Afghanistan Womens Rights Essay

On September 27, 1996, the Taliban seized control of the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul, and violently plunged the occupied territories of Afghanistan into a brutal state of gender apartheid in which women and girls have been stripped of their basic human rights(“The Taliban & Afghan Women” 1).In 1997, Taliban Deputy Foreign Minister Sher Abbas Stanakzai acknowledged that repression of women was a political tool to consolidate power. “Our current restrictions of women are necessary in order to bring the Afghan people under control,” he said. “We need these restrictions until people learn to obey the Taliban.”(“Afghanistan’s Women Today” 1-2). 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 (Barbara Mikkelson). The growing war in Afghanistan has further jeopardized the already precarious lives of Afghan women.For most of the past 25 years, Afghan women have suffered outrage upon outrage as political instability, armed conflict and violence washed over their rugged country. Millions of Afghan women, children and elderly have fled their homes. The current air strikes have worsened conditions, destroying roads and services already devastated by famine, earthquakes and three years of drought.(Afghanistan’s Women Today). Afghan women, who had been the majority of the country’s workforce and of its population, were barred from employment outside the home and prohibited from attending secondary school, driving vehicles or appearing in public without male escorts and the all-covering burqa.Women were placed under house arrest, deprived of health care and education, and made totally dependent upon male relatives, suffering beatings, sexual assault or even execution if they violated the bans(Afghanistan;s Women Today).…