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 | | From: | Dan Clore | | Subject: | Afghan Women Still Learn in Secret Classrooms | | Date: | Fri, 21 Jan 2005 14:30:56 -0800 |
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 | News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
The Independent (UK)
The Taliban are gone but Afghan women still learn to read
and write in secret classrooms
By Nick Meo in Kabul
20 January 2005
Off a dirty backstreet in a far-flung suburb of Kabul, past
a washing line of ragged clothes and up a dingy stairwell,
is a carefully hidden upstairs room.
Inside, teenage girls in headscarves sit crosslegged on the
floor, faces twisted in concentration, doing something once
strictly forbidden for female Afghans; learning to read and
write.
Under the Taliban, an underground network of secret schools
taught a rudimentary education at great risk to teachers and
students. In the democratic new Afghanistan, schools for
girls are still operating -- still in secret.
"There is no signboard in the street though most of the
neighbours know what is going on here," said Faryal Benish
of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (Rawa).
"If the fundamentalists found out they would attack us. And
the parents know it's a school but if they knew it was us
teaching their girls, they might not let them come to lessons."
Rawa enjoyed brief fame in the West after 11 September as a
group of doughty feminists who defied the Taliban. They
taught girls banned from schools. They helped widows barred
from working. They also tried to tell the world about the
nightmare Afghan women had fallen into, smuggling out a
horrifying film shot surreptitiously of a woman being
executed in Kabul's sports stadium.
Yet, more than three years after the Taliban's fall, the
women of Rawa still dare not emerge in public in Kabul.
Members believe they are still in so much danger from their
enemies that they have not even opened an office in the capital.
"We can be killed easily if we carry out our activities in
public," said a Rawa organiser, Neelab Ismat, "It is better
than the Taliban days of course. But we can only work
underground, even now."
The secret schools -- there are 50 in the capital, teaching
hundreds of girls and women -- no longer run the terrible
risks they once did. But the threat from Islamic hardliners
still requires discretion.
Some girls attend Rawa's literacy classes because their
fathers have banned them from government schools.
"They are very backward, narrow-minded people," said Faryal,
an 18-year-old student and Rawa member. "They think girls
are just for washing the clothes and sitting in the house."
Most of the pupils in the Laila (Tulip) school in the north
of the city attend as an alternative to government schools.
Their parents banned them from making the journey to and
from the state school because security is still bad in their
part of the city. Parents fear their daughters will be
kidnapped on the way to or from school -- the girls
attending the Tulip school all live within a couple of
streets of the classroom.
The teacher, Rahela, started lessons seven years ago. "I
would like to teach in a government school and perhaps when
security conditions are better I will do that," she said.
"But God knows when that will be. We still haven't seen
democracy in our land."
In the Taliban days, her pupils sometimes had to hurriedly
hide their books under their burkhas when suspicious police
poked their noses in. Rahela always told police she was
running a handicraft class.
Now, about a dozen girls between the ages of 10 and 19 learn
together for an hour every morning in the cosy room, kept
warm against the January cold by a wood-burning stove. On
dark days, a single bulb provides light -- powered by a car
battery.
In a corner, a fat baby boy slept in a cot, a brother being
looked after by a 12-year-old pupil. Older brothers started
arriving at the lesson's end to escort their sisters back
through the streets.
Thirteen-year-old Nargis has learnt to read in the past
three years and wants to be a doctor.
"My father won't let me go to the government school," she
said. "But I like it here and I've learned a lot." The
network of schools are now the main activity of Rawa but
underground meetings and campaigns are still organised by
the 2,000 members in Afghanistan, derided as Communists by
their enemies.
They tried to distribute copies of their magazine -- Woman's
Message -- but men in uniform threatened shopkeepers not to
stock it. A newspaper in Kabul linked to a warlord described
them as "dangerous" adding; "they must be finished".
Their founder, Meena, was assassinated by a fundamentalist
warlord in the 1980s and knowledge of the risks they run are
never far from the thoughts of members. Ms Ismat said: "We
hold meetings but they are not public. We must be very
careful who we tell, and who we let into our organisation."
Even student members at the university don't tell their
friends they have joined.
Rawa doesn't like President Hamid Karzai -- "too close to
the warlords" -- and hates George Bush. "He is a hypocrite,
using the pain of Afghanistan's women for propaganda," said
Ms Ismat.
The appointment of three new women ministers to the Afghan
cabinet last month was dismissed as window-dressing of a
government dominated by conservative old men, many with
fundamentalist leanings.
Ms Ismat said: "We saw in the election many women who were
proud to vote, but we do not think this new government will
help women much.
"Hospitals for women are terrible, commanders can still
force girls into marriage, and there are hardly any jobs for
women. Unfortunately we are not hopeful about the future of
Afghanistan. There are some open-minded men here, but most
are still very backward."
RAWA:
http://www.rawa.org/
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
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