Build Shelters in Afghanistan Hillary!

http://cryptome.org/info/af-war-arch-1008/af-war-arch-10-083.htm

AFGHANISTAN: Domestic violence intolerable, say battered women and girls

The story of Zaynab, (a name adopted to conceal her identity) an 18-year-old mother of five who has taken refuge in a new women’s shelter in the capital Kabul, illustrates how routinely women continue to suffer rights violations in conservative, patriarchal Afghanistan.

She fled her home after refusing to put up with any more beatings from her husband, less than three weeks after giving birth to her youngest son.“ My father forcibly married me to an old man when I was 11 and my husband treated me like a slave over the last seven years,” she said, while sewing a blanket in the shelter, located in an upmarket suburb of the capital.

But Zaynab and the 20 other women she shares the facility with are the lucky few out of millions of destitute Afghan women. The small group have managed to find sanctuary from widespread physical violence, forced marriage, honour killings and other violations in ultra-conservative rural Afghanistan. Zaynab’s leg was broken when her husband threw her out of a window. The torment ended when she managed to escape from the hospital where she was being treated, leaving her children behind.

“This is the new pain I must bear, living without my family, but I had no other option. I knew he would never change.”“I put on men’s clothes and a turban to hide my long hair and to look like a man, because it is extremely dangerous and difficult for women to travel by themselves,” she added, describing her escape.

Throughout the whole country, there are just four shelters, all in the capital, that are home to more than 100 women and girls. Supported by different agencies and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MoWA), the confidential centres are designed to give protection, accommodation, food, training and healthcare to women who are escaping violence in the home or are seeking legal support due to family feuds.“Often they are introduced to MoWA by the office of the attorney general or supreme court, while sometimes they come directly to our ministry,” Shakila Afzalyar, a legal officer at the ministry, told IRIN.

All the women IRIN interviewed at the shelter said they had broken no laws, but were fleeing from brutality or forced marriages. Afghanistan’s new constitution guarantees equality before the law for men and women, but the reality, the women point out, is very different.

A girl at the shelter, Paikai, just 12 years old, said she was compelled to marry the brother of her fiancé, who died before marrying her. “They paid some money and gave a car to my father, but I did not like the man and escaped,” she said. She added that she had heard from a local radio station that there was a women’s affairs ministry in the capital, which heard the complaints of women, “that idea helped me make the final decision.” “Women are used as a means for settling disputes between two families or tribes,” she said, adding that she did not want to return to her village, where they treated women “like animals”.

“I have nowhere to return to, I like it here, because there is a literacy course and at least I don’t see and hear those arrogant men,” she sighed.

The statistics are worrying, the ministry says. Afzalyar said that up to 20 women and girls were referred to MoWA’s legal department every day, mostly complaining of physical violations and forced marriages. But space at the specialised shelters is limited. Many of the women who cannot find a place in the four secure hostels in Kabul end up in prison.

More than 30 women are currently in jail in the capital, many simply because they have nowhere else to go, women’s rights activists say. “But I think even being in prison is safer than bearing the misery and punishments of violent men at home, at least in prison… one day you leave,” Zaynab said.

Give women peacekeepers a chance

GC Notes:PEACEKEEPERS MEANS SOLDIER WITH A GUN

NEW YORK, 29 October 2010 (IRIN) - The consensus was “could do better” as senior government representatives met in New York to commemorate UN Security Council Resolution 1325, a decade-old commitment to strengthen the role of women in peace and security. Ambassadors and government officials widely endorsed a Security Council decision on 27 October to create indicators to measure progress from now on.

“There’s a need for the indicators so the UN can measure how many women are in peacekeeping, are mediators, and are in parliament across the spectrum,” Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and co-chair of the UN civil society advisory group for women, peace and security, told IRIN. “Member states are afraid of that because if we start measuring performance you’ll see how bad it is.” Two recent events have underlined the failures - as well as the hope: the gang rape of more than 280 women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo in July, and the recent appointment of former Chilean president, Michelle Bachelet, to head UN Women, to be launched in January 2011.

“Those rapes and our failure as an international community to bring that conflict to an end and to protect women and children in the process stands as a tragic rebuke to our efforts thus far,” said US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Part of UN Women’s mandate will be scaling-up programming in conflict zones. But gender equality activist Beatrice Aber, a member of Southern Sudan’s Legislative Assembly, said its work was needed now. “There are only two women at the negotiating table for the post-referendum arrangements,” Aber said of Sudan’s upcoming January referendum, as she marched with 150 other women activists to the Security Council. “Women are not being properly represented. People are not aware of what 1325 means, and if they are not aware it, there is no way to implement it.”

Peacekeepers

A recent report about Indonesia, Colombia, Israel and Palestine, Liberia, Sri Lanka and Uganda highlights that women remain on the sidelines of peace-building because the resolution is only partially implemented by UN agencies in these conflict and post-conflict countries.

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Sexual violence used to "break the will" of civilians
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Women UN peacekeepers - more needed

A recent report about Indonesia, Colombia, Israel and Palestine, Liberia, Sri Lanka and Uganda highlights that women remain on the sidelines of peace-building because the resolution is only partially implemented by UN agencies in these conflict and post-conflict countries.

The report, "What the Women Say:Participation and UNSCR 1325", by the Massachusetts Institute for Technology and the Washington-based International Civil Society Action Network, found that governments had failed to take the necessary steps to boost women’s participation at crucial stages in a country’s rebuilding.

“I felt that we were going to come here today and have countries tell us how fantastically they are doing,” said Sanam Anderlini, the lead author of the report. “When you dig into what they are actually doing you realize that a lot of it, like the training, like the awareness-raising, isn’t quite there.”

Positive developments in the past 10 years include an increase in the number of women serving as UN peacekeepers, including all-female police peacekeeping units; an increase in training for soldiers on gender issues and sexual violence, and a rise in the percentage of women in national parliaments. Yet the percentage of women in both military and police peacekeeping units remains below 10 percent of overall levels.

Only 16 percent of peace agreements specifically address women’s rights and needs. “We have made some progress but not as much as we would have wanted,” said UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping, Alain Le Roy. “

The challenges ahead remain immense.”Enhanced national action plans, as well as nearly US$44 million pledged by the US for empowering women in conflict zones, is an “important first step” for addressing some of those challenges, said Carla Koppell, director for the Institute for Inclusive Security, which documents and helps facilitate women’s participation in peace-building. “But a plan is just that. It’s a first step to implementation.”

Full implementation of 1325 will require a “transformation of heart and mind” Koppell said, re-prioritizing peace negotiations to look beyond stopping immediate violence with “very narrow range of military actors ”, often male, at the table.