Trying to Save Women Buried Alive
No, guys, no. Wrong.
Here it is, well into October--Domestic Violence Awareness Month--and some of you still do not get it: You do not observe Domestic Violence Awareness Month by committing domestic violence.
You, in Sherman Oaks, who killed your daughter and then yourself to punish your ex-wife . . . you, in Baldwin Park, who didn’t understand any part of “no” and allegedly killed your ex-girlfriend a year after she broke up with you . . . and you, Senor Sensitivity, smashing your girlfriend’s nose during an anti-domestic violence rally in Spain.
One by one, or rather two by two, it is dreadful enough. But what of an entire country that institutionalizes a domestic violence that amounts to a terrorist campaign on women--so inhumane it demands a new word to describe it?
How about “gendercide”?
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If you were a woman or a girl in Afghanistan, here is what October would be like for you, under the Taliban:
There is no school for you, not even elementary school. Where once women were half the teachers and most of the university professors, now you can neither learn nor teach. If your kids get sick, if you go into labor, male doctors cannot so much as take your temperature, and almost no female doctors still practice. So you may stay home, and you might just die.
At home, your windows must be painted over lest a passing male glimpse a female form. If you go out, you wear a burka, an unwieldy swaddling of cloth with only the eyes exposed through a small mesh screen, like the one in the door of a solitary confinement cell. But woe betide you if the Afghan winds--so brisk that kite-flying used to be a national pastime until it was banned as irreligious--whip the fabric and expose even an inch of skin. You’ll be chased and beaten, maybe to death.
The same will happen if you set foot outside your door with anyone but your brother, husband, father or son. Yet many men died in the civil war; perhaps yours are among them, and you cannot leave home at all. But why should you? You can’t have a job.
Today in New York and tomorrow in L.A., writer Mavis Leno (yes, as in that Leno) is taking the lead in a Feminist Majority Foundation campaign to make the Clinton administration and Congress act with the same force against Afghanistan’s “gender apartheid” as was used in South Africa, flexing policy and that powerful crowbar called the dollar.
“If we do not call this human rights abuse,” Leno says, “then we have a problem calling women human, or we don’t call ‘abuse’ anything that doesn’t involve killing somebody.”
In their desolation and isolation, Afghan women remind her of her father, trapped years ago in a mine cave-in. He came out of it with broken ribs, but he told his daughter that “the most terrible thing was that he had no way of knowing if anyone was looking for him.” So it is now: “These women have been buried alive, and they don’t know if anybody even knows they’re there and is coming for them. We need to let them know we’re coming.”
This is no “women’s thing,” no “liberal thing.” Jay Leno will try to enlist Bob and Elizabeth Dole. One of Orange County’s GOP congressmen, Dana Rohrabacher, is ferocious on the topic. In this he has no bigger supporter than Hassan Nouri, an Afghan American engineer who set up war-zone medical clinics and opposed Communists and the Taliban alike.
The Taliban, Nouri says, distorts Islam to “violate human rights in the name of religion.” After a woman was raped by dozens of rival soldiers and died, the Taliban pledged to stop such treatment of women. In a way, says Nouri acidly, they did. “They put them all in prison.”
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Once the beneficiary of U.S. support, the rebel Taliban is now the ruling Taliban. It runs Afghanistan like a cult concentration camp; it is no more Islamic than the people who cheered Matthew Shepard’s murder are Christian. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright calls its dealings with women “harsh and backward.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein has held hearings into its abuses. Even Iran keeps the Taliban at arm’s length, like a bad fish. If it were a virus--and some fear it is politically contagious--it would have been quarantined long ago.
So where, people ask, is government pressure on its rich ally, Saudi Arabia? On its neighbor Pakistan? I have a question, just as good--where are the power brokers who are laboring to whip up moral outrage on a sex scandal, when here truly is an outrageous offense against a whole gender, and all they have to do to see it is to lift a veil?
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Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.
