Title from RAWA’s website. “RAWA believes that freedom and democracy can’t be donated; it is the duty of the people of a country to fight and achieve these values.”
Both the US and Canada have stated among that high among their purpose for being in Afghanistan is to win freedom for the women there. The Feminist Majority Foundation in the States supports this. However, RAWA an organization of women who risk their very lives to fight for women’s rights, and who being women in the country in question would know best what they need, are very much against further war action.
Waging war does not lead to the liberation of women anywhere. Women always disproportionately suffer the effects of war, and to think that women’s rights can be won with bullets and bloodshed is a position dangerous in its naïveté. The Feminist Majority should know this instinctively.
Here are the facts: After the invasion, Americans received reports that newly liberated women had cast off their burquas and gone back to work. Those reports were mythmaking and propaganda. Aside from a small number of women in Kabul, life for Afghan women since the fall of the Taliban has remained the same or become much worse.
Under the Taliban, women were confined to their homes. They were not allowed to work or attend school. They were poor and without rights. They had no access to clean water or medical care, and they were forced into marriages, often as children.
Today, women in the vast majority of Afghanistan live in precisely the same conditions, with one notable difference: they are surrounded by war. The conflict outside their doorsteps endangers their lives and those of their families. It does not bring them rights in the household or in public, and it confines them even further to the prison of their own homes. Military escalation is just going to bring more tragedy to the women of Afghanistan.
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As feminists we know that war hurts women the most and that any thought of it being for the betterment of women is usually at best naive [witness the treatment of women in Nicaragua]. So while it saddens and sickens us to see the way women are being abused and denied their humanity, we must not make the mistake of thinking that bringing war and more violence is going to make things any better. Instead of telling the women of Afghanistan what they need, instead of worsening their living conditions and killing their friends, neighbours and children, why don’t we ask them what they need?
See also:
The Huffington Post
RAWA-Let’s rise against the war crimes of US and its fundamentalist lackeys!
RAWA – ‘US air-raid kills over 100 civilians in Farah’ – Warning Graphic Reality of War
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