Human rights must not be an afterthought
Polly Toynbee
Something horrible flits across the background in scenes from Afghanistan, scuttling out of sight. There it is, a brief blue or black flash a woman.
The top-to-toe burqa, 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 disgusting to be seen. It is a garment of 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.
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? (No letters, please, from Western women who have chosen to take the veil and claim it is liberating. It is their right in a tolerant society to wear anything, but that has nothing to do with the systematic cultural oppression of those with no choice.)
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, allowing men to divorce but not women all this perverted abhorrence of half the human race lies at the maggotty heart of religion.
Moderate, modernised believers may claim that the true Bible/Qur’an does not demand such things. But it hardly matters how close these savage manifestations are to the words of the Prophet or Christ. All fundamentalism plunges into the dark ages by using the oppression of women as its talisman. Religions that thrive are pliable, morphing to suit changing needs. Islamic fundamentalism flourishes because it too suits modern needs in a developing world that is seeking an identity to defy the all-engulfing West. And the burqa (or chador) is its battle flag.
The war leaders are coy about this cultural war of the worlds that is fought out over women’s bodies. There is a danger that Western leaders are seeking to blur the issue, to mollify semi-friendly Arab countries. Already the West’s new allies, the Northern Alliance, sneak into the language as brethren, the good guys. 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 is that in the background of all those pictures of our gallant allies? Flitting burqas, just like the Taliban women.
Talking to those in the United Nations, aid agencies and others who have lived in Afghanistan, they all say there is little difference between the two sides beyond old ethnic allegiances. The Taliban are Pashtuns, the Alliance an unstable mix of minority ethnic groups. Look at 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 in 1992 when the Alliance barged in to demand all women staff be sent home at once: they banned women from jobs long before the Taliban. Their assassinated leader, Ahmed Shah Masood, had a pleasing, French-speaking Western-educated aspect, but his past was hardly savoury. He cannily wooed Western support with promises that women would be able to work and girls attend school, but life for women in burqas 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 against atrocities before the fighting begins. Raping, burning, slaughtering and ethnic revenge killings marked their last victorious entry to Kabul. Current eagerness to chase out Osama 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 against moderate Islam but against the fundamentalism that breeds murderous martyrs. But the war leaders are fudging even this on their 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 Pakistan, in 1987. They are secular, sane and work hard running schools and clinics in refugee camps in Pakistan. They get no help from any government.
With the money flooding in, pushing these women forward and backing their work would be an act of faith in a democratic future. Or will realpolitik come before real women?