Keep Women’s Rights in Mind, Group Urges

For six years, a national women’s rights organization has lobbied for international condemnation of Afghanistan’s Taliban for its crimes against Afghan women and girls. Now, as the eyes of the world are focused on that country, leaders of the Feminist Majority Foundation are urging the U.S. government to remember the plight of those they call “the first victims.”

They ask, as the U.S. prepares its response to last week’s attack, that humanitarian assistance be provided to Afghan refugees in Pakistan and that restoring the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan not be “marginalized as a side issue.”

The foundation opposes not only widespread airstrikes, but also negotiations with the Taliban, which could lend the group legitimacy. The latter concern was assuaged Wednesday when the White House refused such talks.

“These women were the first casualties of the war against the United States,” said Eleanor Smeal, president of the organization and a longtime feminist activist. “When the Taliban took over, they saw educated modern women as instruments of the West, who needed to be punished and killed.”

On Tuesday, Smeal met with State Department officials to share her knowledge and concerns. During a telephone interview from Washington after the meeting, she said that she believed the government recognizes “that this is a humanitarian crisis of enormous proportion.

“We have been saying for years that a country where so many people have no rights will create international instability,” Smeal said. Smeal has not been to Afghanistan, but the foundation sent a research team to Pakistan in 1999 to interview Afghan refugees. The foundation has also worked closely with Afghan women who have fled to the United States.

The United States should think of the Taliban as an occupying militia holding Afghanistan hostage, Smeal said, and itself as a liberating force.

Although experts on the Middle East say Smeal may be overstating her case, most agree that human rights should be a priority in the weeks and months to come.

Begun in 1996, the foundation’s Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid has been the nation’s loudest voice in protesting the treatment of Afghan women who, under the ruling Taliban, have been stripped of basic human rights. They are no longer allowed to work, to attend school, to leave their homes or to receive medical treatment.

The problem extends into Pakistan, where millions of Afghan women and children have taken refuge. According to the United Nations Food Program, many have only about three weeks worth of food.

Spearheaded by Mavis Leno, wife of comedian Jay Leno, the campaign played a key role in the Clinton administration’s refusal to recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government.

While American experts on the region do not argue that the Taliban’s treatment of women is inhumane, they find some of what the foundation is saying problematic.

“Certainly they are to be commended for reiterating the need to protect civilians,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan research and policy center. “But there seems to be a contradiction. If by saying we should have done something sooner, they mean military action . . . [that] seems to contradict their desire to protect civilian lives. We have done virtually everything else” to condemn the Taliban.

David Gibbs, an associate professor of political science at the University of Arizona and an expert on Afghanistan, agreed with much of what Smeal said. But he said the moujahedeen, the Islamic soldiers the U.S. supported during the war with the former Soviet Union, also had a terrible record on the treatment of women.

In future policymaking, Gibbs said, groups that mistreat women and girls should be ostracized by the international community.

Smeal said she and her peers felt frustrated now that the terrorist attacks have given their darkest fears credence.

“People just thought, ‘Oh, there they go about the women again,’ ” she said. “People need to realize that women are important, not just in their own right, but that we’re the canaries in the coal mine. How women are treated is a good indication of which way a society is going.”