Globalization and Human Rights: Focus on Afghan Women By Linda Lindsey, Maryville University The sociological story of human rights as related to women in the developing world is rapidly unfolding. This story was catapulted to the global spotlight by events on September 11, 2001 which irrevocably linked a small, seemingly obscure central Asian nation as the sympathetic host and protector of terrorists. The world learned that these protectors, known as the "Taliban," enacted a brutal regime grounded in such appalling interpretation of Islam that barbarism cowered behind religion. Afghan women and girls were among the Taliban's earliest victims of this barbarism. Although human rights violations of Afghan women have been documented for years by scholars, non-government organizations (NGOs), the United Nations, and numerous media accounts, it was clearly the terrorist attacks that fueled the interest of the world to their plight. Prior to September 11 it would be safe to say that linking the words "religion" to "violations of women's (human) rights" would have mystified most people. Others would have dismissed the linkage as "cultural interference". In a nation where famine, poverty, illiteracy, and uncertain daily existence affect most of the population, the notion of women's rights could easily be trivialized as the lesser (or least) of many evils clamoring for immediate remedy. But after an end to the 62
Taliban's reign of terror - and the Taliban will be defeated - can an agenda calling for women's human rights fit into a new regime in Afghanistan? A large part of the answer to this question, I believe, rests on understanding the powerful, taken-for-granted process of social change. We sociologists often point out that the very nature of social change spawns the opposite tendency to curtail it. When modernization collides with tradition, support to revitalize, rediscover, and readapt cultural traditions increases. Global interdependence is a key product of social change. Fueled by economic development originating in the West, global interdependence produces two conflicting effects: the spread of Western culture to every corner of the world, and rejection of this spread. Efforts by fundamentalists to create, or re-create, religious states are typical expressions of this rejection. Countermodernization is a social movement generated by the very processes of modernization itself, and either resists certain parts of it or promotes ways to neutralize its effects. Western values - such as individualism, secularism, and scientific empiricism - are seen as undermining traditional forms of social organization. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, countermodernization takes on the form of Islamization, already rooted before the Soviet invasion, that suggests religious fundamentalism as the remedy against the corruption of society due to the intrusion of Western values. With Islamization, religion and state are inseparable, and all laws governing public and private life have a religious basis. Until the Taliban, 63
its most virulent expression worldwide was the Iranian revolution that propelled Khomeini to power after the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979. But in September 1996, the Taliban imposed the world's strictest version of Islamization. In swift assertion of their authority, the Taliban banned photography, photographs, television, music, movies, and games. Men are forced to have beards and women don the burqa, a completely veiling garment many women had given up in favor of Western clothing or scarves that revealed part of their faces or ankles. Islamization in Afghanistan targets women as vulnerable to Western corruption. The Taliban insists that the principle way Islamic identity would be restored is to make certain that women return to their primary roles as wives and mothers and are kept under the authority of the men in their households. Islam is invoked to deny reproductive choice, health care, educational opportunity, and paid employment. Women have been executed for adultery and prostitution, often defined as simply being seen with a nonkin male. Beheading, amputation, shooting, and beating can occur for religious infractions such as clothing not sufficiently covering a women's entire body, for illegally teaching girls to read and write, and for going out in public alone - even if completely veiled. Displays of these atrocities are often staged in public venues where they are carried out to the applause and supposed delight of an appreciative audience. The Taliban onslaught has put thousands of women and their families in peril and has had serious economic 64
repercussions. The Taliban decreed out of existence even the minimal rights women and girls gained as Afghanistan began the economic development. With gender apartheid taking effect, women were quickly banned from the workforce. Schools and hospitals closed, even those serving only women and girls, lest they come into contact with men, which is strictly forbidden under Taliban interpretation of Islamic law. War widows in the capitol of Kabul have resorted to street begging as a means of livelihood, and are further imperiled because they are alone outside their homes. Women die after they are refused admittance to hospitals because there are no female nurses or doctors to tend to their medical needs. Women and children fleeing to the supposed safety of refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran are likely to find that safety is an illusion. In Afghanistan there are still places where women, by necessity, can come together outside their homes for some agricultural work, to gather fuel and water, and wash clothes. Even in the poorest homes, courtyards exist where women can visit other women. Refugee camps do offer sanctuary for physical survival, even amid squalor and overcrowded conditions, but psychological comfort is virtually nonexistent. Boredom and melancholia combined with intermittent periods of extreme fear are the norms. While not as extreme, Islamization insistence on gender apartheid still intrudes in the camps and Pakistan is doing little to curtail it. The camps I visited on the Afghan border over a decade ago clearly demonstrated that isolation has 65
disastrous outcomes on the mental health of women. Recent research by NGOs currently working in these camps conclude that the combined effects of war-related trauma and abuses of human rights have had profound effects on women's physical and mental health. Before the terrorist attacks, NGOs attempted to buffer the misery left in the wake of the Taliban, especially in the areas of health, education, and livelihood. But many programs ground to a halt due to fear of reprisals - by the Taliban in Afghanistan and by the uncertainty that the outside world would accept Taliban propaganda that NGOs were engaging in cultural interference. Although NGO aid virtually ended in Afghanistan when the bombing began, it now appears that the UN may be able to re-organize NGO assistance when the Taliban abandon Kabul. In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, the search for a social formula that would protect traditions under Islamic law while dealing with the inevitable demand for change was resolved in favor of an extreme form of countermodernization. Although there is no possibility for a sustained, internal women's movement, a worldwide Muslim feminist movement is gaining strength using the interpretations from the Koran (Qur'an), the holy book of Islam, to upgrade rather than degrade the position of women. There is electronic linkage to Muslim women's groups and human rights groups around the world. When economics, technology, reinterpretation of religious scripture, and global pressure are brought to bear, a counter to the 66
brutal excesses of countermodernization, in this case Islamization, exists. Yet no matter how productive any move toward protecting the human rights for women in Afghanistan appears to be, positive change is not inevitable. I share a persistent, nagging fear with many women throughout the world that in the religious and political jockeying that will accompany building a new regime in Afghanistan the critical issue of women s rights will yet again be dismissed as "too culturally sensitive" to deal with at this time. Yet it is abundantly clear that the success of any regime in Afghanistan - as well as throughout the world - hinges on the precept that women s rights, as human rights, are not to be denied. Linda Lindsey is a Professor of Sociology at Maryville University in St. Louis, MO. She is the author of Gender Roles: Sociological Perspectives (Third Edition, Prentice Hall) and co-author of Sociology (Second Edition, Prentice Hall). Dr. Lindsey also has written various articles and delivered numerous conference papers on women in the developing world, as well as having traveled internationally in her research. 67