Word: bahauddin
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...Northern Alliance, the loose coalition of former mujahedin fighting the Taliban, could play a major role. Abdullah Abdullah, the Alliance's smooth-talking Foreign Minister, vowed last week that women would be part of any government he helped form. But in the Alliance's garrison town of Khoja Bahauddin women walk soundlessly in full burka. "The majority of Afghan men do not believe women should have rights," says Farahnaz Nazir, head of the Afghanistan Women's Association, the only women's organization operating openly in the country today. "Taliban or Northern Alliance, there are fanatics everywhere...
...Alliance can claim some progress: it allows Nazir's group to exist. But she is the only woman in Khoja Bahauddin who doesn't wear a burka in public. Her privileged status as an overseas-educated aid worker partially protects her from the beating Osema received. But when Nazir shakes hands with a Western man, she looks around furtively. It is the same motion countless Afghan women make every day, the rapid adjusting of veils to cover their faces or the eyes quickly downcast when men enter the room. To help empower women, Nazir runs workshops that include reading...
...Northern Alliance also points to schools like the one in Yang-e-Qale, a remote hamlet a half-hour's jeep ride from Khoja Bahauddin, as proof that it promotes women's rights. More than 50 veiled girls crowd the Yang-e-Qale school's first-grade class, reading the Koran. But in the eighth-grade class, only 12 students sit at the desks, their burkas hanging on hooks in the back of their classroom. Many parents believe a couple of years' education is all their daughters need to become good housewives. Other girls in the area attend classes only...
...Even at the Khoja Bahauddin bazaar, where commerce and enterprise should reign, there is little movement. Shopkeepers lazily eye customers. There is little reason to hustle. Everyone sells the same dusty goods - banana biscuits and tomato paste from the Islamic Republic of Iran, wormy apples from neighboring Bagram province and the sole product (until last weekend) from the United States of America: Selsun Blue anti-dandruff shampoo...