When foreign intervention is justified women under the Taliban

"It's like having a flower, or a rose. You water it and keep it at home for yourself, to look at it and smell it. It is not supposed to be taken out of the house to be smelled."

--Syed Ghaisuddin,

Taliban Minister of Education, when asked why women need to be confined to the home.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights--except in those countries where cultural differences dictate that a human being born a female is neither free nor equal and has neither dignity nor rights. Recent world events have brought the issue of human and particularly women's rights to the forefront, necessitating all of us to reevaluate the use of foreign intervention for humanitarian causes.

The Roman philosopher Boethius, in his work The Consolation of Philosophy, argues that the fact of a person being born into a specific caste or position in society intrinsically denies justice and human rights. While this theory can be applied to many human rights, my focus is primarily on women's rights.

Being born female provides an immediate classification. In certain societies, such as in New Zealand where women's liberation movements have been very successful in achieving social equality, this classification hardly goes any further than the gender specification on a birth certificate. But in other societies--for example, fundamentalist Islamic states like pre-war Afghanistan, the classification is immediately apparent, since sixteen out of every 100 women die in childbirth there from lack of proper medical care and since strictly enforced, physical punishment, ranging from whipping to stoning, is common practice.

After taking control of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, in 1996, the Taliban's Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice placed harsh, systematic restrictions on women's rights. They prohibited schooling for girls over the age of eight, shut down the women's university in Kabul, and forced women to leave their jobs. Women were taken out of the public sphere, forced to stay at home behind windows painted black to prevent passersby from seeing them, and allowed to venture outside only when sheathed in a chadari and accompanied by a close male relative.

The chadari, often mistakenly referred to in the West as a burqa, is a head-to-toe covering of Indian origin that has a mesh cloth over the facial area to allow the wearer to see and breathe. The burqa is a veil of Arabic design that is drawn across the face with the eyes exposed, first introduced in Afghanistan during the resistance to Soviet occupation ten to fifteen years ago. Official Taliban law required all women to wear the chadari, although not all women did, especially those who lived in areas outside of direct Taliban control. With the fall of the Taliban and the al-Qaeda, many Afghan women allowed the chadari to fall as well.

However, some women took pride in wearing the chadari; for centuries it was a traditional bridal gift from husband to wife. The chadari is very expensive; in some poorer areas an entire village would share one chadari. That meant that the women would have to take turns going to market and other public places, often waiting weeks for a chance to use the garment. This could become very serious in health-related circumstances because a woman committed to its wearing, who couldn't afford or gain access to a chadari couldn't be attended by a doctor. And those who were able to see a male doctor were required to remain fully clothed--not exactly conducive to accurate diagnosis.

Depending on where they lived, 21 percent to 64 percent of Afghan women under the Taliban had no access to health care, usually because of the high cost of the chadari or the long trip to find a female doctor. With few exceptions--such as allowing some women to continue to practice medicine, tolerating limited home schooling, and allowing widows with no other means of income to seek employment with international aid agencies--the Taliban effectively stripped women of all control over their lives.

Many have claimed that it is impossible to determine international human rights, that circumstances vary too widely among individual societies to allow for the same conceptions. Mahathi Mohammed of Malaysia believed that Europeans and Americans pressure developing countries to adhere to Western cultural values, including notions of rights, in order to create "instability, economic decline, and poverty" so the Western states "can threaten and control us."

The Taliban leaders maintained that their policy for women emanated directly from their religion and culture. "If a woman wants to work away from the home and with men, then that is not allowed by our religion and our culture," said Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, Taliban Minister of Justice. "If we force them to do this they may want to commit suicide." Contrary to Taliban propaganda, however, 94 percent to 98 percent of women in Taliban-controlled areas expressed the opinion that the Taliban had made their lives "much worse." In fact, in ironic denial of Turabi's statement, the percentage of women under Taliban authority who suffered from major depression was 76 percent compared to 28 percent in areas not directly controlled by the Taliban. And the percentage of women who contemplated suicide was 7 percent higher (16 percent) under Taliban authority.