Tomorrow is International Woman's Day. Over the last ten years, Afghan government has been boastful of relative achievements of women in terms of their participation in politics and social activities as compared with the Taliban era. But one of the government's main boasts appear to be being undone as the situation of women in Afghanistan continues to be influenced by a culture of discriminatory and predatory nature.
Women in Afghanistan continue to fall victims to the most startling and shocking and ruthless traditions and actions. For instance, a woman was killed by her husband in Kunduz for delivering a female child. It is said that she gave birth to the third daughter and it upset her in-laws who expected her to give birth to a son.
In another case, a newly-wed 15 year old girl committed self-immolation on Friday, February 17, 2012 to get herself rid of domestic violence. Sadat, the victim, has said that in a forced marriage she faced violence and abuses from her in-law family and in order to relieve herself of those violent behaviors she had to have recourse to self-immolation.
Unfortunately, in advance of this year's woman's day, Ulema Council of Afghanistan issued a statement calling for segregation of males and females at workplaces and education centers. The religious scholars also asked for not allowing women to travel without any male relative.
According to this statement, man is the root and woman is the offshoot or man is originally superior and woman is inferior, which denies the equality of man and woman. This trend is extremely treacherous as earlier the Ministry of Information and Culture had asked the female newscasters and presenters to observe Islamic ethics and national culture while appearing on televisions.
In a notice, the ministry has asked all the television channels not to allow the newsreaders with unveiled heads and "thick make-up" to appear on the televisions for the programs. This was ironically called by journalists, civil society organizations, human rights groups and activists and women rights defenders as a "make-up and dress code" developed by the Ministry of promote a violence-generating culture.
These issues gave rise to concerns that there may be an attempt for realignment with Taliban's harsh line of interpretation of Islamic teachings and Sharia law in order to appease the atrocious militants that have remained hostile to women's presence in the society and had banned girls' education when they were ruling about 90 percent of the country.