If you receive this list with more than 50 names on it,
please email a copy of it to sarabande who-is-at brandeis.edu
Even if you decide not to sign, please be considerate and do
not kill the petition. Thank you. It is best to copy rather than
forward the petition.
Melissa Buckheit
Brandeis University
The government of Afghanistan is waging a war upon women.
The situation is getting so bad that one person in an
editorial of the times compared the treatment of women there to the
treatment of jews in pre-holocaust poland. Since the Taliban took
power in 1996, women have had to wear burqua and have been beaten and
stoned in public for not having the proper attire, even if this means
simply not having the mesh covering in front of their eyes.
One woman was beaten to DEATH by an angry mob of fundamentalists
for accidentally exposing her arm while she was driving.
Another was stoned to death for trying to leave the country with a
man that was not a relative. Women are not allowed to work or
even go out in public without a male relative;
professional women such as professors, translators, doctors,
lawyers, artists and writers have been forced from their jobs
and stuffed into their homes, so that depression is becoming so
widespread that it has reached emergency levels.
There is no way in such an extreme Islamic society to know
the suicide rate with certainty, but relief workers are estimating
that the suicide rate among women, who cannot find proper medication
and treatment for severe depression and would rather take their
lives than live in such conditions, has increased significantly.
Homes where a woman is present must have their windows
painted so that she can never be seen by outsiders. They
must wear silent shoes so that they are never heard. Women live
in fear of their lives for the slightest misbehavior. Because they
cannot work, those without male relatives or husbands are either
starving to death or begging on the street, even if they hold
Ph.D.'s.
There are almost no medical facilities available for women,
and relief workers, in protest, have mostly left the country,
taking medicine and psychologists and other things necessary to
treat the skyrocketing level of depression among women.
At one of the rare hospitals for women, a reporter found
still, nearly lifeless bodies lying motionless on top of beds, wrapped
in their burqua, unwilling to speak, eat or do anything, but are slowly
wasting away. Others have gone mad and were seen crouched in
corners, perpetually rocking or crying, most of them in
fear. One doctor is considering, when what little medication that is
left finally runs out, leaving these women in front of the
president's residence as a form of peaceful protest.
It is at the point where the term 'human rights violations' have
become an understatement.
Husbands have the power of life and death over their women
relatives, especially their wives, but an angry mob has just
as much right to stone or beat a woman, often to death, for
exposing an inch of flesh or offending them in the slightest way.
David Cornwell has told me that we in the United States
should not judge the Afghan people for such treatment because it is a
'cultural thing,' but this is not even true. Women enjoyed
relative freedom, to work, dress generally as they wanted,
and drive and appear in public alone until only 1996 -- the
rapidity of this transition is the main reason for the depression and
suicide; women who were once educators or doctors or
simply used to basic human freedoms are now severely
restricted and treated as subhuman in the name of right-wing
fundamentalist Islam. It is not their tradition or 'culture,' but is
alien to them, and it is extreme even for those cultures where
fundamentalism is the rule. Besides, if we could excuse everything on
cultural grounds, then we should not be appalled that the
Carthaginians sacrificed their infant children, that little girls are
circumcised in parts of Africa, that blacks in the deep south in the
1930's were lynched, prohibited from voting and forced to submit to
unjust jim crow laws.
Everyone has a right to a tolerable human existence, even if
they are women in a muslim country in a part of the world that
Americans do not understand.
If we can threaten military force in Kosovo in the name of
human rights for the sake of ethnic Albanians, Americans can certainly
express peaceful outrage at the oppression, murder and injustice
commited against women by the Taliban.
*************
STATEMENT:
In signing this, we agree that the current treatment of
women in Afghanistan is completely UNACCEPTABLE and deserves
support and action by the people of the United States and
the U.S. Government and that the current situation overseas will not
be tolerated. Women's Rights is not a small issue anywhere and
it is UNACCEPTABLE for women in 1998 to be treated as sub-human
and so much as property. Equality and human decency is a RIGHT not
a freedom, whether one lives in Afghanistan or the United
States.*****
1) Leslie London, Cape Town, South Africa
2) Tim Holtz, Boston, USA
3) Jennifer Kasper, Boston, MA, USA
4) Ali Noorani, Boston, MA
5) Juli-Ann Carlos, Boston, MA, USA
6) Elaine Alpert, MD, Boston, MA USA
7) Diane Morse, MD, Rochester, NY
8) Mark Winsberg, MD, Rochester, NY
9) Elizabeth Hirsh, Rochester, NY
10) Ellen Goldstein, Rochester, NY
11) Kathryn Fiske, Rochester, NY
12) David H. Hunt, Seattle, WA
13) Dan Freeman, Kent, WA
14) Sheryl Allen, Bellevue, WA
15) Larry Allen, Bellevue, WA
16) Nancy Kahn, Seattle, WA
17) Jim Ekberg, Olga, WA
18) Cedron Mark Sterling, Seattle, WA
19) David Matthews, Shoreline, WA
20) Wendy Zieve, Shoreline, WA
21) Bunny Hirschmann, Seattle, WA
22) Chuck Dolan, Seattle, WA
23) Betty Hirschmann, Titusville, NJ
24) Hank Hirschmann, Titusville, NJ
25) Stacia Savidge Myrtle Beach, SC
26) Paul Savidge Myrtle Beach, Sc
27) Hilary Kane Norman, OK
28) Carlos Warter M.D., FLA
29) Rabbi Goldie Milgram, Reading, PA
30) Steven Silvern, Auburn, AL
31) David Kirshner, Baton Rouge LA USA
------------------------ End Forwarded Message -------------------------