WUNRN
Afghanistan
Women Protest New Restrictive Family Law
Robert Nickelsberg/Getty
Images for The New York Times
April 15,
2009
KABUL,
Afghanistan
— The young women stepped off the bus and moved toward the protest march just
beginning on the other side of the street when they were spotted by a mob of
men.
“Get
out of here, you whores!” the men shouted. “Get out!”
The
women scattered as the men moved in.
“We
want our rights!” one of the women shouted, turning to face them. “We want
equality!”
The
women ran to the bus and dove inside as it rumbled away, with the men smashing
the taillights and banging on the sides.
“Whores!”
But
the march carried on anyway. About 300 Afghan women, facing an angry throng
three times larger than their own, walked the streets of the capital on
Wednesday to demand that Parliament repeal a new law that introduces a range of
Taliban-like
restrictions on women, and permits, among other things, marital rape.
It
was an extraordinary scene. Women are mostly illiterate in this impoverished
country, and they do not, generally speaking, enjoy anything near the freedom
accorded to men. But there they were, most of them young, many in jeans,
defying a threatening crowd and calling out slogans heavy with meaning.
With
the Afghan police keeping the mob at bay, the women walked two miles to
Parliament, where they delivered a petition calling for the law’s repeal.
“Whenever
a man wants sex, we cannot refuse,” said Fatima Husseini, 26, one of the
marchers. “It means a woman is a kind of property, to be used by the man in any
way that he wants.”
The
law, approved by both houses of Parliament and signed by President Hamid
Karzai, applies to the Shiite minority only, essentially giving
clerics authority over intimate matters between women and men. Women here and
governments and rights groups abroad have protested three parts of the law
especially.
One
provision makes it illegal for a woman to resist her husband’s sexual advances.
A second provision requires a husband’s permission for a woman to work outside
the home or go to school. And a third makes it illegal for a woman to refuse to
“make herself up” or “dress up” if that is what her husband wants.
The
passage of the law has amounted to something of a historical irony. Afghan Shiites,
who make up about 10 percent of the population, suffered horrendously under the
Taliban, who regarded them as apostates. Since 2001, the Shiites, particularly
the Hazara minority, have been enjoying a renaissance.
President
Karzai, who relies on vast support from the United States and other Western
governments to stay in power, has come under intense international criticism
for signing the bill into law. Many people here suspect that he did so in order
to gain the favor of the Shiite clergy; Mr. Karzai is up for re-election this
year.
Responding
to the outcry, Mr. Karzai has begun looking for a way to remove the most
controversial parts of the law. In an interview on Wednesday, his spokesman,
Homayun Hamidzada, said that the legislation was not yet law because it had not
been published in the government’s official register. That, Mr. Hamidzada said,
meant that it could still be changed. Mr. Karzai has asked his justice minister
to look it over.
“We
have no doubt that whatever comes out of this process will be consistent with
the rights provided for in the Constitution — equality and the protection of
women,” Mr. Hamidzada said.
The
women who protested Wednesday began their demonstration with what appeared to
be a deliberately provocative act. They gathered in front of the School of the
Last Prophet, a madrassa run by Ayatollah Asif Mohsini, the country’s most
powerful Shiite cleric. He and the scholars around him played an important role
in the drafting of the new law.
“We
are here to campaign for our rights,” one woman said into a loudspeaker. Then
the women held their banners aloft and began to chant.
The
reaction was immediate. Hundreds of students from the madrassa, most but not
all of them men, poured into the streets to confront the demonstrators.
“Death
to the enemies of Islam!” the counterdemonstrators cried, encircling the women.
“We want Islamic law!”
The
women stared ahead and kept walking.
A
phalanx of police, some of them women, held the crowds apart.
Afterward,
when the demonstrators had left, one of the madrassa’s senior clerics walked
outside. Asked about the dispute, he said it was between professionals and
nonprofessionals; that is, between the clerics, who understood the Koran and
Islamic law, and the women calling for the law’s repeal who did not.
“It’s
like if you are sick, you go to a doctor, not some amateur,” said the cleric,
Mohammed Hussein Jafaari. “This law was approved by the scholars. It was passed
by both houses of Parliament. It was signed by the president.”
The
religious scholars, Mr. Jafaari conceded, were all men.
Lingering
a while, Mr. Jafaari said that what was really driving the dispute was not the
Afghans at all, but the foreigners who loom so large over the country.
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