http://apnews.excite.com/article/20041009/D85K2UBO0.html
Women Reveal Wishes for Afghan Election
Oct 9, 2:34 PM (ET)
By STEPHEN GRAHAM
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) - As Bibi Gul voted in Afghanistan’s landmark presidential election Saturday, she cried recalling how she lost her husband to war, raised five children under the Taliban and was threatened with having her hand chopped off if she dared cast her ballot.
“I have so many troubles, sometimes my mind is not right,” the 45-year-old said in a crowd of blue and green burqas at a women-only polling station in Kandahar, the former capital of the oppressive regime.
“If Karzai becomes president, maybe we will get some land and be able to go to Mecca. What we need is Islam, which is peace.”
More than 4 million women registered for Saturday’s presidential election, 41 percent of the total number of 10.5 million people signed up to vote in this country of an estimated 25 million.
Many more were voting among Afghan refugee communities in Pakistan and Iran. Moqadasa Sidiqi, a female student whose family fled Kabul in 1992, became the first Afghan to cast a ballot in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, at 7 a.m.
Although opposition candidates claimed the polls were unfair because the ink used to mark people’s thumbs so they vote only once rubbed off too easily, women here hoped the polls would mark the advent of female suffrage in a country steeped in conservative Islamic tradition.
The figures for registered women voters were a revelation, suggesting Afghan women are determined to help draw a democratic line under a quarter-century of strife. Still, they lag in much of the Pashtun-dominated south, where many still believe women should leave their home only in a medical emergency.
In the courtyard of the Haino School for Girls close to Kandahar’s main mosque, scores of women lined up Saturday morning, chatting excitedly and pressing around the doors of the small classrooms used as makeshift polling booths.
The ballot was supposed to be secret. But election staff said no screens were delivered in time, leaving women to mark their papers - some with a loop, some with a line and others with a squiggle - in front of the poll worker handing them out.
After squinting at the pictures on the long green ballot - most of the women were illiterate - almost all chose Karzai, a fellow Pashtun. An ethnic Hazara challenger appeared to be running a distant second. None was considering the lone female candidate from distant Kabul.
Women registered most avidly in cities such as the relatively cosmopolitan capital, and across the north and center, where ethnic minorities take a more relaxed view of patriarchy. Competition between ethnic groups in mixed areas also spurred tribal elders to marshal a bloc vote from their women.
At a polling station in Kabul, Gul Sum, a 60-year-old ethnic Hazara housewife wearing a black veil, showed off a thumb stained with the ink from special pens shipped in from India. Some of them apparently ran dry.
Sum said the vote would help glue the country back together after more than two decades of violence and poisonous ethnic division. She prayed that militants would not make good on their threat to attack the process.
“In the line waiting with me, there were women from all the different groups: Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara,” Sum said. “For the first time, women are having a say in the future of Afghanistan. We are fed up with war.”
There was gratitude but no thumping for women’s rights, which are enshrined in Afghanistan’s new constitution, passed in January.
“I came to vote for Karzai to bring peace and make sure the young men have jobs,” said a woman in Kandahar hidden by a yellow burqa whose voter ID card identified her only as Fatima, 45.
Four women were among the dozen election workers killed by anti-government militants during the months of voter registration, but Fatima said she had no fears about voting because her husband had given his permission.
She said she was relieved that the Taliban’s draconian interpretation of Islamic law, which saw millions of women and girls forced out of work and education and whipped in the street for showing as much as an ankle, had been swept away.
Still, Bibi Gul said that on her way to the polls she received a reminder of the hardline regime - which was ousted by an American bombing campaign in late 2001.
“A man with a scarf around his head asked me where I was going. He said: ‘If you vote, I will see it from your thumb and I will cut off your hand,’” she said.
She said she could not afford to take a taxi home to avoid the man, but would pay no heed.
“We don’t want those people. They did nothing for us.”
That last comment sums up the accomplishments of the Taliban! Now, if the rest of the do-nothing naysayers will quit their caterwalling and get out of the way, maybe the Afghanis can finally move forward! Good luck to them!
:Salute:
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