WEST LEAVES AFGHAN WOMEN TO FATE

Victoria Brittain

Even after Emma Bonino, the European commissioner for humanitarian affairs, scathingly criticised their silence at the rise of the Taliban, the United Nations and the United States state department waited a full week before voicing concern for the women of Afghanistan, whose skills and hopes are threatened with asphyxiation.

The UN and the US have every reason to be deeply embarrassed by their role in Afghanistan in the recent past.

The UN failed to protect the former head of state Mohammed Najibullah, who was given shelter in its compound but ended his days mutilated and swinging from a lamppost.

The US, which recklessly armed and supported the anticommunist mojahedin through the CIA and Pakistan's powerful intelligence services, gave us the Taliban with all its backward attitudes.

In fact, for the UN and the state department both largely male-run organisations commitment to women's rights remains in practice a low priority.

This week's belated warnings that aid may be withheld from Afghanistan is a response to the outrage of a broad international coalition of women at the Taliban's exclusion of women from education, work and public life.

But is there any will at the UN or in Washington to enforce the warning?

Business as usual is more likely. The Taliban have said they want friendly relations with the US, and the state department is planning to send a delegation to explore the possibility of reopening the embassy closed in 1989 when the communists took over.

Ms Bonino did not mince her words. "I thought that the UN was the body which protects human rights. I think that what is happening in Afghanistan is bringing people back to the Dark Ages, and particularly the women. It's not acceptable that everyone should be quiet."

Describing the country as the "theatre of a major humanitarian crisis", she said she was astonished that declarations about human rights made at the fourth UN world conference on women in Beijing a year ago were not now being followed by action.

"I wonder what is the use of the conference in Beijing ... if afterwards the same organisations are not saying a word about the violation of the most basic human rights," she said.

She might have been speaking about a number of countries less in' the news.

'In Afghanistan women are being brought back to the Dark Ages' than Afghanistan where the plight of women remains an indictment of the international community's words at Beijing.

For instance, Kuwait, a strategic ally of the US, held parliamentary elections this week from which women were excluded.

In Pakistan, another important US ally which has à woman prime minister, the courts ruled last month that under Islamic law no woman can marry without her father's or guardian's consent.

"This is a ruling to curb women's rights and make them totally helpless," said a placard outside the court.

In Rwanda a new Human Rights Watch report details the widespread use of rape by the interahamwe militia during the genocide of 1994. Some women were gang-raped raped with sharpened sticks or gunbarrels, held in sexual slavery or sexually mutilated. The survivors tell of unimaginable horrors.

To date, no indictments for rape or other forms of sexual violence have been issued by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Rwandan women, who now make up 70 per cent of the population, have second-class status in Rwandan law, which often makes it impossible for them to reclaim family property.

In Algeria, for the past four years, women and girls choosing a secular lifestyle have had their throats cut by an Islamic extremist movement which, like the Taliban, owes much to leaders who helped the US side in the Afghan war.

Again, as with the Taliban, US allies played a key role: Algeria's extremist groups were funded and encouraged in their early days by Saudi Arabia, which saw them as a buffer against the socialist politics then favoured by a section of the Algerian political elite.

If men were being wrapped in burqas and made to stay at home in Afghanistan, or were being killed or forced into exile for going to work wearing the clothes of their choice in Algeria, or were being excluded from the democratic process in Kuwait, or were suffering the psychological after-effects of rape in Rwanda, the UN and the state department would have been up in arms from the start.

No one would be talking, as they are now, about giving the Taliban credit for bringing some stability to the country or assuming that they will become more modern ate in time.

Nor would they be criticising the Algerian government for cancelling elections which the fundamentalists would have won.

Nor would there be a lack of cash and expertise to rebuild the Rwandan judicial system.

Women at Beijing called for an equal share of power - we need it, and none more than the women of Afghanistan.