No Place for Women

by U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer
                                                                                                  

Taliban. It is a word that was scarcely heard except in foreign policy circles until a few weeks
ago. Now we hear it on street corners, in homes, and in offices. We all have questions: Who is
the Taliban?

Before the Taliban seized power of Afghanistan in 1996, the majority of women living there
enjoyed gender freedoms. They made up fifty percent of the student body at Kabul University
and sixty percent of the faculty. In the nation's capital, Kabul, they constituted forty percent of
doctors and seventy percent of school teachers. But when the Taliban instituted a totalitarian
system of terror, it turned the lives of even the most successful women upside down.

As an Afghan woman, you are no longer allowed to work, attend school or enter places of
worship. You are not allowed to leave your home unless accompanied by a close male relative.
And even if you have a chaperone, you are not free to socialize with the outside world. Instead,
you are forced to wear the burqa, a piece of clothing that covers the entire body, leaving only a
small mesh covered window through which to see. If you fall ill you cannot see a male doctor,
and because most women doctors are prohibited from practicing medicine, you are left with no
access to medical care, making even the most curable disease life threatening.

If you break the rules it can cost you your life. There are countless accounts of women being
beaten, flogged, and even stoned to death for failure to adhere to the Taliban's strict code of
conduct. Women are brutally beaten for accidentally showing an ankle from beneath their burqa
or letting their shoe heels click when they walk.  Friends and families watch women being
murdered for acts as harmless as running secret schools for girls, and public executions are
held in soccer stadiums for entertainment.

According to experts, the Taliban has attempted to justify its acts of cruelty by claiming it
represents the purist form of Islam. In reality, the Taliban's treatment of women not only has no
basis in Islamic faith, but according to Islamic leaders, it is diametrically opposed to it. Islam is a
faith that promotes the peaceful treatment of all people. A number of Islamic organizations have
questioned the Taliban's legitimacy, including the 55-member Organization of Islamic
Conference, which joins the U.S. and nearly all other countries in refusing to recognize it as
Afghanistan's official government.

In 1999, the U.S. Senate took a stand against the Taliban by passing a resolution authored by
myself and my colleague Senator Brownback of Kansas. This resolution instructed the U.S. to
use all appropriate means to prevent any Taliban-led government in Afghanistan from obtaining
a seat in the United Nations reserved for Afghanistan. In this resolution we pointed to the
following:

The Taliban's frequent violence against women, including beatings, rapes, forced marriages,
disappearances, kidnapings, and killings.

The Taliban's interference with attempts to deliver humanitarian assistance to women and girls
in Afghanistan. 

The Taliban's requirement that all women wear a burqa, which prevents all women who cannot
afford these garments from leaving their homes. 

I think it is crucial that we all understand that the Taliban governs with fear, using food as a
weapon and rousting young men out of sleep to force them into military service. Beyond that is
the subjugation of women.

We made a terrible mistake after the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan in1989. We
walked away from a proud people with barely a fare-thee-well. After this action against the
Taliban is over, our country must lead an international effort to right past wrongs.