Fifteen Afghan men, heads slightly bowed, file into a crowded living room to greet the new leader of Bamiyan province. They sip tea and listen patiently as the governor holds court.
Such a courtesy call is commonplace in this deeply hierarchical society when someone wins high office – but this time there is a critical difference: They are paying respect to a woman, the first female governor in the history of this Islamic nation.
Three years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan is casting off the fundamentalism that once barred women from public life and kept girls out of school.
The selection of Habiba Sarobi to head the central province of Bamiyan is a milestone, but she is the first to acknowledge that it masks a sad reality.
– There are equal rights for women on paper. The challenge is to put it into practice … Afghanistan is still a male-dominated society, Sarobi said as she received well-wishers last week at her Kabul apartment.
For most Afghan women, little has changed since the Talibans ouster; most womens daily lives are still dominated by archaic traditions and grinding poverty.
Womens literacy rates are just 14 percent, far below the literacy rate for men, and maternal mortality is about 60 times higher than in industrialized countries, with an Afghan mother dying every half hour on average.
Before Afghanistan descended into war two decades ago, women held high office. As early as the 1950s, they served in parliament, and worked as judges and diplomats. In the 1970s, a woman was minister of health. During the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, up to 70 percent of teachers were women.
A wave of fundamentalism swept the country after Muslim fighters ousted the Soviet army in 1989, and the Taliban came to power seven years later.
Since the hard-line regimes ouster by U.S.-led forces in late 2001, millions of girls have returned to school. And while women are still mostly on the periphery of public life, career opportunities have reopened for them, at least in the cities.
Womens rights were enshrined in a democratic constitution adopted in 2004, and women turned out in force to vote in presidential elections in October. A female presidential candidate is now the womens affairs minister.
President Hamid Karzai has given three women minor posts in his new, 30-member Cabinet, and named women to lead the Afghan Red Crescent Society and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.
But skeptics – and even high-profile women appointees – concede they have little political clout.
– I still believe most of us are selected for these seats because they (the government) wants to give a good impression to the world, said Fatema Gailani, who has won praise for shaking up the Red Crescent since her appointment two months ago. – But we really want to achieve things, she added.
Malalai Joya, a 26-year-old woman who created a stir at last years constitutional convention by calling Afghan warlords criminals, said progress in womens rights was only cosmetic.
– Women still live under the shadow of the gun, she said from her home in western Farah province adding: – In Kabul, some women now walk to work without a burqa (all-covering veil) … In the villages, there is no change. Women are still victims of violence.
Joya has received death threats for her outspokenness at the convention, and has three bodyguards supplied by the government.
And there are even disputes between conservatives and liberals over womens place in society – even whether women should sing and dance on television.
Abdul Hafiz Mansour, editor of the conservative Mujahedeens Message newspaper said women have a right to hold political office. But he said he doubted whether there were enough educated women in some provinces to fill the quota of seats in parliament called for in the constitution.
Kilde: The Push Journal
