06.12.2001

Voice for Afghan women

The Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (Rawa) has played an increasingly vocal role since September 11. Through its website it has issued statements condemning both the attacks on the US and the Bush-Blair war with its effects on the Afghan people.

As the western media applauded the fall of Kabul, Rawa declared that the "people of Afghanistan do not accept domination of the Northern Alliance!" ('Appeal to the UN and the world community', November 13, www.rawa.org). Its appeals for solidarity with the masses of Afghanistan have been referred to by anti-war speakers on platforms throughout Britain. It has become known as the voice of oppressed women of Afghanistan. What internal support it has after a decade of fundamentalist oppression is another matter, of course.

Rawa was formed in 1977 "as an independent political/social organisation of Afghan women fighting for human rights and for social justice in Afghanistan" ('About Rawa' ibid). It was created in Kabul by a group of women intellectuals with an objective of increasing the political and social involvement of women in society and to contribute "to the struggle for the establishment of a government based on democratic and secular values in Afghanistan".

Formed as it was in the lead-up to the democratic revolution led by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan in 1978, it is surprising that Rawa appears to have opposed the PDPA government. The only reference to those years on the website describes Rawa as being part of the war of resistance "after the coup and particularly after the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in December 1979". The significant democratic advances made by Afghan women in 1978, in terms of personal freedoms, education and social and political activity, go unmentioned. Advances that despite the counterrevolutionary intervention of the Soviet Union in 1979 continued to exist until the final victory of the mujahedin in 1992.

What Rawa does make clear, however, is that its position within the war was against both the fundamentalists and the Soviet Union - "in contradistinction to the absolute majority of the vaunted islamic fundamentalist 'freedom fighters' of the anti-Soviet war of resistance, Rawa from the outset advocated secularism and democracy" (ibid). This is an important difference with the majority of the British left, who did not feel it necessary to place quotation marks around those particular 'freedom fighters'. Then the Socialist Workers Party cheered what is now the Northern Alliance and those whom it brands as "drug barons".

However, supporting the mujahedin from the safe distance of Britain is clearly a very different matter from the actuality of living under their brutality. According to Rawa their resistance brought reprisals from both the fundamentalists and the Soviets, with their leader, Meena, being assassinated by agents of KHAD (Afghanistan version of the KGB) in 1987.

Since 1992 Rawa's political struggle has been mainly directed against the fundamentalists. They have involved themselves in social programmes to educate and provide healthcare denied to women. They have continued to resist even under the barbaric regime of the Taliban. Their website documents the day-to-day existence under this regime. A society where oppression of women intensified to a point that they lived in terror. Where they were not only forced to cover themselves from head to toe in the burqa, but faced arbitrary public chastisement for such crimes as wearing socks deemed 'too thin' by the local Taliban militia. Where women's laughter was not to be heard outside the home and public floggings were common, as were stonings for fornication. Women were banned from driving, from working (except as doctors) and from receiving education. They were locked in their homes, unable to venture out without their husbands or male relatives.

That the SWP, the main leftwing organisation in the Stop the War Coalition, alibis this forcible imprisonment is quite outrageous. None us would dream of excusing the misogynist rulers who constitute the house of Saud. Understanding the conditions which produced the Taliban is one thing. Providing excuses for them as 'anti-imperialist allies' is another. The recent article by Talat Ahmed and Kevin Ovenden in Socialist Worker states: "The Taliban believed that imposing their model of behaviour could bring some order to the country" (December 1). Therefore the Taliban "imposed ... the burqa, banning women from public activity". This, say our two SWP comrades, was designed to protect women and prevent them from being raped en masse as they had been when the mujahedin took over Kabul in 1992.

The myth that the four years of domestic imprisonment under the Taliban was motivated by misplaced good intentions does not match up with the actual lived experience of women in Afghanistan.                 

In this regard Rawa has played an important role in drawing attention to the reality of life under the islamic fundamentalists. Its website has a section, 'On Afghan women', which features reports and photographs depicting the situation of women from 1992, onwards under both the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. For Rawa, "the Taliban and other jihadi fundamentalist cliques of Rabbani, Sayyaf, Masoud, Khalili, Hekmatyar and their like are brothers in arms" ('The difference between the Taliban and other fundamentalist forces' ibid).

Rawa stands for a democratic and secular Afghanistan which ensures "freedom of thought, religion and political expression, while safeguarding women's rights" ('Rawa's standpoints' ibid). It states that as "a matter of principle [it] is not a monarchist organisation", but supports the return of the king, considering this to be a popular demand of the majority of the people. It must also be noted that Queen Homaira, consort of exiled King Zahir Shah, horrified the Afghan mullahs when she lifted her veil in 1959. Therefore it is understandable that there are illusions, however misplaced, that he can help to bring about a secular Afghanistan.

Rawa also has illusions in the UN and calls for it to place a peacekeeping force in Afghanistan, to disarm the fundamentalists and to "supervise the convening of the loya jirga and the formation of a government based on democratic values and comprised of neutral personalities. This government should be assigned the task of holding free and fair elections within a period not exceeding one year. It is only on completion of this task and the establishment of a national security force free from the clutches of fundamentalists that the job of peacekeeping would be over" (ibid).

But liberation, including women's liberation, can never be handed down from above. So, despite its name, the Rawa has no revolutionary class perspective. This makes it natural for Rawa to rely on the UN to resolve the situation. Understandably though, it does not want any of the states that have previously interfered in Afghanistan to be involved in this peacekeeping force. The excluded countries are not specifically stated, but presumably they would include Russia, Pakistan, Iran and of course the US and Britain. Clearly Rawa fails to grasp the essential nature of the UN - an agency of imperialism. In any event it is almost bound to be the case that those regional powers with interests in Afghanistan will be involved in any imperialist-sponsored solution - as can currently be seen in Bonn and the fact that Pakistan has already got its Pashtun prime minister. Rawa's hopes that the UN solution will mean some degree of independence from the forces which have helped to destroy Afghanistan will almost certainly bring bitter disappointment.

What is essential in this context is for the working class movement internationally to take up the issue of women's rights in Afghanistan and not leave it to the likes of Cherie Blair and Laura Bush. The fact that Rawa has such illusions should not lead us to dismiss it. It is waging a brave struggle to liberate women in Afghanistan - where they have been more oppressed than anywhere else in the world and perhaps to a degree unprecedented in history. Islam in its origins did not have a programme designed to oppress women. Mohammed's wife, Khadijah, was independently wealthy. His daughter, Fatima, is still highly esteemed by muslims. Islamic fundamentalism and its assault on women's rights is a modern phenomenon and the struggle of those who oppose it in Afghanistan - as well as throughout the Arab and muslim world against islamic fundamentalists - must have our support.

This is a vital democratic question that cannot be ignored. If the left and the workers' movement do not fight to take the lead on this question, it will be easily subsumed in the imperialist-led solution. Much is being made of the token presence of women in the new interim government in Kabul - as if this makes up for the plight of women under both the US-financed mujahedin and the US-financed Taliban.

For leftwing groups like the SWP to have downplayed this issue in the name of 'defencism' or the need to build a 'broad movement' is a gross abdication of their responsibilities as socialists. All those who say they are for women's liberation must come out with clear demands for women's rights in Afghanistan and a democratic and secular state "“ now.

Anne Mc Shane