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| ISBN-13: | 9781742242224 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 405 KB |
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From Victims to Suspects
Muslim Women Since 9/11
By Shakira Hussein
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2016 Shakira HusseinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-222-4
CHAPTER 1
Afghan girls
Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror — not only because our hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us.
LAURA BUSH, 17 NOVEMBER 2001
Steve McCurry's 'Afghan Girl' was perhaps one of the most memorable images of the Cold War, as well as National Geographic's most successful cover photograph. Her face framed by a tatty red scarf, the Afghan girl with the striking green eyes gazes straight into the camera. Published in 1985 with the caption 'Haunted eyes tell of a refugee's fears', the photograph of the unnamed girl in a refugee camp in Pakistan allowed viewers to inscribe the image with their own chosen narrative of Afghan suffering under Soviet occupation. Nearly two decades later, the magazine described this photograph as 'a searingly beautiful image of a young girl with haunting eyes who came to symbolise the plight and the pain and the strength of her people'.
The Afghan Girl vanished from view in the years after her photograph was published. Her name and her fate remained unknown for nearly two decades. Perhaps that was appropriate. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1992, the nation whose fate she represented also vanished from the international radar, overshadowed by a confusing mess of civil war, tribalism, landmines, left-over Cold War weapons and grudges.
Zala was not an orphaned child like the Afghan Girl, but she was still touchingly, heartbreakingly, young. Nineteen years old and still in high school, she spoke of democracy, liberation, women's rights, duty. When we met in Peshawar in August 2000, she had already proved her dedication by secretly returning to Afghanistan from Pakistan in order to gather evidence of the Taliban's human rights abuses. She said that she wasn't afraid to die for her cause.
Zala was a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). RAWA was formed in 1977 and had campaigned against Soviet occupation, CIA-backed factions and the various warlords who battled for control of Afghanistan after the fall of the Soviet-backed regime in 1992. But it was RAWA's struggle against the Taliban that gained them international recognition.
Like so many others, I had discovered RAWA via its website. For many years, RAWA had used its magazine Payam-e-Zan to communicate with Afghans; after the Taliban took power in Kabul, their website gave them a global audience at a time when, at last, information about Afghan women was highly sought after. 'If you are freedom-loving and anti-fundamentalist, you are with RAWA', the banner of their website proclaimed. This proclamation was a powerful appeal to the desire of many women in the West to show solidarity with Afghan women.
I had expected that my first meeting with Zala would consist of a discussion over a cup of tea. Instead, she led me out to an ambulance that would transport us back to the refugee camp on the outskirts of Peshawar where we shared a room for the next several days. The camp was a mudbrick-walled fortress surrounded by a moonscape of brick-kilns set up to exploit the pool of cheap labour. The brick-kilns brought employment, but also a fine, choking dust that polluted the water supply and caused chronic respiratory problems among the children and the elderly. The camp's residents — men, women and children alike — told stories of homelessness, bereavement and trauma inflicted by various forces during decades of war and displacement.
My encounter with Zala took place during a critical time for Afghanistan but also at what would come to be regarded as a key moment for international feminism. As reports of Taliban abuses against Afghan women emerged, Western feminist organisations, including the US-based Feminist Majority, had launched a political campaign to isolate the regime and publicise its excesses. This engagement by Western feminists with the oppression of 'Third World' women was unprecedented in scope and scale. In its early phases, the campaign presented a challenge to US foreign policy before being appropriated wholesale in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when the mission to rescue Afghan women became a raison d'être for military intervention in Afghanistan.
Soviet storm to Taliban tyranny
By 1996, when the Taliban seized control of Kabul, Afghanistan had suffered nearly two decades of Soviet occupation — which had been fiercely resisted by loosely allied groups of guerilla fighters, the mujahideen — followed by four years of brutal civil war. The United States had chosen to work through the Pakistani secret intelligence agency, the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), to supply military aid to the mujahideen. The ISI, in turn, favoured the Pakistani Islamist party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, and its Afghan ally, the Hezb-e-Islami, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. More moderate forces within the Afghan resistance were marginalised, with the tacit agreement, if not outright approval, of the United States. Sociocultural anthropologists Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood report the words of one CIA analyst: 'Fanatics fight better'. These 'fanatics' subjected Afghan women working for international aid organisations to constant intimidation, seriously disrupting the provision of welfare and education to Afghan men, women and children living in refugee camps in Pakistan. However, in the proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union, the mujahideen were cast by Western media, and in government propaganda, not as violent patriarchs but as colourful heroes in the struggle against communism.
In launching the Feminist Majority's 'Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan' campaign in 1997, its chair Mavis Leno (wife of talk-show host Jay Leno) claimed: 'Until September of 1996, Afghan women, particularly those living in cities, were highly involved in public life. They wore contemporary clothing, participated in the government and worked in all professions, particularly as doctors, nurses, lawyers and teachers.' This remarkable historical amnesia erased discussion of the culpability of US foreign policy in arming and empowering misogynist warlords during the years of counter-insurgency, rendering the Taliban as a purely 'Afghan' problem.
The years of civil war following the Soviet withdrawal and the fall of the pro-Soviet Najibullah government in 1992 further eroded women's welfare. The weapons that flowed so freely into the region during the years of Soviet occupation were now turned against the Afghan population. The West's erstwhile proxy, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, shelled Kabul into ruins. It is little wonder that when the Taliban began its advance, promising among other things to end the sexual abuse of women and boys by the warlords they displaced, many Afghans — women as well as men — initially made it welcome.
The Taliban advance initially received rather muted international press coverage, and even some positive reports of the new militia's desire to cleanse the country of warlord corruption and brutality. However, after the fall of Kabul in 1996, reports soon emerged of the regime's attempts to impose an extremely repressive code of behaviour upon women, enforced by the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. These edicts ranged from the deadly — forbidding women to seek medical help from male doctors, while curtailing the ability of female doctors to work — to the merely petty (if grim), such as the edict enjoining women to walk noiselessly upon the streets least male passions be aroused by the sound of their footsteps. Women were denied the right to work and study, and to go out in public unless accompanied by a male relative and dressed in the burqa that covered their entire body except for a mesh screen at eye level. Those found disobeying even trivial injunctions risked humiliation and injury from beatings in the street.
The American-backed mujahideen had issued similar ordinances during the years of counter-insurgency against the Soviet Union. However, in the post-Cold War era, Afghan militias were no longer regarded in the West as allies and freedom fighters whose less savoury foibles could usefully be ignored. Unlike previous misogyny against Afghan women, Taliban abuses succeeded in generating a transnational feminist response.
The feminists rally
The feminist campaign against the Taliban was multifaceted rather than unified or centralised and significant shortcomings have since been identified. Most of them arose out of one prominent strand of the broader movement — US-based Feminist Majority's 'Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan' campaign. This campaign was able to position itself as a fashionable celebrity cause, emerging as the most high-profile international public response to Taliban misogyny. Mavis Leno was enlisted as chair and political figures such as Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright added their voices to the growing condemnation of the Taliban.
If the symbol of Afghan suffering under the Soviet occupation had been the unflinching gaze of the green-eyed girl, the symbol of Taliban oppression was the face hidden behind the blue burqa. Campaigners, journalists and celebrities lined up to gain an insight into the lives of Afghan women by trying on the tent-like garment themselves and Feminist Majority sold small pieces of burqa mesh to wear as a 'Symbol of Remembrance for Afghan Women'. But in interviews, Afghan women (including RAWA members) tended to accord much less symbolic weight to the burqa. They were more preoccupied with other, not necessarily gender-specific, issues — the loss of close relatives, homes and farms; the struggle to subsist when the means of subsistence had been destroyed. When they did talk about the burqa they used quite different language to that deployed by their self-appointed Western saviours. While some urban-educated Afghan women complained of the burqa in aesthetic or ideological language, most women talked about more practical considerations. Low-income women complained about the economic burden of purchasing an extra garment, or the fact that if a household could not afford a burqa for each of the women in the house, they could not all go out at the same time. Some women objected not because they objected to covering per se, but because the burqa was not their preferred style of veiling. Such women may have resented having the burqa foisted upon them, but had no desire to unveil entirely. For others, the enforcement of the burqa either reflected existing social practice in their location, or was worn for security reasons that were not confined to the Taliban.
The transnational feminist movement intervened at an important political moment. In the aftermath of its conquest of Kabul, it appeared likely that the Taliban could eventually become recognised as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. The country's fragmentation during the years of occupation and war had long impeded trade and development initiatives throughout Central Asia, but a new, stable government might enable fresh political and business deal-making. With the Taliban's rise to power allowing the reopening of important and long-closed trucking routes, it seemed that by 'normalising' the Taliban as a government like any other, stalled business ventures could proceed. Clinton administration officials indicated that they would be prepared to recognise a Taliban government if they negotiated a truce with the Northern Alliance and agreed to 'modify their behaviour' on women's rights.
However, as the regime failed to consolidate its control of the country and its abuses against women became a prominent feminist cause and media story, this outcome became increasingly unlikely. This was illustrated by the failure of the UNOCOL pipeline — a proposed trans-Afghanistan pipeline to convey gas from Central Asian countries through Pakistan to the Indian Ocean — which would have provided the Taliban with revenue of between $US50 million and $US100 million a year had it proceeded. As UNOCOL executives courted Taliban officials, feminist lobbyists successfully pressured the Clinton administration to withhold its endorsement — a campaign that was reported in a 1998 Washington Post article by foreign correspondents Dan Morgan and David Ottaway. The project was repeatedly put on hold and finally shelved after the United States targeted Osama bin Laden in missile strikes on Afghanistan in August 1998. And after the strikes on New York and Washington in September 2001, opposition to the Taliban, as called for by the Feminist Majority campaign, became official US foreign policy.
The women of RAWA
At first glance, RAWA's activists and their American admirers seem to share little common ground. The RAWA women have not forgotten that the United States supported their bitter enemies for many years — Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the warlord responsible for the bombardment of Kabul and, initially, the Taliban itself. But RAWA's website, the courage of its members in documenting Taliban atrocities, its newly-formed links with Western feminist organisations and media appearances by English-language proficient young women — who were, even with their faces veiled for security reasons, extremely photogenic — all helped to make it the most prominent Afghan women's organisation in the West, despite its relatively marginal position among Afghans themselves. RAWA's success in seizing the political moment during the years of Taliban rule was in part due to its members' single-minded determination in gathering compelling evidence of Taliban abuses and their adroit communication skills. However, it also reflected RAWA's willingness to reframe its political identity when dealing with outsiders and to perform to certain required stereotypes, even as it sought to overturn them.
RAWA was founded by Meena Keshwar Kamal, generally known simply as 'Meena', in 1977. The organisation's origins and independence remain controversial, in part because of Meena's marriage to Faiz Ahmad, leader of the Maoist Gruh-e-Enquilabi (Revolutionary Group or RG), later known as the Sazman-i-Rihayi. RAWA supporters maintain that the two organisations were and are entirely separate. However, the description of RAWA as Maoist in origin comes from some admirers such as author Hafizullah Emadi as well as many of its enemies. RAWA members themselves generally dismiss any Maoist tag as irrelevant. But while RG has fallen into obscurity, RAWA has gained in prominence and standing, in large part because its branding as a feminist organisation gained it a far broader international support base.
After the Soviet invasion in 1979, Kamal and most other RAWA members joined the millions of Afghans who sought refuge in Pakistan and Iran. They established schools, literacy classes and orphanages, and continued to circulate their publication Payam-e-Zan (Message of Women). All of these projects placed a heavy emphasis on women's empowerment. Politically, RAWA set itself firmly against the Soviet occupation and its puppet government in Kabul, but also against the mujahideen who were the favoured beneficiaries of United States and Pakistani military aid, and who were exerting ever-greater control over the running of the refugee camps in which more than two million Afghans now resided.
In 1986, Meena Kamal's husband Faiz Ahmad was murdered in Quetta, reportedly by agents of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. A year later Kamal, too, was murdered by agents of the Afghan secret service. The RAWA website describes her as a martyr and her murder is cited as justification for the continued security consciousness maintained by the organisation today, including their reluctance to publicise the addresses of their projects and the concealment of their leaders' identities.
But the rise of the Taliban simplified the Afghan story for Western audiences. The Taliban quickly attracted international condemnation for their oppressive policies towards women. The undercover feminists of RAWA began to receive more attention.
Although the initial momentum was slow, RAWA's cyber-campaign eventually began to generate media and feminist interest. After discovering RAWA's website, Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, travelled with RAWA to Peshawar in northern Pakistan and across the border to Afghanistan and wrote a series of articles on her experiences for the glossy magazine Marie Claire and other publications. Feminist Majority invited RAWA to attend its 'Feminist Expo 2000' in Baltimore and assisted touring RAWA members in gaining media exposure. An appearance by RAWA on the Oprah Winfrey show led to so many hits that the RAWA website collapsed. A logo on the homepage read 'Welcome, Oprah viewers'.
Having gathered the raw data needed to make their case, RAWA was very skilful in dealing with the media and international campaigners. They made journalists' work easier by directing them towards good stories and supplying them with documentation and footage. They had polished, English-speaking representatives available for interviews. But more than this, many Western activists and journalists described their encounters with RAWA in terms suggestive of seduction. Eve Ensler's description of herself as 'completely smitten' illustrates a very common reaction. The willingness of often very young, fragile-looking women to put themselves in the frontline was part of this emotional appeal. But RAWA was also very skilled at giving outsiders a sense of being part of their struggle, using their security procedures to make international supporters feel chosen and trusted.
My own initial contact with them followed what appears to have been the established pattern — initial contact by email, in which RAWA advised that I should let them know where I was staying in Peshawar so that they could contact me there, followed by the very short initial meeting with Zala and then transport by ambulance to the camp where RAWA's projects were based. I cannot see how RAWA could have made any defnitive assessment of me from this screening, beyond that of gut instinct. Nor did I ever hear of any interested journalist or researcher being denied contact with RAWA during the pre-9/11 period in which international exposure and support was both vital and difficult to come by.
However, this screening process and the sense that one had to be judged worthy before being entrusted with access to RAWA members imparted a sense of privileged access that the writers concerned did not hesitate to highlight to their audience back home. Anne Brodsky, a psychology professor and frequent visitor to Afghanistan writes:
(Continues...)
Excerpted from From Victims to Suspects by Shakira Hussein. Copyright © 2016 Shakira Hussein. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,1 Afghan girls,
2 Candle in the wind,
3 Shifting perceptions,
4 Proxy wars,
5 Invisible menace,
6 'Jihadi brides' and chicks with sticks,
Conclusion,
References,
Acknowledgments,
Selected index,