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November 9, 2001/Cheshvan 23, 5762, Vol. 54, No. 9
Standing with Afghan women
PAULA AMANN
Washington Jewish Week
Women, carrying luggage on their heads, pass thorough a street in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, March 8, 2000. International human rights groups, women's organizations and governments have assailed the Taliban's restrictive policies toward women, which the Taliban say are in keeping with Islamic teachings and Afghan traditions.
Photo courtesy of AP Photo/Amir Shah
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Barbara Bick spent Sept. 11 in Afghanistan. Days earlier, she crossed paths, in the border town of Khoja Bahauddin, with two men posing as Arab journalists. On Sept. 9, using a rigged camera, the two men blew themselves up along with Ahmed Shah Massoud, commander of the Northern Alliance, a rebel group fighting the ruling Taliban.
Bick had left her home Aug. 28 to spend 2 1/2 weeks along the country's dusty frontier with Tajikistan.
Moving through the area controlled by the Northern Alliance, lodging at guesthouses without running water, living largely on rice and potatoes, the intrepid Jewish grandmother, 76, sought to learn about the condition of women.
"People say the Northern Alliance isn't any better than the Taliban," says Bick, disagreeing with that assessment. "I was there, I saw and it wasn't a picture show put on for me: Women work, study and live freely."
Traveling with three others from the Association to Support the Women of Afghanistan (NEGAR), Bick said she attended meetings with Northern Alliance President Burhanuddin Rabbani and his wife.
In addition to Bick, the delegation included an American woman who lived in Afghanistan for many years and two Afghan exiles, one living in Falls Church, Va., and the other in Paris.
NEGAR was behind the crafting of a Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women at a two-day conference in the Tajik capital of Dushanbe in June 2000.
The group urged Rabbani to commit to including this declaration in the constitution of any future Afghan government his alliance may join "so it is explicit the women have all the rights of any other citizens."
Bick's Afghan companions persuaded the president's wife, in an act of feminist symbolism, to walk down the streets of Feyzabad, a northeastern town, without her burka, the head-to-toe covering mandated for women by the Taliban regime.
Bick says in the Northern Alliance areas she visited, women in workplaces, fields and schools did not wear this covering but generally donned it for walking on busy streets in town.
The NEGAR group managed to travel in slacks and short-sleeved shirts without adverse reactions from anyone, Bick relates.
The Afghan regime has also banned women from all employment outside their homes.
Yet across the Northern Alliance zone where Bick traveled, she says she met women doctors, nurses, tailors and teachers along with others who work with the local offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross and U.N. agencies. She toured a Feyzabad hospital where the head doctor was female.
"The condition of women under the Taliban and the condition of the women we saw is like night and day," she says.
Bick became interested in Afghanistan when she turned 65. After decades of involvement as a feminist activist, she thought her life would become more sedate.
"It struck me, 'Barbara, you're through with adventure' and then a woman came up to me at a cocktail party and said, 'Would you like to go to Afghanistan?' " Bick recalls. "I immediately said yes. Then I found out there was a war going on."
In the midst of the Afghan-Soviet conflict, she had accepted an invitation from the Women's Union of Afghanistan to tour the country.
"In fact, it was a fabulous trip. I met wonderful women," says Bick, recalling encounters with two female Cabinet members, and an English professor and a school principal who helped guide her group. She visited a university where roughly half the students were women.
Upon her return, Bick immersed herself in Afghan history and in the mid-1990s, followed the early moves against women by the new Taliban regime. Her concern for her new friends there led to her association with Feminist Majority, a group that lobbies for the rights of Afghan women, and later with NEGAR.
Despite the relative freedom along today's northern border, poverty reigns. Bick described roads without cars (donkeys and horses provide most transportation), mud brick houses without toilets, schools without enough desks, hospitals without enough medicines and basic supplies.
Given this situation, Bick welcomes the Bush administration attempt to distinguish between its terrorist opponents in Afghanistan and the country's struggling people.
"I'm impressed by the fact that they haven't rushed in with indiscriminate bombing, that they have emphasized that this is not a war against Islam, and that they understand the enemy is a fanatic world view that looks upon the modern world of multiethnic, multicultural and multireligious freedom as something evil," says Bick. "We really have to root out that kind of fanatic terrorist network."
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