Opinion Editorial - Lauryn Oates, Calgary Herald

Afghan women worth the fight - today, the girls of the Omid-e-mirmun Orphanage are enrolled in school. Many had to work long and hard to make up for missed years of schooling under the Taliban.

Licia Corbella's April 4 column, "Here's why the fight in Afghanistan is worth it" was a powerful wake-up call that the tone of the reactions to the proposed discriminatory law against Shiite women, now under reconsideration, is misplaced. She is indeed right when she reminds us that the question is not "why are we in Afghanistan," but rather, for whom?

For several years, our organization, Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, has funded the orphanage Licia visited back in 2003. I was also in Kabul at that time, when Afghan men and women delegates came together to approve the country's new constitution, which made women and men equal citizens by law.

Afghanistan is emerging from 30 years of violent conflict, a period where it was largely ignored by the West except to flood it with weapons and then leave the fate of its citizens to the mercy of illiterate, trigger-happy, fundamentalist men. That era, and our subsequent inaction, is to our great shame. Now is our chance to make up for the past and we must get it right. Abandonment is not the answer.

Today, the girls of the Omid-e-mirmun Orphanage are enrolled in school. Many had to work long and hard to make up for missed years of schooling under the Taliban. They are excelling. One girl, aged 15, earned the highest marks this semester in her class. She taught herself English and sends me home with passionate letters to read on the long plane ride back to Canada, describing her dreams for the future. Parentless and poor, the world is nevertheless still wide open in her mind and her goals are so ambitious. The future is very different for this young woman than it was a decade ago. And that future desperately needs to be protected.

It is difficult to describe a sight more compelling than watching the youngest girls spread about, lying on the floor, quietly reading simple picture books to learn to read. The images of animals or illustrated, cartoon-like children with which they engage were illegal under the Taliban, who banned all images of living things. One of the older girls is an avid poet. She writes of Kabul's springs, the blooming of orange blossoms and flowing rivers. The Taliban banned any non-religious literature during their regime. They closed museums, burned books, murdered intellectuals and kept women as prisoners in their homes. The Omid girls will become adults in a new Afghanistan -- one characterized by sweeping changes set against old habits that die hard. They will grow up governed by a president and parliament elected by the people, yet under a government marred by corruption. They will be able to go to university, but their high school teachers risk being murdered by the Taliban -- for being women who teach girls. Some of them may start small businesses, but they live in a country where many people live on less than $1 a day. They may choose to run for a seat in parliament, where they will contend with old mujahedeen deeply averse to their presence. It will be a windy road, but along which some seeds have been planted -- and they must be allowed to grow. As Nick Grono of the International Crisis Group stated, "we shouldn't give up on our strategy of institution building -- the fact is that it's not so much that it has failed, but that we have hardly tried."

Canada's presence in Afghanistan enabled us to send a clear signal to the Afghan government that laws which discriminate against women have no place in our shared goals of justice, human rights and peace. This stands in stark contrast to the Taliban's days of power, when there was nothing but silence coming from the West in response to the regime of gender apartheid under which Afghan women lived. This time, the Afghan government was forced to listen.

A decade ago the Afghan women's movement was in no place to mobilize against the threat of such discrimination. Today, they are doing that -- with ferocity. I was in Kabul at the time the new law was publicly announced and witnessed the flurry of activity which immediately began as women's organizations, parliamentarians, intellectuals, writers and Afghan civil society mobilized. They started a petition, issued statements, made recommendations for repealing the law, met together to plan action, held a press conference, and organized a demonstration against the law.

My friend Shamzia now runs a successful women's cooperative in Kabul, something she could have never done under the Taliban. She often tells me, "Lauryn, if Canada leaves Afghanistan, you had better get me a visa to Canada, because the Taliban will be back, and I will be dead." She is not joking. Her anxiety over her fate if the international community chooses to once again walk away from Afghanistan again is shared by many women, with good reason. Rebuilding a shattered state, one where gender inequities have been amplified by poverty and extremism, was always going to be hard work. But so far the hardest thing about it has been getting a true commitment from players like Canada and the U. S. to make a promise to stick it out for the long run. It's a situation that has been rendered even less confident by the deplorable position of Canada's radical 'antiwar' movement on our role in Afghanistan.

In August, Afghans will go to the polls again. They will have the chance then to demonstrate whether they believe Hamid Karzai should stay in power, when women's hard fought-for rights were imperilled under his watch. Until then and beyond, we must stay vigilant in our solidarity with Afghans. We must listen to those like the girls of the Omid Orphanage, who want the right to dream of being doctors, lawyers, poets and politicians. We must learn something from the schoolgirls in Kandahar who returned to their classrooms after having acid thrown on them by Talibs -- because they wanted to go to school that badly. These are the voices we need to pay attention to, and who we must be fighting for. We owe them nothing less.

Lauryn Oates has been advocating for the rights of Afghan women and girls since 1996. She founded the Vancouver and Montreal Chapters of Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, and is currently Project Director of the Excelerate Teacher Training Program (CW4WAfghan)

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http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Afghan+women+worth+fight/1533852/story.html

BY LAURYN OATES, FOR THE CALGARY HERALD
APRIL 25, 2009