trial.

"There can be no betrayal, no treachery, no violation more than this," Shafia said on one recording. "Even if they hoist me up onto the gallows ... nothing is more dear to me than my honor."

Defense lawyers argued that at no point in the intercepts do the accused say they drowned the victims.

Shafia's lawyer, Peter Kemp, said after the verdicts that he believes the comments his client made on the wiretaps may have weighed more heavily on the jury's minds than the physical evidence in the case.

"He wasn't convicted for what he did," Kemp said. "He was convicted for what he said".

http://news.yahoo.com/jury-finds-afg...202441543.html

[Kobi]

By AMIR SHAH
The Associated Press
January 30, 201


KABUL, Afghanistan -- Afghan police say a woman has been strangled to death, apparently for bearing a baby girl instead of a boy, and her husband is the main suspect.

The police chief for Khanabad district in Kunduz province says the man fled the area last week about the time his 22-year-old wife was found dead in her house. Medical examiners said the woman was strangled.

Police Chief Sufi Habibullah says they have the man's mother in custody because she appears to have collaborated in a plot to kill her daughter-in-law.

Provincial women's affairs chief Nadira Ghya said the victim had warned family members that her husband had threatened to kill her if she gave birth to another daughter.

http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pb...139987/-1/NEWS

[Kobi]

This is going on in my backyard. Sexism, white male privilege, immigrant discrimination/racism, domestic violence, and a child stuck in the middle.

This article infuriated me. I wish it was an example of the exception of the way things are done. In my experence, it is too often the rule. And, it sucks when the process to protect a child gets circumvented over and over and over.

I dont know what the truth is. I dont know who is responsible for what. But, I know that child should be coming first and he isnt.

This is just the beginning of the article. Reading the entire thing might infuriate you. It is also somewhat detailed and might be disturbing to some.


By Patrick Cassidy
pcassidy@capecodonline.com
January 29, 2012


BARNSTABLE — She thought she finally had the sordid proof in hand; her young son's pajamas stained with what she suspected was his father's semen.

But after years of fighting a language barrier, her own fears and a Barnstable probate judge who did not believe that her ex-husband had molested the boy, she froze.

If she called police, she feared Barnstable Probate Judge Robert Scandurra would take the boy away from her as he had threatened if she made further allegations of sexual abuse against her ex-husband that could not be proven. If she stayed silent, she firmly believed her then 6-year-old son's safety was at risk.

"I was frustrated," she said in a recent interview, adding that she no longer believed that police, state child welfare officials or even advocates for child sexual abuse victims could help.

Haunted by her son's cries for help and her inability to protect him, the Cape Cod mother pressed on anyway. In June 2010, she gave the pajamas to a Sandwich police detective.

Last November, the results of a comparative analysis revealed DNA from the semen stain matched DNA collected from the boy's father, according to court documents.

On Jan. 19, Scandurra scheduled an April probate court hearing to determine custody of the boy in light of the DNA evidence and a report from investigators who interviewed the boy after the semen was matched to his father. No criminal charges have been filed against the father based on the latest evidence.

The woman is hopeful the new evidence will be enough to convince authorities — and Scandurra — that she has been telling the truth all along, and that finally her son will be protected. But she is cautious, having harbored similar hopes before, only to be disappointed.

A Cape Cod Times review of legal, medical and child welfare documents that span more than five years and interviews with more than a dozen people, reveal that despite serious concerns about possible sexual abuse expressed by the boy's doctor, his therapist, a teacher, a school counselor, child welfare officials and a court-appointed investigator, Scandurra continued to allow both supervised and unsupervised visits between the boy and his father.

Scandurra's decisions left the mother no option but to fight the court system — often without a lawyer — in a race to save her son.



http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pb...cid=sitesearch

[Kobi]

Women in Saudi Arabia refuse to hit the brakes in their fight to overturn the kingdom's female driving ban.

One woman is even suing the government for not allowing her a driver's license, she told CNN on Sunday.

Manal al-Sharif, who is leading a campaign pushing for women's driving rights, said she filed her suit in November after officials rejected her license application and ignored her ensuing complaints.

"It's just creating positive pressure on the officials to get back to us," she told CNN. "And it will encourage more women to apply for licenses and file lawsuits."

While there is no law in Saudi Arabia prohibiting women from driving, religious edicts are often interpreted to mean that females should not be behind the wheel, and officials comply with the religious authorities. Under the same decrees, Saudi women are also banned from opening bank accounts, obtaining passports or attending school without a male chaperone, CNN reported.

Al-Sharif's fight began after she was arrested for posting a video of herself driving on YouTube. She was detained for nearly two weeks, according to The Associated Press.

There is a long history of women being punished for driving in Saudi Arabia, although it wasn't formerly banned by the Minister of Interior until 1990. Just last year, a Saudi court found Shaima Jastaina guilty of violating the ban, and sentenced her to ten lashes. She was pardoned from the beating, but her case ignited protests and launched campaigns like the one al-Sharif leads, Women2Drive.

Last June, the organization posted a banner on its Facebook page that said, "We are all Manal Sharif," according to CNN. The post also included a quote from King Abdullah: "The day will come when women will be able to drive."

Al-Sharif, a single mother and information technology specialist, told CNN after her detention that she was determined to speak up about what she thinks is gravely unjust.

"We have a saying," she said. "The rain starts with a single drop. This is a symbolic thing."



Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/worl...#ixzz1lgy6tkoW

[Kobi]

KABUL (Reuters) - Crouching behind a wooden barrier, 27-year-old Sergeant Sara Delawar fires her M-4 rifle at a target showing the silhouette of a man, part of a training exercise for Afghan special forces.

Anxious to defuse tensions stoked by foreign male soldiers raiding Afghans' homes at night in what is a conservative Muslim country, Afghanistan has begun training elite female troops to join Afghan male soldiers on operations.

"Before we joined this unit, our operations were done by foreign troops and they did not know our culture. People were critical so we joined to help out," Delawar, a former policewoman in Jowzjan province, said.

"I have already fought the Taliban. My comrades were martyred in fights with the Taliban and we have killed them too, but during the night raids I haven't fought insurgents yet."

Fluent in four local languages, Delawar is one of only 12 female soldiers who has been trained to fight and conduct searches in what is an attempt to pay greater respect to cultural sensitivities.

Surprise night raids in pursuit of militants have long stoked anti-Western sentiment in Afghanistan, with many locals seeing them as assaults on their privacy and on women's privacy in particular.

In conservative southern areas of the country where the Taliban is strong, such raids have created even more ill will.

On Sunday after months of tense negotiations, Afghanistan and the United States agreed that only Afghan forces would search residential homes or compounds.

As well as seeking to assuage cultural sensitivities, the new strategy is aimed at lowering civilian casualties and shoring up President Hamid Karzai's popularity at a time when foreign combat troops are handing over to Afghan forces.

"It's unacceptable for us to see male soldiers body-searching females. Men are not allowed to touch females," third-lieutenant Binazir, 24, said.

"I'm proud to say that I'm here to serve my country side by side with my brothers. I'm proud that Afghan girls are here and I hope more girls join in order to provide better services for brothers and sisters in the battlefield and save lives."

NO EASY TASK

At a training facility on the outskirts of Kabul, the Afghan capital, suspected militants inside a mock-up house are advised to leave the building via loudspeaker. A hijab-wearing woman cries and asks where the soldiers are taking her brother.

Female soldiers lead her by the arm away from the scene.

"The training they've already received in this unit has had a good outcome during night raids," Captain Mohammad Khalid, head of training at the special forces, said.

"In order to launch our operations in a good manner we have to have 100 female officers in our forces."

The program began two months ago and drew women from the Tajik, Uzbek, Turkmen and Hazara ethnic groups, but not from the Pashtun where the Taliban recruit most of their fighters.

The task of finding women has become even more important ahead of a pullout of most NATO combat troops by the end of 2014.

Afghanistan is still recovering from the strict social conservatism of the Taliban, whose hardline laws during their 1996-2001 rule marginalized women, stripping them of the right to work, study or move freely.

The country remains one of the world's worst places for women and setting up female special forces was not an easy task.

Recruitment is especially tricky. Women are put off by the prospect of social rejection and disapproval from their families.

Traditionally confined to their homes, women also face problems their male comrades do not.

"My children were attending school in Jowzjan, but here they don't because I'm not at home and they can't go by themselves," said Delawar, a mother-of-two and a widow.

"I hope there is support for them to get educated especially when I'm out of my house on the duty."

http://news.yahoo.com/afghan-elite-r...155447759.html

[Kobi]

WASHINGTON/KABUL (Reuters) - Shortly after sending U.S. troops to Afghanistan in October 2001, President George W. Bush focused so intently on freeing Afghan women from the shackles of Taliban rule that empowering them became central to the United States' mission there.

More than a decade later, as his successor Barack Obama charts a way out of the unpopular war, Afghan girls are back in school, infant and maternal survival rates are up and a quarter of the parliament's seats are reserved for women who at least on paper have the same voting, mobility and other rights as men.

But Obama rarely speaks about that progress, delegating discussion of women's rights to his secretary of state and other top diplomats so he can focus on narrower goals for Afghanistan: uprooting the militants there and getting out.

Obama's lack of overt attention to Afghan women has led many to fear their hard-fought gains will slip away as the United States hands off security responsibility to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, with ever-present Taliban leaders still holding sway in much of the countryside.

Women's issues are not on the formal agenda at the NATO summit the United States will be hosting in Chicago later this month. Afghanistan is poised to send an all-male delegation.

Suzanne Nossel, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said it was "really worrying" that Obama only made a passing reference to women on his trip to Afghanistan last week, when he affirmed a general need "to protect the human rights of all Afghans - men and women, boys and girls."

Obama's choice of words also was noticed in Afghanistan, which remains a conservative and male-dominated Islamic country. Gulalai Safi, a female member of parliament from northern Balkh province, said it was "somewhat of a shame" that he did not use the visit to underline women's rights.

Amnesty is calling on Obama to spell out a plan to preserve the gains for women since the fall of the Taliban, which from 1996 to 2001 barred Afghan girls from schools and kept women from working and from leaving their homes unless they were accompanied by a male relative or spouse and were covered in a head-to-toe burqa.

For more than a year, the White House has been pursuing, with little success, reconciliation talks involving the Islamist group that could give it a share of power in Kabul.

"When you are negotiating with the Taliban, ensuring the rights of women is not a simple matter," Nossel said. "In that sense you can understand why they are not talking about it but that is why it is doubly worrying."

WOMEN AS BAROMETER

Bush did not mention Afghan women when he launched the war a month after the September 11, 2001, attacks that were orchestrated by al Qaeda militants based in Afghanistan.

But he soon broadened his rhetoric, saying that empowering women was essential to strengthen Afghan society and prevent al Qaeda from keeping a foothold there.

His wife, Laura Bush, also made Afghan women one of her signature issues. In November 2001 she delivered the weekly presidential radio address "to kick off a worldwide effort to focus on the brutality against women and children by the al Qaeda terrorist network and the regime it supports in Afghanistan, the Taliban."

The former schoolteacher visited Afghanistan three times to support educational projects and efforts to tackle infant and child mortality rates, then the highest in the world next to Sierra Leone, and to inform women about their legal rights.

"Her effort really helped to sell to the American people why we needed to do what we were doing," said Anita McBride, former chief of staff to Laura Bush.

Today's White House has a more limited definition of that purpose, one that eschews his predecessor's "nation-building."

In February, White House spokesman Jay Carney stated that U.S. troops were in Afghanistan to root out al Qaeda militants and their training camps, accusing the previous administration of adopting a mission was "muddled and unclear."

The Obama administration says women's rights remain an important goal, even if not the focus of its public rhetoric.

"That refocusing of our efforts is reflected in our public messaging. When we talk about the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, you will hear us speak to that core goal," said Caitlin Hayden, a National Security Council spokeswoman. But she said there was "absolutely no lessening of our attention or support to Afghan women from this administration."

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, an Afghanistan expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, said the American public was so tired of the war that today's White House was reluctant to dwell on what is at stake with the U.S. departure.

"Now the question is how to get out, not to explain why we got in," Lemmon said. But she stressed the risks of seeing women "as a pet project instead of a barometer for the society's health."

"How the war ends really does matter. The question is, will a Somalia be left behind in Afghanistan? And if it is, women will be the first to suffer," she said.

DISCOURAGING HEADLINES

Obama often jokes that he is surrounded by women, sharing the White House with his wife, two daughters and mother-in-law and working closely with female advisers and cabinet members including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

He created the first White House Council on Women and Girls shortly after taking office to make sure the U.S. government "considers the needs of women and girls in every decision we make." In December he signed an executive order and action plan telling U.S. diplomats to work to empower women as "equal partners" in conflict prevention and peace-making.

But neither he nor first lady Michelle Obama has used their tremendous attention-generating power to stress the needs of women outside the United States, including in Afghanistan.

That work has mainly been left to Clinton, herself a former first lady, who has visited Afghanistan three times as the United States' top diplomat. Melanne Verveer, U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women's issues, has been to Afghanistan twice.

In an interview, Verveer acknowledged the American public had lost track of the advances for Afghan women amid "discouraging" headlines about acid attacks on girls in school and violence against women that the United Nations has said remains at "near-pandemic levels."

"But it is important to see just so much has been achieved, that there should not be a reversal in the investments and the progress that has been made, because that would be to the detriment of Afghanistan's future," she said.

Asked why Obama has not spoken more directly about the need to protect Afghan women, Verveer said the president had made clear he wants U.S. diplomats and military personnel to focus on women's issues on the ground as they prepare for the transition.

‘NO SUPPORT'

In the talks with the Taliban, which are currently suspended, the White House has said it would only accept a reconciliation deal that requires respect for the Afghan constitution, which codifies equal rights for men and women.

But in Afghanistan, many women fear that Karzai could trade away their freedoms as he seeks to curry support in conservative parts of the country, including in rural areas where female illiteracy remains above 90 percent and child marriages are still widespread despite being illegal.

In March, Karzai backed recommendations from powerful clerics to segregate the sexes in the workplace and allow husbands to beat their wives under certain circumstances. Last year he sacked the deputy governor of southern Helmand province after two women performed without headscarves at a high-profile concert.

"This is a green light paving the way for extreme figures, including the Taliban, to come forward," said Fawzia Koofi, a female member of parliament who has said she plans to run in the country's 2014 presidential elections.

Senior Afghan peace negotiators have said the Taliban is now willing to soften its hardline ideology to regain a share of power. But a spokesman for the Taliban, Zabihullah Mujahid, said this week that "it is too early to discuss" whether the group now supported girls' education.

Another Afghan lawmaker, Shukria Barakzai, said the shift in attention from the White House had decreased the pressure on Afghan leaders to take the status of women seriously.

"We are now getting the sense that in order to achieve women's rights, we have to act alone ... We feel like we have no support," said Barakzai, who met Laura Bush during one of her trips to Afghanistan.

On a trip to Washington, Afghanistan's health minister Suraya Dalil said women in the country were ready to stay politically active to prevent backsliding in health and other areas with the political changeover.

"Being a woman in Afghanistan today is different from being a woman in Afghanistan 11 years ago," the Kabul-trained surgeon and mother of three girls said in an interview. "We want to be engaged in the peace process, in the transition, and decisions about the future of Afghanistan. In all of this we want to be engaged and we want our voice to be heard."

There are also grassroots women's movements emerging in Afghanistan and signs of change in the capital's streets.

Kabul is now full of beauty parlors for women, unheard of during Taliban times, and girls in their white hijab and black uniforms are seen going merrily to and from school every day.

But there has been a dramatic spike in reports of violence against women, and very few perpetrators are getting punished for crimes including beatings, torture and brutal killings.

Over the past year, the volunteer group Young Women For Change glued more than 700 posters around Kabul showing a woman's veiled face that read: "don't grab my hair/don't throw stones in my face/I can stand on my own two feet/I can build this country with you together."

Almost all the posters were torn down within days.

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