Post-Taliban Kabul Marks International Women’s Day

The movie theater where they gathered had been burned by the Taliban. Its roof was jury-rigged out of red-and-white parachute cloth. The guests had to sit on new folding chairs still partially wrapped in plastic.

But that only added to the up-from-the-ashes charm Friday as hundreds of Afghan women and a raft of international dignitaries gathered for the first observance of International Women’s Day in Afghanistan since before the Taliban came to power. They bade a cheerful good riddance to a regime that kept women and girls out of school, in the home and under burkas--all on pain of beating, prison or death.

Instead of cowering and running from enforcers for the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, women with heads held high strode purposefully past soldiers into the Zainab theater and took their places in the front.

There was nary a burka in sight at the ceremony, attended by interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai and much of his Cabinet as well as U.N. human rights chief Mary Robinson. Nevertheless, on the streets of this capital and in the countryside, virtually all women still wear the all-encompassing, identity-hiding cloak in public.

At the ceremony, next to Afghan women in colorful head scarves were female members of the foreign armed forces taking part in the peacekeeping force in Kabul, dressed in camouflage uniforms and red berets.

Karzai, in a speech delivered in the Dari language, vowed to improve the status of women and pledged $500,000 to the country’s new Ministry of Women’s Affairs.

Women’s Day has not been an annual event in Afghanistan since the fall of the pro-Soviet government in 1992. The moujahedeen who took over held fundamentalist views, and strictures on women became even more intense when the Taliban movement conquered Kabul in 1996.

Under the Taliban, women were barred from school and jobs outside the home and could be beaten for daring to lift their burkas off their faces in public, even if only to better read a price in a market or an address on a building.

“This is a great and historical day,” Karzai said Friday. “We are determined to work to improve the lot of women after all their suffering under the narrow-minded and oppressive rule of the Taliban.”

The first speaker was Karzai’s deputy and the minister for women’s affairs, Sima Samar, a doctor who courageously funded and operated clandestine schools for girls in Afghanistan during the Taliban era through a nongovernmental organization she founded in neighboring Pakistan.

She condemned the Taliban regime as criminal and ignorant and urged that Afghan women and the international community join hands to improve the lot of Afghan women. But she also pointed out that Afghanistan remains an Islamic country and said that its feminism must reflect Islamic values.