Deadly Persecution

"There is only one reason behind killing women: to prevent women from working in the government.  We should expect more similar assassinations in the upcoming weeks and months because they have threatened every female civil servant, including members of the provincial council and teachers."
 Zufenon Safi, representing Afghanistan's Laghman province in Parliament

Photo, Khalid Khan

Afghan relatives and villagers prepare to offer funeral prayers over the body of Najia Sediqi

Yesterday the acting head of women's affairs in Laghman province, eastern Afghanistan was sacrificed to the malice of Afghan tribal culture that insists women have no place in public, much less holding government office in any capacity.  Afghan women think otherwise; they demand due consideration of their human rights; equality and opportunity in education and all aspects of the human condition and society.

Najia Sediqi was the acting head because six months earlier the head of women's affairs was similarly murdered.  Nadia Seddiqi courageously stepped in to fill the administrative gap left by the assassination of her predecessor, Hanifa Safi, killed by an explosive under her car.  Who had enraged the Taliban by her support of a young Afghan woman marrying for love, when she had been promised to an elderly man.

Nadia Seddiqi was entering a rickshaw on her way to work when two men on a motorcycle gunned her down.  Women sitting in the Afghan parliament are not particularly shy in voicing their opinion, in claiming equal treatment for women, in insisting on their human rights.  In bravely facing up to the Islamists within the chamber who shout them down and who occasionally rejoice when one is murdered.

Much good this has done them.  Under the protective auspices of foreign presence, the humanitarian groups, the civil authorities on hand visiting from other countries attempting to help Afghanistan heave itself out of the barbarian past into the modern era, the dwindling armies of foreign states stationed there in an effort to aid the country in its battle against the brutal Islamism of the Taliban fundamentalists there have been some advances made.

Girls in urban centres can be guaranteed - for the present - an education, and women can go about their business in public without fear of being assailed by Taliban mullahs beating them for insufficient modesty, causing them to be incarcerated first within the all-concealing burka, then within the four stifling walls of their home out of which they are not permitted to venture without the protective custody of a male family member.

Pakistan and Afghanistan share much in common aside from their habitual antipathy to one another; a fundamentalist Sharia-based theocracy posing as an eastern democracy, a thin veneer of civility covering a customary misogyny.  And now that NATO and UN forces are eager to depart the medieval confines of a stifling backward society, inured to change, the Taliban is set to return, and the Afghan government is set to welcome them.

Talks are being held to resolve details between suddenly-reliable Pakistan and suddenly-trusting Afghanistan to reach decisions respecting the welcome of the searingly fundamentalist Taliban through the Afghan High Peace Council, where the Peace Process Roadmap to 2015 views Pakistan taking the helm from a departing United States to lead peace negotiations and accommodations.

"By 2015, Taliban, Hezb-e-Islami and other armed groups will have given up armed opposition, transformed from military entities into political parties, and are actively participating in the country's political and constitutional processes, including national elections", according to this ambitiously hopeful plan.  Also proposed in this hallucinatory draft is the prospect of senior insurgents becoming cabinet members and provincial governors.

Well, one supposes it is not such an incredible leap, given that corrupt and violent warmongering warlords have been well entrenched in the current democratic government of Afghanistan.  Democracy in such countries has a most levelling influence, inviting the most unscrupulous and devious-minded to take their place with the earnest and honest who hope to make some moral breakthrough in the production of a state where justice will be done.

Meanwhile, under the watchful eye of the international community, still dedicated to aiding and assisting Afghan people, and guiding the Afghan government toward some reasonable semblance of responsible governance, women who assume they are capable and prove to be such, are summarily executed for their impudence in misjudging the tenor of their times.