Author: Polly Toynbee
Publication: The Guardian
Date: September 28, 2001
We should make the Northern Alliance
sign a contract on human rights - especially women's rights
Something horrible flits across
the background in scenes from Afghanistan, scuttling out of sight. There
it is, a brief blue or black flash, a grotesque Scream 1, 2 and 3 personified
- a woman. The top-to-toe burka, with its sinister, airless little grille,
is more than an instrument of persecution, it is a public tarring and feathering
of female sexuality. It transforms any woman into an object of defilement
too untouchably disgusting to be seen. It is a garment of lurid sexual
suggestiveness: what rampant desire and desirability lurks and leers beneath
its dark mysteries? In its objectifying of women, it turns them into cowering
creatures demanding and expecting violence and victimisation. Forget cultural
sensibilities.
More moderate versions of the garb
- the dull, uniform coat to the ground and the plain headscarf - have much
the same effect, inspiring the lascivious thoughts they are designed to
stifle. What is it about a woman that is so repellently sexual that she
must diminish herself into drab uniformity while strolling down Oxford
Street one step behind a husband who is kitted out in razor-sharp Armani
and gold, pomaded hair and tight bum exposed to lustful eyes? (No letters
please from British women who have taken the veil and claim it's liberating.
It is their right in a tolerant society to wear anything including rubber
fetishes - but that has nothing to do with the systematic cultural oppression
of women with no choice.)
The pens sharpen - Islamophobia!
No such thing. Primitive Middle Eastern religions (and most others) are
much the same - Islam, Christianity and Judaism all define themselves through
disgust for women's bodies. There are ritual baths, churching, shaving
heads, denying abortion and contraception, arranged marriage, purdah, barring
unclean women access to the altar, let alone the priesthood, letting men
divorce but not women - all this perverted abhorrence of half the human
race lies at the maggotty heart of religion, the defining creed in all
the holy of holies.
Moderate, modernised believers may
claim the true Bible/Koran does not demand such things. But it hardly matters
how close these savage manifestations are to the words of the Prophet or
Christ. All extreme fundamentalism plunges back into the dark ages by using
the oppression of women (sometimes called "family values") as its talisman.
Religions that thrive are pliable, morphing to suit changing needs: most
Christianity has had to moderate to modernise. Islamic fundamentalism flourishes
because it too suits modern needs very well in a developing world seeking
an identity to defy the all-engulfing west. And the burka and chador are
its battle flags.
The war leaders are coy about this
mighty cultural war of the worlds that is fought out over women's bodies.
Other considerations always did come first. When the mojahedin were western
heroes against Russia and western TV reporters pranced about hilltops in
teatowels extolling them, the Guardian women's page had just about the
only non-Russian inspired writers pointing to the plight of hidden mojahedin
women. Now again there is a danger western leaders seek to blur the issue,
to mollify semi-friendly Arab countries. Already our new allies, the "Northern
Alliance" or the "United Front" sneak into the language now as our brethren,
the good guys. Already their name emits a warm glow of security as we imagine
our boys going in behind their lines to support them to victory for democracy,
freedom, human rights and equality for women. But wait, what's that in
the background of all those nightly pictures of our gallant allies? Flitting
burkas, just like the Taliban women. Talking to those in the UN, aid agencies
and others who have lived there, they all say there is little difference
between the two sides beyond old ethnic and tribal allegiances. The Taliban
are Pashtuns, the Alliance are an unstable mix of minority ethnic groups.
Turn to the Amnesty or Human Rights Watch websites and there are atrocities
aplenty on both sides. As for women, a UN official I spoke to was sitting
in his office in Kabul back in 1992 when our friends the Alliance barged
in to demand all women staff be sent home at once: they banned women from
jobs long before the Taliban. Far from a "united" front, this makeshift
Alliance are just tribal warlords each with their own supporters abroad,
some selling heroin, many with a history of ratting and re-ratting across
the battlelines. Their assassinated leader, Ahmad Shah Masood, had a pleasing,
French-speaking westernised educated aspect, but his past was hardly savoury.
He cannily wooed western support with promises that women can work and
girls attend school, with a few women engineers in evidence, but life for
women in burkas on both sides of the divide is virtually identical servitude.
Does it mean the war is not worth
fighting? No, but it requires extreme circumspection about our allies and
no illusions about how difficult it will be to build a stable or half-civilised
government. Given the Northern Alliance's past, we should draw up a human
rights contract now and make Alliance leaders sign the UN's International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, binding them personally against
atrocities before fighting begins. Raping, burning, slaughtering and ethnic
revenge killings marked their last victorious entry to Kabul. Present eagerness
to chase out Bin Laden must not make human rights an afterthought in our
intervention in this black hole of humanity. Global moral authority on
universal rights and women's equality will matter more in the long run
than appeasing the Islamic sensibilities of coalition members now.
This is a rationalist jihad. This
war against terrorism is not a war not against moderate Thought-for-the-Day
Islam but against the fundamentalism that breeds murderous martyrs. But
the war leaders are fudging even this, on anxious visits to Iran where
BBC women correspondents are forced into chadors. Women are missing from
the story so far when they should be up at the front - literally and metaphorically:
this war between reason and unreason is ultimately about them. With such
a dearth of satisfactory allies, the coalition should turn to one Afghan
group completely ignored so far - the Revolutionary Association of the
Women of Afghanistan. Their leader was a poet called Meena, who was assassinated
by the KGB with fundamentalist help, in exile, in Quetta in 1987. They
are secular, sane and working hard in the camps of Pakistan, running schools
and clinics. They get no help from any government because rationalist feminists
naturally have no sway with any tribal warlords. With all the money now
flooding in, pushing these women forward and backing their progressive
work would be an act of good faith in a democratic equal rights future.
Or will realpolitik come before real women?
Readers can offer support via www.RAWA.org
p.toynbee@guardian.co.uk
