Well actually no, that’s not true.
Clearly much more needs to be done by the international community to arrest the animals who are raping women and oppressing them, but as it’s is stated below it has improved. The women feel safest when the peacekeepers are around, which a great number are Americans. It’s taken the U.S. to get it a little better and it will take more from the world to move it further out to the rest of the country.
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LONDON (AlertNet) – In Kabul, under the watchful eyes of NATO forces, women can walk alongside men, hold jobs and send their daughters to school. Hopes are high that Afghanistan’s first attempt at a democratic constitution will deliver even more freedoms.
Women elsewhere are not so lucky. In rural communities controlled by repressive warlords, many are forced to submit to intrusive gynaecological exams if seen with men outside their families, and girls have set themselves on fire to avoid being sold into marriage.
Women’s rights groups say the good intentions of Afghanistan’s new constitution, unveiled in draft form this month, will come to little unless the warlords are toppled and peacekeeping forces are expanded throughout Afghanistan’s 32 provinces.
“There is fighting all over the country,” said Mamizha Naderi, administrative director of Women for Afghan Women (WAW), a New York-based NGO working to create opportunities for Afghan women.
“Woman in Kabul feel safer because the peacekeeping troops protect them from fundamentalists, but outside of Kabul women do not go outside. There is no security.
“The only way to bring peace and security to Afghanistan is to expand the peacekeeping troops. I just don’t understand why they are not doing it. They did it in Kosovo and Bosnia. Why are they not doing it in Afghanistan?”
Two years after the U.S.-led removal of the hardline Taliban regime, hopes for change focus on the Loya Jirga, or traditional Afghan grand council, which will vote next month on whether to adopt the new constitution.
The draft is now being circulated throughout the provinces as Afghans prepare to elect Constitutional Loya Jirga representatives. Women’s groups will choose 64 of the assembly’s 500 members, while Afghan President Hamid Karzai is required to appoint 25 women.
Women have had unprecedented input in drafting the constitution. They held two of nine seats on a board created last year by President Hamid Karzai to outline the ideological framework of the constitution, and seven seats of a 35-member review commission.
While the Constitutional Review Commission says it has tried to incorporate women’s rights into the draft and sought recommendations from ordinary women, pressure groups say that without nationwide security, whatever rights it offers will be little more than a luxury for a minority of Afghan women.
While there have been improvements and Afghanistan recently celebrated the unprecedented number of girls in school – an estimated one million – rape and forced marriage are on the rise again and many women continue to wear the burqa for security, RAWA’s website says.
“Hospitals are open, but they are dirty, filthy and there is not enough medicine,” Saryal said. “It is better because women have a choice now, but outside of Kabul people are scared to send their daughters to school because of security.
“Clearly it is better than how it was under the Taliban since we don’t have the official restrictions. Now women are not forced to wear the burqa, although that was never the main tragedy of Afghan women as it was portrayed by the western media.”
Women in Kabul are free to talk in public without fear of persecution, but elsewhere it is common for women to be hauled into hospitals by religious police to undergo gynaecological examinations for the purpose of “chastity checks”, according to a Human Rights Watch Report published in 2002.
Naderi said that for peace to be sustained, it was vital to increasing security forces in Afghanistan and target human rights programmes at both men and women.