04 March 2002

Afghan-American Women's Rights Activist Returns to Kabul

Washington -- Nasrine Gross, an Afghan women's rights activist and author, is traveling to her native Afghanistan in March with several tons of relief supplies to help schools reopen, farmers replant their fields and women rebuild their shattered lives.

Gross, who left Afghanistan in 1965 and eventually resettled in the United States, says she will take two to three tons of books, magazines, school supplies, clothing, sewing supplies and seeds for fruits, vegetables and flowers when she visits her homeland in early March.

Gross is a key member of Negar-Support of Women of Afghanistan, an international organization headquartered in Paris that supports Afghan women's rights.

In a recent interview with the Washington File, Gross said she had been asked to give a first course on women's studies at Kabul University where she hopes to build a women's studies program.

The women's studies program "needs an organization that would underwrite the course and its teacher for one year," she said.

During her return to Afghanistan, she said she will promote several other projects geared towards women's advancement, such as women's rights seminars, a literacy program and the organization of an international women's conference in Kabul.

"We are planning for a repeat of our Dushanbe Conference, this time in Kabul," she said. "We want to have about 500 Afghan women from all the provinces and we would like to have 40 to 50 non-Afghans, individuals and organizations, come along as well."

In Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in June 2000, 300 Afghan women from all segments of society and various countries drafted and announced The Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women in response to the Taliban's oppression of women.

A conference in Kabul would review the declaration, identify the needs and priorities of the Afghan women and develop an action plan, Gross said.

Gross said she and other members of the Negar-Support of Women of Afghanistan have collected hundreds of thousands of signatures inside and outside of Afghanistan from people who support having women's rights enshrined in the next Afghan constitution, which is scheduled to go into effect in 2004.

She said most of the members of the Afghan Interim Authority, including Chairman Karzai, have signed the petition.

"We are hopeful that the women's rights issue is going to be the unifying issue of Afghanistan," she said. "The various factions have been at odds with each other for so long that reconciliation will take a long time. You have to find points of agreement. One of them seems to be women's rights. That's why I'm going back to Kabul."

In December 2001, Gross went to Afghanistan to participate in the inauguration of the Afghan Interim Authority and seek support for The Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women.

During her subsequent 40-day visit, she traveled to various places in the country and found that the schools and libraries had been devastated by the Taliban.

"Grown men started crying," she said when her local hosts showed her libraries that the Taliban had torched.

She has put out a call for donations of all kinds of books and magazines. At the top of the list are reference books -- dictionaries, glossaries, maps, atlases and encyclopedias for both children and adults. She also is looking for textbooks for subjects taught at university, notably medicine, agriculture and engineering. Materials in English, French, Persian and Pashto are welcome.

She said Afghan libraries would welcome nearly any kind of magazine.

"Libraries and all of Afghanistan are starved for magazines. The Taliban were extremely successful at cutting off Afghanistan from all information," she said. "Afghans have not seen one foreign or Afghan magazine in years."

Gross also is collecting sewing kits, sewing catalogues and seeds for planting.

"I took a few packets of seeds with me last year, and people would snatch them from my hand, beg me for even one packet. They are starved for this," she said. "You give a few of these packets to a group of women, and they can start a community vegetable garden. They can make the rubble bloom."

Gross said she has timed her return to coincide with the reopening of the schools in Afghanistan, which were closed to women during the years of Taliban repression.

As part of her relief supplies for Afghan schools, Gross will also bring clothing intended for university professors and school teachers, who were impoverished under the Taliban.