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Mavis Leno
Chair, The Feminist Majority's Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid
Everybody recently has said, "You have so much courage to do this." This is so funny to me because you cannot imagine the courage of the Afghan women I have met in the course of pursuing this. My perception of myself is that I was born in paradise and upgraded to heaven. So the least I can do is pay some attention to people who didn't win the lottery, and these women sure as hell didn't win the lottery.
Back in college when I was taking art appreciation, I remember learning that during the Middle Ages there was a repellent religious theme that was often depicted in paintings of those times. Hieronymus Bosch was particularly fond of this theme. People would be going down a thoroughfare, where there would be rich people, poor people, tradesmen selling their goods, wealthy people off to a party in their finery, poor people in the streets begging-everybody going about their business on an ordinary day in their lives. That would be a first panel.Second panel, the ground would suddenly open with no warning, gape open, and all of these people would be swallowed into the fires of hell, and particularly in the Bosch paintings, you'd see little tiny people plummeting into the mouths of grotesque beasts and limbs being severed, etc. Violence didn't originate with American films. The worst part of these paintings, and the theme that they depicted, was not actually shown. After these people fell into the gaping jaws of hell with no warning, in the middle of their lives, the earth would close and they would be forgotten. No one would know what happened to them, and they would be lost.
This is what happened to the women of Afghanistan. When I first heard what was going on there, fairly early in the situation - it was about three months old - I found myself, in my mind, in the same position as a person who happens to be walking by a lake when someone's going down for the third time, and you know that you can swim. I couldn't know this and not do something about it.
Let me give you a little history about the situation in Afghanistan. This country has been decimated by a 20-year-old civil war. I believe it is either the first or second most landmined country in the world. It is mainly an agrarian society, and this is particularly hard because it's difficult for people to farm countryside that is thickly sown over with land mines. Most of the infrastructure of the country has been destroyed. There is great poverty, great hardship, and all of these things were true before the Taliban took over.
Nevertheless, women were contributing members of that society at every level - as is true in almost every country in the world - in the urban areas women were living modernized lives. Some of them wore Western dress, some more traditional dress, but it was entirely their choice, and they had had equal rights under the law since the '60s. They held down an enormous quantity of all the important positions in the government, and in the professions. In the countryside, women did live more conservative lives, but they had a rich support system among the other women of their community, and although some of them did wear the burqa, the garment that all women have to wear if they leave their houses, according to the Taliban edict - they wore the burqa mainly for visits to the town.
The burqa is a very expensive garment. One of the great hardships that has been visited upon women in Afghanistan since the Taliban took over falls heavily on the rural areas where women cannot afford a burqa, and therefore as many as 12 or 14 women share in the use of one garment. And should you have an emergency, should your child fall ill, break a leg - you need to take this kid to the hospital or any available medical care right now - if it's not your turn for the burqa, too bad.
One of the many Afghan women that I have come to know, told me that it is ridiculous to suggest that the women in rural areas wore the burqa as a common thing. Not only is it too expensive for most of them to have owned, but in most farming areas, most women worked in the fields alongside their husbands, which you cannot do in a burqa. In fact, there is almost nothing you can do in a burqa. One of the singular qualities of this garment is that it renders you incapable of almost any independent action. It is the case under the Taliban edicts that you must go out of your house not only wearing the burqa, but accompanied by a close male relative. But in truth, it would be very difficult for somebody to navigate and manage their tasks while wearing the burqa if they did not go out accompanied by someone.
You have no peripheral vision in this garment. In fact, the only vision provided to you is through an approximately two and a half by two inch square of mesh which sits over your eyes.
The Feminist Majority has started wearing these, and we are sending them to people who are interested in taking action as a token of remembrance for the women in Afghanistan. This little 2.5 x 2 inch square of dense mesh, which is hard to see through, provides no peripheral vision and also does not allow for breathing. You breathe through the solid cloth of the burqa itself. It's the only view of the outside world that is left to these women anymore, since their windows have to be painted an opaque color; they cannot look out of them. If a woman rides in a car, all the windows except for the front window must also be either curtained or painted opaque.
These are the kinds of egregious, excessive restrictions which have prompted us to call this "gender apartheid." In reality, the people who suffered under apartheid in South Africa had fewer restrictions, by far, than these women do. They can no longer work in any capacity, even if their families have no other means of support, which is a serious issue in a country where so many men have been killed in war, and where women far outnumber men. There are many widows. Many women are the sole support of their families. Now that they can no longer work, they are sometimes allowed to beg, but there is almost no other form of self-support left open to them, even though these women were once lawyers, doctors, professors, midwives, nurses, teachers.
When we made the film, we had to go to the Afghan American community to get enough pictures of how the women lived before the Taliban took over. We asked people to give us home movies, family photographs, anything that showed the good times that they had enjoyed prior to the takeover. We had to do this because the Taliban insists that many of these situations never occurred.
This desire to erase history has plagued people for a long time. It was a feature of the Nazis in the concentration camps that they would often tell the Jews that when the war was over and they had won, they would destroy the concentration camps, they would hide all the evidence of what had happened there, and they would tell the populace at large that the Jewish population had gone to live in other non-fascist countries so that no one would ever know what had happened to them.
Many people that were interned in those camps have said that one of their main motives for surviving in such a terrible environment was that they were determined to live to tell their story and call the Nazis liars. These films and photographs that we got from the Afghan American community do the same thing on a smaller scale. The Taliban would like to say that their country was always a conservative, Islam culture, that women never enjoyed the freedoms that in fact they enjoyed. But that is not the case, and we are here to put the lie to it.
The Taliban is essentially a tribal group; they are predominantly Pashtun. There are three major ethnic groups that live in Afghanistan: Pashtun, Tajik, and Hazara. The Hazara have always been subjected to a certain amount of prejudice.They have some Mongolian ancestry. The Pashtun occupy not only Afghanistan but a great deal of Pakistan. When the lines of demarcation were drawn to create the state of Pakistan, the Pashtun population was essentially divided in half between the two countries. So it is not so odd that Pakistan has helped promulgate the Taliban and recognized them as the legal government of Afghanistan. Pakistan is one of only three countries that makes that recognition, and they give them fiscal support.
One of the things that the feminist majority would like the United States to do is to address this issue with Pakistan. Pakistan has a long, strong relationship with America. We give them money, we help them out and have a lot of interaction with them. We need to say to them, "You have to speak to these people."
The fact is that there is no fabulous alternative government for Afghanistan at the moment. I can't say, "If only the Taliban weren't there, the such-and-such could take over." There is no really rich, wonderful, democratic alternative. And even if there were, that's none of my business. That's not America's business. I am strictly concerned with the human rights of the women and girls there. I do not want to displace the Taliban. I want them to understand how enormously wrong their treatment of women is to the rest of the world, and to moderate it. Give these women back the lives and the freedoms that they enjoyed before.
Recently, some people have been suggesting that the Taliban has in fact moderated. They have yet to rescind their edicts, and it is from these edicts that we get the information that I have just given you about how the women are treated. In other words, this is not word of mouth from people who witnessed it. This is from the Taliban themselves. If they wish to be seen as moderating their position, they must rescind these edicts. They must allow observers into the country to confirm that they are, in fact, treating the women in a fair, humane and equal way. That's all we ask. We don't want any sort of revolution there. We simply want these people to listen to reason.
There are a lot of things that everybody can do to help this cause along. The Taliban does not have a lot of money. The country is destroyed. It will take a lot of money and effort to rebuild it. One of the things that gives me hope about moderation of the Taliban stance is that I see no possible way that it or any other government can rebuild this country while it keeps better than half of its population under what essentially amounts to house arrest.
One of the things that I believe has made the West so strong and powerful and successful is that we use all our human resources. Who knows how many ideas, how inventions and innovations are lost to countries that will not give equal rights to women, certain racial groups, and whatever these particular people decide is a group that should be singled out to have no opportunity in their society? Afghanistan needs every single citizen to rebuild the country. The people that I speak to from the Afghan community say, "Do not imagine that this is a monolithic group. They have lots of factions, some of whom are much more moderate. It happens that the extremists are in power now."
It is my hope that the more moderate, more reasonable people will realize that not only will they never gain acceptance in the world community while they treat women like this, but they'll never fix their country unless they want to spend the rest of their natural lives walking up and down the streets of the country with shotguns and chains hitting people because they're not conforming with some tiny minutiae come up with by the Taliban developers. They're not going to be able to reconstruct the society that will live on its own.
We need to increase immigration to this country from Afghanistan so that people who have fled or are able at some point in the future to leave can come to this country. You would imagine that we would be inundated by Afghan immigrants, but when the Feminist Majority checked the statistics, we found that thousands of Afghans were led into this country and welcomed during the war with the Soviets. But since the Taliban takeover two and a half years ago, guess how many Afghan people have been admitted to this country? Zero.
No one is a political refugee if these people aren't political refugees. And if you don't think that this is a human rights violation, then I don't know what you mean by human, or I don't know what you mean by rights.
So that is the first step that we can take: pressuring the government to take this action. Then we can ask America to speak to three nations in the Middle East who are alone in recognizing the legal government of Afghanistan, and alone in giving them money: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates. We have strong influence with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; we should use it. We should speak to them in the name of decency and reason and say, "This is your family. There's one in every family. You go talk to them. Tell them it won't fly."
Another thing that we need to do is to be concerned about United States companies setting up in Afghanistan and financing - not perhaps as a direct result of their business being set up there, but as an indirect result - the Taliban. If the Taliban had a lot of financial support, it would have no need to listen to the world community. They could take the ball and go home. We don't want that to happen. The problem is that Afghanistan is, by far, the most viable country through which to run a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan, which has no coast, to Pakistan. Some people have suggested that the gas deposit there is so large it might last as long as 500 years. It is this pipeline which brought me into direct contact with Unocal. I spoke at a stockholders' meeting that they had, and I participated in a number of actions to try to persuade them not to build a pipeline and fund this terrible regime.
Let me be very clear about this. Somebody's going to get this gas. I would like it to be the United States. We're a decent and humane country; we stand for human rights as much as anybody in the world. The business of business is to make money; there's nothing wrong with wanting to put the pipeline through there. But you don't have to become a fiscal giant at the expense of being a moral dwarf. Go to the Taliban and say, "You can have hundreds of millions of dollars right now. Let the women out of their houses. Knock it off." Is that so hard? Is that such a big deal? I think a company could say that.
Furthermore, the Feminist Majority has made it their business to look into which other countries might want to put the gas pipeline through there. Some of you may be aware that there are feminist organizations even in some very unlikely places, including almost all the Middle Eastern countries. We intend to speak to our sisters in Japan, which is trying to involve themselves with the Taliban on the basis of this pipeline, and we intend to speak to our sisters in Great Britain, which also has an interest in putting a pipeline through there. In both of these countries, the gender gap in voting is similar to what it is in the United States. In other words, it behooves the government of both these countries, as it behooves the government of this country, to listen up when women say, "We're really bothered by this. You could find yourself out of office if you don't listen up."
We are going to speak to these women and make sure that no one can do business in Afghanistan comfortably and with the sanction of their population. Eventually, we will make it clear to the Taliban, which is a very young, inexperienced group of people, that women are significant in the cultures of all other countries in the world, that they are a force to be reckoned with, and they do not want - and nor do men who have mothers whom they love, and daughters whom they have great hopes for - the next 1000 years to be like the last 1000 years for women. The work that the Feminist Majority has done to try to help the women of Afghanistan is beginning to yield some results. We have some profoundly conservative people on board with us, as well as some renowned liberals. This is human rights, human decency; it has nothing to do with political attitudes whatsoever, except the political attitude that the world. If it cannot get better, should at least not get worse.
I was privileged to make a tape for Voice of America, which they promised me they would take into Afghanistan, so that the women there would know that women in the rest of the world knows what has happened to them and were not going to rest until something was done. These women were like people buried in a mine cave, who had no idea if somebody was searching for them. They had no idea if anybody even knew what happened to them. That's how fast and overwhelming the takeover was.
While making the short tape, they taught me how to say "Maba shuma hasteem," which in Pashtun means, "We are with you." I got a lot of response. What I wanted to tell those women, and what I want to make a reality, is that they're not going to be like those pathetic people in those medieval paintings. That the ground will not close over them, that they will not be forgotten; that it will not be as if they never lived.
