RE: Keepin On...'Best Kept

Furthermore, in January 1997, Taliban officials announced a policy of segregating men and women into separate hospitals. This regulation was not strictly enforced until September 1997 when the Ministry of Public Health ordered all hospitals in Kabul to suspend medical services to the city’s half million women at all but one, poorly-equipped hospital for women. Female medical workers also were banned from working in Kabul’s 22 hospitals. The temporary Rabia Balkhi facility was designated the sole facility available to women. At that time the facility had 35 beds and no clean water, electricity, surgical equipment, X-ray machines, suction, or oxygen. An international uproar ensued, and in November 1997, after two months of negotiations with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Taliban partially rescinded its directive and agreed to reopen some of the hospitals and make available limi! te! d beds therein.

The Taliban’s edicts restricting women’s rights have had a disastrous impact on Afghan women and girls’ access to education, as well as health care. One of the first edicts issued by the regime when it rose to power was to prohibit girls and women from attending school. Humanitarian groups initiated projects to replace through philanthropy what prior governments had afforded as a right to both sexes. Hundreds of girl’s schools were established in private homes and thousands of women and girls were taught to sew and weave.

On June 16, 1998, the Taliban ordered the closing of more than 100 privately funded schools where thousands of young women and girls were receiving training in skills that would have helped them support their families. The Taliban issued new rules for nongovernmental organizations providing the schooling: education must be limited to girls up to the age of eight, and restricted to the Qur’an.

PHR’s researcher, while visiting Kabul in 1998, saw a city of beggars - women who had once been teachers and nurses now moving in the streets like ghosts under their enveloping burqas, selling every possession and begging so as to feed their children. It is difficult to find another government or would-be government in the world that has deliberately created such poverty by arbitrarily depriving half the population under its control of jobs, schooling, mobility, and health care. Such restrictions are literally life threatening to women and to their children.

Male doctors’ access to sick children within women’s hospitals is also severely curtailed, leading to unnecessary deaths. A female physician reported that a female child died of the measles because the authorities didn’t allow a male doctor to visit the children’s ward, which is located within a designated female ward of a local hospital. A twenty-year old woman interviewed in Kabul related the following:

“Eight months ago, my two-and-a-half year old daughter died from diarrhoea. She was refused treatment by the first hospital that we took her to. The second hospital mistreated her (they refused to provide intravenous fluids and antibiotics because of their Hazara ethnicity, according to the respondent). Her body was handed to me and her father in the middle of the night. With her body in my arms, we left the hospital. It was curfew time and we had a long way to get home. We had to spend the night inside a destroyed house among the rubble. In the morning we took my dead baby home but we had no money for her funeral.”

The requirement, reiterated in June 1998, that physicians may not treat women unaccompanied by close male relatives, has caused particular problems for the many women in Kabul and elsewhere who do not have male relatives to play this role. In Kabul alone, there are more than 30,000 widows. As one survey respondent stated: “I can’t see a male doctor since I don’t have a chaperone to accompany me; my brother is too young and my father is ill.”

Taliban guards are ever present in medical facilities and intervene at will on behalf of the Department for the Propagation of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice. Nurses and other female health personnel may be beaten when not covered completely, and women often fear to even venture from their homes to seek health care for themselves or their children.

Male physicians cannot properly examine women patients because of prohibitions on touching them or looking at their bodies. A dentist said he only examined a woman’s teeth if a lookout was posted at the door while he lifted her veil. He noted that if he were caught treating a woman, he and his patient would be beaten, and the authorities would likely close his office and throw him in jail.

PHR interviewed homeless, displaced women occupying an abandoned school with their children. One woman was mourning the recent death of her 20-year-old daughter, who had suffered from stomach pains for days but could not be taken out because her mother did not possess a burqa. The women gathered there begged the PHR researcher to send them some burqas from the United States so that they could go out on the street. They didn’t possess the garment, and had no money to pay for it.
It is clear from PHR’s forty interviews with Afghan women that the general climate of cruelty, abuse, and tyranny that characterizes Taliban rule has had a profound affect on women’s mental health.

Humanitarian assistance providers have played a critical role in meeting the basic needs of the Afghan people. However, in striking contrast to published reports indicating the successful disbursement of humanitarian assistance, only 6 per cent of respondents reported receiving any form of humanitarian assistance while living in Kabul. In addition to reported corruption in the distribution of aid, Taliban gender restrictions inevitably interfere with the delivery of humanitarian assistance to women. A Taliban decree dated July 20, 1997, for example, stated that women could not pick up food or other aid from distribution centres themselves. A male relative had to pick up and deliver the aid to the women. Widows are particularly vulnerable to exclusion by such requirements.

The Taliban’s claim that its policy of gender segregation is rooted in Afghan history and culture is invalidated by the experience and views of Afghan women themselves. Afghan women have a long history of participation in Afghan society and in political and economic life, including employment as health professionals, teachers, and in government offices.

The Afghan women in PHR’s health and human rights survey also reported a high prevalence of loss of a family member to war and displacement hardships. Eighty-four percent of women reported one or more family members killed in war. All but one of the participants had been displaced from Kabul at least once.

PHR’s health and human rights survey demonstrates that harassment and physical abuse of Afghan women and their family members by Taliban officials is extremely common in Kabul. Sixty-nine percent of women reported that they or a family member had been detained in Kabul by Taliban religious police or security forces. Twenty-two per cent of women reported a total of 43 separate incidents in which they were detained and abused. Of these incidents, 72 per cent followed non-adherence to the Taliban’s dress code for women. The majority (35/43, 81 per cent) of detentions lasted less than one hour; however, 36 (84 per cent) resulted in public beatings and one (2 per cent) in torture.

Over half (58 per cent) of the study participants reported that a family member had been detained in a total of 133 separate incidents. Of the 17 incidents involving female family members, the reasons for detention and abuse were similar to those identified by the respondents. Of the 116 incidents involving male family members, reasons for detention included having a short beard (29, 25 per cent) and being a member of a minority ethnic group (mainly Tajik and Hazara) (32, 28 per cent). Fifty-four percent of these detentions resulted in beatings and 21 per cent resulted in torture. Under these circumstances, 68 per cent of women surveyed reported that they had “extremely restricted” their activities in public during the past year in Kabul.

Sixty-eight per cent women interviewed described incidents in which they were detained and physically abused by Taliban officials. The atmosphere of fear created by the Taliban laws and their harsh imposition has exacerbated the multiple traumas related by the women PHR interviewed. Every Friday the Taliban terrorizes the city of Kabul by publicly punishing alleged wrongdoers in the Kabul sports stadium and requiring public attendance at the floggings, shootings, hangings, beheadings, and amputations.

Witnessing executions, fleeing religious police with whips who search for women and girls diverging from dress codes or other edicts, having a family member jailed or beaten; such experiences traumatize and retraumatize Afghan women, who have already experienced the horrors of war, rocketing, ever-present landmines and unexploded ordnance, and the loss of friends and immediate family.