The New York Times

Thursday, October 28, 1999

The Long Dark Night

IN AMERICA/By BOB HERBERT

It was peculiar. The women kept pointing to their heads.

"I would ask if they had any health problems," said Zohra Rasekh, a senior health researcher for Physicians for Human Rights. "They would not mention anything specific. But they would point to their heads. Some would say, 'Yes, right here.'

"And I would ask, 'What do you mean?' And after a couple of interviews I was really shocked to see how everybody would say the same thing over and over. They would say, 'Well, I'm going crazy. I have bad dreams. I don't want to live anymore.'

"It was so easy to notice this prevalence of depression, even if you weren't trained to recognize it. The women were very down. Some would start crying. They felt they were without hope. Some said they wanted to kill their children and then kill themselves."

Ms. Rasekh, who has interviewed more than 160 Afghan women, said she believed the majority of the women living under the viciously oppressive rule of the Taliban were now caught in the long dark night of severe depression. They are not permitted to work or go to school. For the most part they must remain at home, indoors, as in a prison, their windows covered or painted black. If they do go out, it must be in the company of a close male relative, and within the claustrophobic confines of the all-encompassing burqa.

They must remain quiet. Their footsteps are not to be heard. Their breathing is only grudgingly tolerated. These are women who barely register on the most fundamental gauges of existence. They are not alive in any real sense. They are there but not there. Barely there. How could they not be depressed?

There is a growing fear among top officials of Physicians for Human Rights and other groups that recent overtures to the United States by Taliban officials, including offers to discuss the status of the terrorist Osama bin Laden, will undermine efforts to bring some kind of real relief to the suffering women of Afghanistan.

The Taliban control most of Afghanistan, but because of opposition from the United States and other countries they do not hold Afghanistan's seat at the U.N. And, in fact, the U.N. has threatened to impose economic sanctions against the Taliban if their leaders continue to harbor Mr. bin Laden.

Eleanor Smeal, the president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, which has been trying to focus international attention on the conditions faced by women in Afghanistan, said she feared "there will be a peace negotiation" that could lead to an agreement under which the hideous treatment of women by the Taliban "will become accepted."

She said, "If this can be accepted, just passed off as culture or religion, then there are no human rights for women that could ever be guaranteed. The United Nations has declared that women's rights are human rights. If you can take away the right to employment, the right to education of any kind, the right to move about freely, then what rights do you have? What are the inalienable rights that women have?"

Ms. Rasekh acknowledged that everyone in Afghanistan had been affected by the devastation wrought by so many years of warfare and religious fanaticism. But the conditions that currently prevail for women are "so terrible, so horrible," she said, that they cry out for special attention.

"Even before the Taliban it wasn't the best health system in the world," she said. "But there were trained doctors, male and female, and women could visit male doctors, specialists."

Now, she said, most of the experienced doctors have left. Women doctors for the most part are barred from practicing. And women patients, with very few exceptions, cannot be treated by male doctors.

She said a few decrepit facilities had been set aside, ostensibly for the treatment of women patients, but they were not even minimally adequate. She mentioned a diabetic woman who died because she couldn't get insulin shots, and a woman who was in an automobile accident and died because a hospital wouldn't admit her.

Ms. Rasekh spoke of her own sadness and sense of helplessness as she continues to try to do what she can to help.

"Every day you hear these sad things," she said. "You see them and you feel helpless. I am not the same person that I was."