Women under attack in Iraq, Afghanistan
SuzannePjam
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Women under attack in Iraq, Afghanistan
Females become targets when they take public roles, U.N. official says
UNITED NATIONS - Women are facing increasing violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, especially when they speak out publicly to defend women’s rights, a senior U.N. official told the U.N. Security Council.
Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of the U.N. Development Fund for Women, called on for fresh efforts to ensure the safety of women in countries emerging from conflicts, to provide them with jobs, and ensure that they receive justice, including compensation for rape.
“What UNIFEM is seeing on the ground — in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia — is that public space for women in these situations is shrinking,” Heyzer said Thursday. “Women are becoming assassination targets when they dare defend women’s rights in public decision-making.”
Heyzer spoke at a daylong open council meeting on implementation of a 2000 resolution that called for women to be included in decision-making positions at every level of striking and building on peace deals. It also called for the prosecution of crimes against women and increased protection of women and girls during war.
Undersecretary-General for Peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno said that, in the past year, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the first woman head of state in Africa, Liberia adopted an anti-rape law, women in Sierra Leone pushed for laws on human trafficking, inheritance and property rights and women in East Timor submitted a draft domestic violence bill to parliament.
'Lives of girls at risk'
Despite these positive developments, he said, women face widespread insecurity and in many societies violence is still used as a tool to control and regulate the actions of women and girls seeking to rebuild their homes and communities.
“In Afghanistan, attacks on school establishments put the lives of girls at risk when they attempt to exercise their basic rights to education,” Guehenno said. “Women and girls are raped when they go out to fetch firewood in Darfur. In Liberia, over 40 percent of women and girls surveyed have been victims of sexual violence. In the eastern Congo, over 12,000 rapes of women and girls have been reported in the last six months alone.”
Assistant Secretary-General Rachel Mayanja, the U.N. special adviser on women’s issues, said that from Congo and Sudan to Somalia and East Timor, she said, “women continue to be exposed to violence or targeted by parties to the conflict ... lacking the basic means of survival and health care.”
At the same time, Mayanja said, they remain “underrepresented in decision-making, particularly on war and peace issues.”
Assistant Secretary-General Carolyn McAskie, who is in charge of supporting the new U.N. Peacebuilding Commission which was established this year to help countries emerging from conflict, said her office will try to ensure that “space is created for women’s active participation in political, economic and social life.”
“We cannot ignore the voices of the women from the time we broker peace onwards,” McAskie said. “Peacemaking is not just an exercise involving combatants, it must involve all of society, and that means women.”
At the end of the meeting, the council said it “remains deeply concerned by the pervasiveness of all forms of violence against women in armed conflicts.” and reiterated its strong condemnation of all acts of sexual misconduct by U.N. peacekeeping personnel.
Allegations of sexual abuse have also been reported in peacekeeping missions in Congo, Bosnia, Kosovo, Cambodia, East Timor and West Africa.
Females become targets when they take public roles, U.N. official says
UNITED NATIONS - Women are facing increasing violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, especially when they speak out publicly to defend women’s rights, a senior U.N. official told the U.N. Security Council.
Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of the U.N. Development Fund for Women, called on for fresh efforts to ensure the safety of women in countries emerging from conflicts, to provide them with jobs, and ensure that they receive justice, including compensation for rape.
“What UNIFEM is seeing on the ground — in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia — is that public space for women in these situations is shrinking,” Heyzer said Thursday. “Women are becoming assassination targets when they dare defend women’s rights in public decision-making.”
Heyzer spoke at a daylong open council meeting on implementation of a 2000 resolution that called for women to be included in decision-making positions at every level of striking and building on peace deals. It also called for the prosecution of crimes against women and increased protection of women and girls during war.
Undersecretary-General for Peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno said that, in the past year, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the first woman head of state in Africa, Liberia adopted an anti-rape law, women in Sierra Leone pushed for laws on human trafficking, inheritance and property rights and women in East Timor submitted a draft domestic violence bill to parliament.
'Lives of girls at risk'
Despite these positive developments, he said, women face widespread insecurity and in many societies violence is still used as a tool to control and regulate the actions of women and girls seeking to rebuild their homes and communities.
“In Afghanistan, attacks on school establishments put the lives of girls at risk when they attempt to exercise their basic rights to education,” Guehenno said. “Women and girls are raped when they go out to fetch firewood in Darfur. In Liberia, over 40 percent of women and girls surveyed have been victims of sexual violence. In the eastern Congo, over 12,000 rapes of women and girls have been reported in the last six months alone.”
Assistant Secretary-General Rachel Mayanja, the U.N. special adviser on women’s issues, said that from Congo and Sudan to Somalia and East Timor, she said, “women continue to be exposed to violence or targeted by parties to the conflict ... lacking the basic means of survival and health care.”
At the same time, Mayanja said, they remain “underrepresented in decision-making, particularly on war and peace issues.”
Assistant Secretary-General Carolyn McAskie, who is in charge of supporting the new U.N. Peacebuilding Commission which was established this year to help countries emerging from conflict, said her office will try to ensure that “space is created for women’s active participation in political, economic and social life.”
“We cannot ignore the voices of the women from the time we broker peace onwards,” McAskie said. “Peacemaking is not just an exercise involving combatants, it must involve all of society, and that means women.”
At the end of the meeting, the council said it “remains deeply concerned by the pervasiveness of all forms of violence against women in armed conflicts.” and reiterated its strong condemnation of all acts of sexual misconduct by U.N. peacekeeping personnel.
Allegations of sexual abuse have also been reported in peacekeeping missions in Congo, Bosnia, Kosovo, Cambodia, East Timor and West Africa.
"Where there is sacrifice there is someone collecting the sacrificial offerings."-- Ayn Rand
"Some of my friends sit around every evening and they worry about the times ahead,
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference and the promise of an early bed..."-- Elvis Costello
"Some of my friends sit around every evening and they worry about the times ahead,
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference and the promise of an early bed..."-- Elvis Costello
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really when was that? are you refering too carter and Regean supporting the Mujahideen against a soviet invasion of afgahistan?
I was talking about diplomatic missions of talibans in the US. Those guys were toured through the US. didn't know about it?
I heard about that years ago already.
Women have always been treated poorly there but now that they are willing to stand up for themsleves, they are met with more violence to try and stop their progress. Sound familiar?
stick around, you will see 8 people blame bush for this
Dude. You brought it up.
cuz i know people blame bush for this.
I agree. As much as I dislike Bush, he is not responsible for the treatment of women in the middle east.
By Robert Scheer
Published May 22, 2001 in the Los Angeles Times
Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti-U.S. terrorists, destroy every vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush administration will embrace you. All that matters is that you line up as an ally in the drug war, the only international cause that this nation still takes seriously.
That's the message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, the most virulent anti-American violators of human rights in the world today. The gift, announced last Thursday by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in addition to other recent aid, makes the U.S. the main sponsor of the Taliban and rewards that "rogue regime" for declaring that opium growing is against the will of God. So, too, by the Taliban's estimation, are most human activities, but it's the ban on drugs that catches this administration's attention.
Never mind that Osama bin Laden still operates the leading anti-American terror operation from his base in Afghanistan, from which, among other crimes, he launched two bloody attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998.
Sadly, the Bush administration is cozying up to the Taliban regime at a time when the United Nations, at U.S. insistence, imposes sanctions on Afghanistan because the Kabul government will not turn over Bin Laden.
The war on drugs has become our own fanatics' obsession and easily trumps all other concerns. How else could we come to reward the Taliban, who has subjected the female half of the Afghan population to a continual reign of terror in a country once considered enlightened in its treatment of women?
At no point in modern history have women and girls been more systematically abused than in Afghanistan where, in the name of madness masquerading as Islam, the government in Kabul obliterates their fundamental human rights. Women may not appear in public without being covered from head to toe with the oppressive shroud called the burkha , and they may not leave the house without being accompanied by a male family member. They've not been permitted to attend school or be treated by male doctors, yet women have been banned from practicing medicine or any profession for that matter.
The lot of males is better if they blindly accept the laws of an extreme religious theocracy that prescribes strict rules governing all behavior, from a ban on shaving to what crops may be grown. It is this last power that has captured the enthusiasm of the Bush White House.
The Taliban fanatics, economically and diplomatically isolated, are at the breaking point, and so, in return for a pittance of legitimacy and cash from the Bush administration, they have been willing to appear to reverse themselves on the growing of opium. That a totalitarian country can effectively crack down on its farmers is not surprising. But it is grotesque for a U.S. official, James P. Callahan, director of the State Department's Asian anti-drug program, to describe the Taliban's special methods in the language of representative democracy: "The Taliban used a system of consensus-building," Callahan said after a visit with the Taliban, adding that the Taliban justified the ban on drugs "in very religious terms."
Of course, Callahan also reported, those who didn't obey the theocratic edict would be sent to prison.
In a country where those who break minor rules are simply beaten on the spot by religious police and others are stoned to death, it's understandable that the government's "religious" argument might be compelling. Even if it means, as Callahan concedes, that most of the farmers who grew the poppies will now confront starvation. That's because the Afghan economy has been ruined by the religious extremism of the Taliban, making the attraction of opium as a previously tolerated quick cash crop overwhelming.
For that reason, the opium ban will not last unless the U.S. is willing to pour far larger amounts of money into underwriting the Afghan economy.
As the Drug Enforcement Administration's Steven Casteel admitted, "The bad side of the ban is that it's bringing their country--or certain regions of their country--to economic ruin." Nor did he hold out much hope for Afghan farmers growing other crops such as wheat, which require a vast infrastructure to supply water and fertilizer that no longer exists in that devastated country. There's little doubt that the Taliban will turn once again to the easily taxed cash crop of opium in order to stay in power.
The Taliban may suddenly be the dream regime of our own war drug war zealots, but in the end this alliance will prove a costly failure. Our long sad history of signing up dictators in the war on drugs demonstrates the futility of building a foreign policy on a domestic obsession.
so we gave them money to fight the war on drugs. this was before 9/11. is the US also bad for giving Iran assitence after their really bad eathquake in 2003?
They didn't help to "fight the war on drugs," whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean in the first place. They announced that opium growing was against the will of god. They needed $43 million for that?
In giving that and other aid, this administration made us the leading financial backers of a regime that treated 50% of it's population in a way that would get you jailed in any civilized nation. In addition, they harbored a terrorist that had already attacked the United States. You remember, don't you? The embassay attacks that republicans endlessly harp about, complaining that Clinton did nothing? Well Bush did WORSE than nothing, he actually SUPPORTED these people!
(By the way, you know someone's going to blame bush. Why pursue it? It always ends up the same way...lots of arguing....nothing of importance.)
im really sick of your condesending attitude because you dont agree with me.
Except that she is, you know, right. How can you completely ignore the significance of what the article covered?
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She is right, but its not really the same topic as the original post. The poor treatment of women didnt start under Bush, and if Bush didnt support the taliban it doesnt mean that women would have been treated any better. I certainly agree that Bush shouldnt be dealing with the Taliban, but I really dont see what that has to do with this discussion. Many Muslim nations are living in the 14th century and it isnt because of Bush, and it started well before Bush.
It happened long before Bush and hopefully it will end soon.
Hippiemom is 100% wrong about this being important in this context. But that's just my opinion.
I'm not disagreeing with that at all. It's just that this administration has so, so much to answer for and I cannot believe how many people still refuse to open their eyes to such obvious FACTS. That being said, EVERYONE in Iraq is a target anyway- man, woman, child, muslin, christian, athiest, cat, dog, sand dunes, etc.
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I absolutely agree they have a lot to answer for, but they dont have to answer for everything, because everything isnt their fault. Im sorry but when a thread about how Muslim women are treated turns into posting articles about Bush that have nothing to do with the topic, then to me it looks like a lack of concern for the issue at hand, which is the mistreatment of women. The abuses and oppressions that many of these Muslim nations force upon their societies are reprehensible, and go far beyond Bush. Bush is a terrible leader there is no question, but not every world problem lays at this feet.
Actually I meant to say, that in fairness to you, that you werent first one to bring up Bush. I do realize that.
That's fine. Hippiemom already explained how this topic came up. As for muslim countries and such, I really think this needs to be left to said countries. It's difficult enough for western countries to find an agreeable way to deal with Islam within their own countries. Living in London, i know this first hand- there aren't clear solutions to such drastic cultural differences. For there to be any true and meaningful change, it must come from within the group in question. No one from the outside can force that. Even influencing it can be very problematic minefield.
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I read very well thank you. I dont agree that bush's administration gave 43 million to the taliban. it was actually colin powell and the dept of state who was behind that. it was a gift for stopping the growing of opium. this was before 9/11, like I said. the world was a very different place before that happened.
am I complaining that clinton did nothing? no. should he have done much more? yes.
Huh? how can Colin powel and the d.o.s just give the taliban 43 million dollars without the administration knowing about it? Doesn't someone have to sign off on shit like that? Or did I completely misunderstand you?
I didnt say the administration didnt know about it. the state dept doesnt need to ask bush to give a reward for stopping the growth of opium.
here's the thing with real life, businesses, and yes the government (a nig business)...a department gets a budget at the beginning of the year. The budget is to cover expenses in certain categories. They use the $ how they see fit and often does nto require any additional approval unless they are requesting more $...or if it reaches a certain level of spending. And when you are the government, $43 million is a drop in the bucket.