The Treatment of Women in Afghanistan - Research Paper Example

Executive Summary When the Taliban managed to first seize control over Afghanistan, they set off a violent totalitarian regime that sought to among other things, strip the country’s girls and women off all their basic rights and treat them as inferior citizens. The Taliban regime issued a number of edicts that negatively impacted women employment, education health and social participation across the country. This paper seeks to establish the treatment of Afghani women in the periods before, during and after the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Table of Contents Executive Summary 1 The Treatment of Women in Afghanistan Before the Taliban 3 The Treatment of Women in Afghanistan During the Taliban 4 The Treatment of Women In Afghanistan After the Taliban 5 How Afghanistan is Still Not Where It Needs to be in Respect to Women’s Rights 6 Conclusion 8 Works cited 9 The Treatment of Women in Afghanistan Before the Taliban The treatment of women in Afghanistan before the Taliban is seen to have been relatively quite fair. The Afghan women’s right to freely choose their possession and work is seen to have been written into the 1980 Afghanistan constitution when Afghanistan signed both the UN Convention on the elimination of Discrimination Against Women as well as the International bill of rights for women that had been issued by the UN in 1979 (Verdirame 176). Under the convention, the right to work is considered as being an inalienable right of all human beings and when Afghanistan become a signatory nation, women in the country were seen to quickly emerge as key participants in the country’s economy and held key positions as farmers, teachers, doctors, equal partners in the country’s civil service and engineers. In a 2001, US congress report, it was pointed out that before the Taliban; women were treated in a affair manner that saw them emerge as active leaders in both politics and public life. This is exemplified by the fact that women teachers in the country essentially represented an impressive 70% of the teachers in the country, in addition to their also accounting for an estimated 40% of the doctors as well as a vast majority of the health workers’. Of note also is that, over half of the university students in Afghanistan were women. In fact, in 1977 women were seen to essentially make up an estimated over 15 percent of the country’s highest legislative branch; a percentage that is notably higher than the 14 percent of women that served in the United States congress as at the time when the report was being presented in 2001 (US Congress 21276). The freedom that women enjoyed before the Taliban was also seen to allow those living in cities to wear western-style clothing and makeup (Banting 23). The Treatment of Women in Afghanistan During the Taliban When the severely repressive Taliban regime first came into power, its treatment of women is seen to have been quite biased an unfair. The Taliban repressed the women’s right to education by issuing an edict in 1997 that sought to try and enforce a nationwide ban on access to public education for all girls and women in the country and transformed most of girls’ schools that were being run by the former state into all-male institutions (Linschoten and Kuehn 108). When determined Afghani attempted to still educating their children while complying with the law by setting up numerous private educational institutions, the Taliban responded by issuing another repressive edict that stipulated that all private funded education in the country be limited to only those girls that happened to be under the age of eight years in addition to this education being limited to the study of the Koran only. In 1997, the Taliban issued an edict that banned all women from engaging in any work in public places (Crews and Tarzi 98). Although this edict affected all the different sectors of the economy across the country, the health sector is seen to have been most severely affected primarily as a result of the large number of women doctors and nurses. Some women were able to find adequate sources of income by working for the various NGOs in the country however, this was soon to be stopped when in 2000, the Taliban banned all Afghani women from undertaking any work with both the foreign and domestic NGO’s. The Taliban are seen to have also offered unequal treatment to women in the provision of healthcare services (Linschoten and Kuehn 108). During the Taliban era, health care providers are seen to have been mainly located in the urban areas as a result of the fact that healthcare centers and hospitals that happened to have been located in the countryside having been destroyed during the ravaging civil war. The unequal treatment of women by the Taliban is mainly seen to have been perpetuated by the Taliban’s introduction of gender segregation in the country’s health sector in 1998. Under the segregation, women and men could not be allowed to inhabit the same building and room in addition to male doctors not being allowed to treat female patients. The poor access to essential medical services resulted in large numbers of women dying from easily curable diseases such as diarrhea as well as easily preventable diseases such as tuberculosis (Yakos 111). The tuberculosis mortality rates in Afghanistan quickly increased to cause them to become among the highest in the world. Of the approximately 133,000 cases as at 2001, 70 percent of these were found to be females aged between the ages of 15 and 45 years. The Taliban were also seen to impose strict social codes that eroded the progress that had been made by women in the country. Under the Taliban, women were required to be confined to their individual private homes in addition to their being required to wear the burkha, which is a heavy garment that is designed to cover whole body while leaving only a small mesh window through which they could be able to see through. The Treatment of Women In Afghanistan After the Taliban Since the 2001 fall of the Taliban, Afghani women have been able to more readily access educational resources in the country with the right to education for both the women and girls being anchored in the country’s 2003 constitution. An approximated 1.5 million children that had been barred by the Taliban from accessing education were seen to reurn to school (Grover 125) by March 2002. This number was to quickly grow to an approximated 5.2 million by 2002 with about 2 million of these children being seen to be girls. Afghanistan’s new constitution has allowed more job opportunities as it stipulates that women and men are equal. The country has also been able to set up a Women’s Affairs Ministry that is tasked with ensuring that the status of women in the country’s society is significantly strengthened. This ministry is involved with helping women throughout the country find suitable employment and an estimated 75% of its employees are women (Katzman 21). In 2001, the provision of quality healthcare became a priority for Afghanistan’s interim government. The Afghanistan government is required to ensure that it provides all Afghani’s including girls and women adequate healthcare by expanding medical services as well as health centers across the country. How Afghanistan is Still Not Where It Needs to be in Respect to Women’s Rights Although Afghani women and girls now have equal access to education as men, improvements still needs to be made as there is still some antagonism towards this as was evidenced by the burning of 30 girls schools in the country in 2004. The large number of attacks on teachers and students in the northern provinces is also an issue that needs to be addressed so as to ensure that universal education continues to be availed in the country. Although women participation in the country’s labor force has significantly improved since the fall of the Taliban, it is still found to be the lowest in the South Asia region in addition to its mostly being restricted to informal sectors like agriculture, where women are seen to comprise of an estimated 65% of the workforce (Katzman 21). This is in sharp contrast to the participation of women during the pre-Taliban era when large numbers of women were gainfully employed in the skilled sectors like education and medicine. The government needs to implement policies designed to help in providing women with relevant skills to help ensure that they are able to provide skilled labor. While Afghanistan women are now able to better access medical services and health facilities, a march 2005 World Bank reported pointed out that an estimated 40 percent of all the health facilities that provided basic services still happened to lack female staff which was seen to provide a number of constraints to women’s access to adequate health care (Katzman 23). More female doctors need to be recruited by the government to help in remedying this situation by increasing the number of female students accepted into the country’s medical schools as well as the employment of expatriate female doctors to help in temporarily providing health services to women across the country. Conclusion While the developments that Afghani women had made in the latter part of the 20th century were completely reversed during the Taliban reign that treated women in an unfair manner by setting up a gender segregation system that negatively impacted all women in the country and treated them in an unfair manner, impressive gains have been made by the government after the Taliban’s fall. The country’s new constitution is also seen to be emphasizing on offering women equal opportunities and rights to their male counterparts. There is room however for more improvements to be made as the treatment of women in the country is still largely found to be unequal to that of men. Works cited Banting, Erinn, Afghanistan: the people. New York : Crabtree Pub. Co. 2003. Print. Verdirame, Guglielmo. The UN and Human Rights : guarding the guardians. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print. Crews, Robert and Tarzi, Amin. The Taliban and the crisis of Afghanistan. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2008. Print. Yakos, Marvin. Jesus, Jews and Jihad. [Longwood, FL] : Xulon Press, 2006. Print. Grover, Sonja. Schoolchildren as propaganda tools in the war on terror : violating the rights of Afghani children under international law / Sonja C. Grover. Berlin ; New York : Springer, 2011. Print. Katzman, Kenneth. Afghanistan: Post-Taliban Governance, Security, and U. S. Policy. DIANE Publishing, 2010. Print. U S Congress. Congressional Record, V. 147, PT. 15, October 25, 2001 to November 2, 2001. Government Printing Office, 2006. Print. Read More