QALA CHA, Afghanistan — Shershad Muhammad almost didn’t get to vote.
As the 60-year-old baker pedaled his bike toward a polling station in this village on Kabul’s outskirts early Thursday, a group of police officers forced him to dismount, tackled him and nearly arrested him. His offense: carrying a large black bag. It was full of bread to give to election workers, but anxious police mistook the bag for a bomb.
“I decided to give the bread to the police officers instead, and they were happy and let me go,” he said.
Afghans went to the polls for their second presidential election with their country on edge. Those who exercised their democratic rights had to defy Taliban threats and hew closely to the social mores of this conservative Islamic country, which, for one, dictate when and how females leave their homes.
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Hundreds in Kabul staged a rare rally Wednesday, defying counterprotesters’ stones and insults.
Kabul, Afghanistan - As Fatima Fedayee clutched a banner that read “Equality Is Our Right,” an angry man charged toward her and knocked her to the ground. As soon as she picked herself up, another man hurled stones at her. Then a group of men surrounded her, screaming unsavory epithets.
But Ms. Fedayee kept holding the banner, chanting “Islam means equality!” She kept up the rallying cry for more than an hour Wednesday, alongside nearly 300 other women, protesting a law that they say would greatly restrict women’s freedoms.
These demonstrators belong to a women’s movement that has emerged with unusual boldness in recent weeks to fight the law. Unlike other campaigns around gender issues, this marks one of the few times women have openly confronted the conservative attitudes in this country – and the first time in years they have demanded their rights in a public demonstration. Like Fedayee, many have withstood hostile, even violent, opposition – sometimes from other women.
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Just as the world’s eyes are turning towards Afghanistan once again, a few conservative Afghan lawmakers are trying to pass a law that would, amongst other things, legalize marital rape, prohibit women from leaving the home without permission, deny them the right of inheritance, force a woman to “preen for her husband as and when he desires,” and set the minimum female marital age to sixteen.
The draft proposal, which is aimed only at the country’s Shia minority, recalls for many the harsh strictures of the Taliban era and has been roundly condemned in the international community: Hillary Clinton said that she is “deeply concerned” about the law, Obama found it “abhorrent”, and others in the West have asked, “Is this what our soldiers are dying for?” The international condemnation has forced the Karzai administration to shelve the law for the time being, as the Afghan government pledges to look at the details of the bill more closely.
While the world buzzes about this latest setback for Afghan women, you might be wondering just what exactly the bill says about women’s rights in Afghanistan.
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KABUL, Mar 9 (IPS) - Whenever lawmaker Fatima Nazari rose to speak, she says the parliament’s chair snubbed her. Whenever one of her female colleagues made a suggestion, it was brushed aside. Sometimes certain notorious warlords would speak multiple times before a female member of parliament (MP) could speak once.
So Nazari, who represents Kabul province, and almost all other female Afghan MPs banded together and proposed a resolution, asking parliament’s leadership to stop the discrimination. It was ignored.
Female lawmakers say that they are still largely excluded from the political process in Afghanistan, where widespread religious fundamentalism and deep-seated cultural conservatism still pose big challenges to women’s advancement.
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