Articles #2, 3 and 4 – Afghanistan and Gender

#2 In Afghanistan, women and girls strive to get an education

Date: Tuesday, July 9, 2013

“Educating women and girls and women’s empowerment in our community is my dream,” says
Beheshta, a 20-year-old Afghan girl who recently completed classes offered by the UN Women-
supported Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) Centre in Parwan Province,
northeastern Afghanistan.

Education is often not an option for many women and girls in Afghanistan. According to
Government figures, only 26 per cent of Afghanistan’s population is literate, and among women
the rate is only 12 per cent. Among school age children, 38 per cent (4.2 million in real numbers)
do not have access to schools, most of which are girls.
Attacks by insurgents who oppose women’s education lead to regular closures of girls’
schools. Moreover, 50 per cent of schools do not have buildings and other necessities, and a
dearth of textbooks, teaching materials and equipped laboratories, along with the large number
of school closures or relocations directly affects the quality of education.

(excerpt http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2013/7/afghani-women-strive-to-get-an-education accessed online

10/8/17.)

#3 No Justice, ‘No Value’ for Women in a Lawless Afghan Province

By MUJIB MASHAL and ZAHRA NADER JULY 8, 2017

There are three versions of how Tabaruk, a mother of six, died this spring during a journey
through treacherous snow-covered mountains in Afhanistan. She and her family had been
expelled from their village in Ghor Province because her teenage daughter, Mah Yamsar, was
said to have brought dishonor by becoming pregnant out of wedlock. The police in Ghor say
Tabaruk fell off her horse and died. Members of the provincial council and human rights activists
say she was pushed off a cliff, and then tied to a horse and dragged around until dead.

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A third version of the story was told to Mah Yamsar by her 8-year-old brother, who was traveling
with Tabaruk at the time. “They killed my mother with the bullets of a gun,” the brother
recounted.
If Afghanistan is one of the worst places to be a woman, then Ghor, a province so lawless that
people often wonder if there is a government there at all, may be the country’s capital of gender-
based violence and abuse. Week after week there are reports of women abused or killed in Ghor
by men who never face justice.
“There have been 118 registered cases of violence against women in Ghor in the past year, and
those are only cases that have been reported,” said Fawzia Koofi, head of the women’s rights
commission in the Afghan Parliament, who recently visited Ghor to raise awareness about the
lack of justice. “And not a single suspect in these 118 cases has been arrested.” “There is no value
for women there,” Ms. Koofi added. “It is as if she deserves to die.”
With a population of over 700,000 and located in west-central Afghanistan, Ghor is considered
one of the most deprived provinces of the country. It has received little government attention
over the years, and the rule of law is almost nonexistent in certain parts of the territory. Ghor
also shares borders with some of the most violent provinces with strong Taliban presence,
making it vulnerable to the insurgency.
Ms. Koofi, the lawmaker, said the violence had its roots in tribal feuds and the pervasive practice
of marrying off girls at a very young age for large dowries. Also playing a crucial role in the
violence, Ms. Koofi said, is the absence of the rule of law and a complete sense of impunity.
No one has yet been prosecuted for the death of Tabaruk.
Tabaruk, was focused on protecting her daughter from her own almost certain death. The
daughter, Mah Yamsar, says she was at home last year when a neighbor raped her. She hid the
episode from everyone, until she realized she was pregnant. Her mother become her secret-
bearer and helper. In rural Afghanistan, it is common for such pregnancies to end in honor killings.
The village council, swayed by the accused rapist’s powerful relatives, said Mah Yamsar’s family
had brought dishonor on the village. “Load up, and leave this place,” the family was told.
Mah Yamsar, still recovering from a forced abortion, was put on a motorcycle. Her mother rode
a horse, while her father, her brother and two village elders, both men, followed behind.

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Mah Yamsar arrived ahead of her family in Kharsang, also in Ghor, where the family planned to
start a new life. Her mother never made it. At first, her father said Tabaruk would come. Then he
said she had fallen off the horse and died. But her brother said their father was lying. His father
and the two village elders took Tabaruk off into the distance, telling him to stay behind. When
they returned, his father said Tabaruk had fallen off the horse. But the child told Mah Yamsar he
heard gunshots.

(Adapted: https://www.nytimes.com accessed online 10/9/17.)

#4 The Breadwinner
(Excerpt) by Deborah Ellis
Groundwood Books, 2000

“I can read that letter as well as Father can,” Parvana whispered into the folds of her
chador. “Well, almost.”
She didn’t dare say those words out loud. The man sitting beside her father would not
want to hear her voice. Nor would anyone else in the Kabul market. Parvana was there only to
help her father walk to the market and back home again after work. She sat well back on the
blanket, her head and most of her face covered by her chador.
She wasn’t really supposed to be outside at all. The Taliban had ordered all the girls and
women in Afghanistan to stay inside their homes. They even forbade girls to go to school. Parvana
had had to leave her sixth grade class, and her sister Nooria was not allowed to go to her high
school. Their mother had been kicked out of her job as a writer for a Kabul radio station. For more
than a year now, they had all been stuck inside one room, along with five-year-old Maryam and
two-year-old Ali.
Parvana did get out for a few hours most days to help her father walk. She was always
glad to go outside, even though it meant sitting for hours on a blanket spread over the hard
ground of the marketplace. At least it was something to do. She had even got used to holding her
tongue and hiding her face.
She was small for her eleven years. As a small girl, she could usually get away with being
outside without being questioned.

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 “I need this girl to help me walk,” her father would tell any Talib who asked, pointing to
his leg. He had lost the lower part of his leg when the high school he was teaching in was bombed.
His insides had been hurt somehow, too. He was often tired.
“I have no son at home, except for an infant,” he would explain. Parvana would slump
down further on the blanket and try to make herself look smaller. She was afraid to look up at
the soldiers. She had seen what they did, especially to women, the way they would whip and
beat someone they thought should be punished.
Sitting in the marketplace day after day, she had seen a lot. When the Taliban were
around, what she wanted most of all was to be invisible.
Now the customer asked her father to read his letter again. “Read it slowly, so that I can
remember it for my family.”
Parvana would have liked to get a letter. Mail delivery had recently started again in
Afghanistan, after years of being disrupted by war. Many of her friends had fled the country with
their families. She thought they were in Pakistan, but she wasn’t sure, so she couldn’t write to
them. Her own family had moved so often because of the bombing that her friends no longer
knew where she was. “Afghans cover the earth like stars cover the sky,” her father often said.
Her father finished reading the man’s letter a second time. The customer thanked him
and paid. “I will look for you when it is time to write a reply.”
Most people in Afghanistan could not read or write. Parvana was one of the lucky ones.
Both of her parents had been to university, and they believed in education for everyone, even
girls.

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