Please sign at the bottom to support, and include your town.
Then copy and e-mail to as many people as possible.
If you receive this list with more than 50 names on it,
please e-mail> copy of it to sara-bande@brandeis.edu
<mailto:sara-bande@brandeis.edu>
Even if you decide not to sign, please be considerate and do not
kill the petition. Thank you. It is best to copy rather than forward
the petition.
Melissa Buckheit Brandeis University
(Remark from n?28-Olivier Houdas : the talibans got there thanks to
US military aid... they were supposed to be better than communists)
>TEXT:
The government of Afghanistan is waging a war upon women. The
situation is getting so bad that one person in an editorial of the
Times compared the treatment of women there to the treatment of Jews
in pre-Holocaust Poland. Since the Taliban took power in 1996, women
have had to wear burqua and have been beaten and stoned in public for
not having the proper attire, even if this means simply not having
the mesh covering in front of their eyes. One woman was beaten to
DEATH by an angry mob of fundamentalists for accidentally exposing
her arm while she was driving.
Another was stoned to death for trying to leave the country with a
man that was not a relative. Women are not allowed to work or even
go out in public without a male relative; professional women such as
professors, trans-lators, doctors, lawyers,artists and writers have
been forced from their jobs and stuffed into their homes, so that
depression is becoming so widespread that it has reached emergency
levels.
There is no way in such an extreme Islamic society to know the
suicide rate with certainty, but relief workers are estimating that
the suicide rate among women, who cannot find proper medication and
treatment for severe depression and would rather take their lives
than live in such conditions, has increased significantly. Homes
where a woman is present must have their windows painted so that she
can never be seen by outsiders. They must wear silent shoes so that
they are never heard. Women live in fear of their lives for the
slightest misbehavior. Because they cannot work, those without male
relatives or husbands are either starving to death or begging on the
street, even if they hold Ph.D.'s.
There are almost no medical facilities available for women, and
relief workers, in protest, have mostly left the country,taking
medicine and psychologists and other things necessary to treat the
sky-rocketing level of depression among women. At one of the rare
hospitals for women, a reporter found still, nearly lifeless bodies
lying motionless on top of beds, wrapped in their burqua, unwilling
to speak, eat, or do anything, but slowly wasting away. Others have
gone mad and were seen crouched in corners, perpetually rocking or
crying, most of them in fear. One doctor is considering, when what
little medication that is left finally runs out,
Leaving these women in front of the president's residence as a form
of peaceful protest. It is at the point where the term 'human rights
violations' has become an understatement. Husbands have the power
of life and death over their women relatives, especially their wives,
but an angry mob has just as much right to stone or beat a woman,
often to death, for exposing an inch of flesh or offending them in
the slightest way.
David Cornwell has told me that we in the United States should not
judge the Afghan people for such treatment because it is a
'cultural 'thing', but this is not even true. Women enjoyed relative
freedom, to work, dress generally as they wanted, and drive and
appear in public alone until only 1996 -- the rapidity of this
transition is the main reason for the depression and suicide; women
who were once educators for doctors or simply used to basic human
freedoms are now severely restricted and treated as sub-human in the
name of right-wing fundamentalist Islam. It is not their tradition
or 'culture', but is alien to them, and it is extreme even for those
cultures where fundamentalism is the rule. Besides, if we could
excuse everything on cultural grounds, then we should not be appalled
that the Carthaginians
sacrificed their infant children, that little girls are circumcised
in parts of Africa, that blacks in the deep south in the 1930's were
lynched, prohibited from voting, and forced to submit to unjust Jim
Crow laws.
Everyone has a right to a tolerable human existence, even if they
are women in a Muslim country in a part of the world that Americans
do not understand. If we can threaten military force in Kosovo in the
name of human rights for the sake of ethnic Albanians, Americans can
certainly express peaceful out-rage at the oppression, murder and
injustice committed against women by the Taliban.
************ STATEMENT:
In signing this, we agree that the current treatment of women in
Afghanistan is completely UNACCEPTABLE and deserves support and
action by the people of the United States and other countries and
their Governments and that the current situation in Afghanistan will
not be tolerated. Women's Rights is not a small issue anywhere and
it is UNACCEPTABLE for women in 1998 to be treated as sub-human and
so much as property. Equality and human decency is a RIGHT not a
freedom, whether one lives in Afghanistan or the United States.*****
1) Leslie London, Cape Town (South Africa)
2) Tim Holtz, Boston, MA (USA)
3) Joyce Millen, Cambridge, MA (USA)
4) Carmelo Vazquez, Madrid (Spain)
5) Jesus Martin, Madrid (Spain)
6) Belen Lopez Celada, Madrid (Spain)
7) Laura Malefakis, Madrid (Spain)
8) Mariangeles Fernandez (Spain)
9) Daniel J. Bustelo Elicabe-Urriol (Spain)
10) Ana Maria Sanchez Duran, Madrid (Spain)
11) Anna Ramirez Galvan, Barcelona (Spain)
12) Alberto Fernandez Liria, Madrid (Spain)
13) Lina Rodriguez Rodrigo, Madrid (Spain)
14) Jose Maria Gomez Ros (Spain)
15) Sandro Onori, Rome (Italy)
16) Piergiorgio Cerello, Torino (Italy)
17) Valeria Cappa, Torino (Italy)
18) Laura Pastore, Torino (Italy)
19) Carlo Bruschi, Torino (Italy)
20) Silvia Trini Castelli, Torino (Italy)
21) Luciano Gaido, Torino (Italy)
22) Carlo Ricchiardi, Torino (Italy)
23) Gabriele Ricchiardi, Torino (Italy)
24) Barbara D'Anna, Torino (Italy)
25) Arnaud Leroy, Paris (France)
26) Jean-Daniel Richerd, Montreal (Canada)
27) Vincent Dubois, Taipei (Taiwan RoC)
28) Olivier Houdas, Paris (France)
29) Vivian Ng, Singapore
30) Linda Lim, Singapore
31) Max Wang, Singapore
32) Steven .B
33) John (Singapore)
34) Saji R, Kerala (INDIA),
35) Senthil Rajan (Singapore)
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