Definitely worth passing on this, methinks.

Best

Dave


David Bircumshaw

Leicester, England

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>Women's Rights: Why Not?
>
>June 18, 2002
>By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
>
>ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - We now have a window into what
>President Bush and America's senators think of the world's
>women: Not much.
>
>An international women's treaty banning discrimination has
>been ratified by 169 countries so far (without emasculating
>men in any of them!), yet it has languished in the United
>States Senate ever since President Carter sent it there for
>ratification in 1980. This month the Senate Foreign
>Relations Committee got around to holding hearings on it,
>but the Bush administration, after shyly supporting it at
>first, now is finding its courage faltering.
>
>The support came from Colin Powell's State Department, but
>then John Ashcroft's Justice Department found out about the
>treaty - and seems to be trying to defend America from the
>terrifying threat of global women's rights. You'd think he
>might have other distractions, like fixing the F.B.I., but
>the Justice Department is conducting its own review of the
>treaty in what looks suspiciously like an effort to
>eviscerate it.
>
>I wish Mr. Ashcroft could come here to Pakistan, to talk to
>women like Zainab Noor. Because, frankly, the treaty has
>almost nothing to do with American women, who already enjoy
>the rights the treaty supports - opportunities to run for
>political office, to receive an education, to choose one's
>own spouse, to hold jobs. Instead it has everything to do
>with the half of the globe where to be female is to be
>persecuted until, often, death.
>
>Mrs. Noor, a pretty woman with soft eyes and a gold nose
>ring, grew up in the Pakistani countryside, and like her
>three sisters she never received a day's education. At the
>age of 15 she was married off by her parents, becoming the
>second wife of the imam of a local mosque. He beat her
>relentlessly.
>
>"He would grab my hair, throw me on the floor and beat me
>with sticks," she recalled. Finally she ran away.
>
>Her husband found her, tied her to the bed, wired a metal
>rod to a 220-volt electrical outlet and forced it into her
>vagina. Surgeons managed to save her life, but horrific
>internal burns forced them to remove her bladder, urethra,
>vagina and rectum. Her doctor says she will have to carry
>external colostomy and urine bags for the rest of her life.
>
>
>At least she survived. Each year about one million girls in
>the third world die because of mistreatment and
>discrimination.
>
>In societies where males and females have relatively equal
>access to food and health care, and where there is no
>sex-selective abortion, females live longer and there are
>about 104 females for every 100 males. In contrast,
>Pakistan has only 94 females for every 100 males, pointing
>to three million to seven million missing females in that
>country alone. Perhaps 10 percent of Pakistani girls and
>women die because of gender discrimination.
>
>In most cases it is not that parents deliberately kill
>their daughters. Rather, people skimp on spending on
>females - just like Sedanshah, a man at an Afghan refugee
>camp I visited near here. When his wife and son were both
>sick, he bought medicine for the boy alone, saying of his
>wife, "She's always sick, so it's not worth buying medicine
>for her."
>
>At Capital Hospital here in Islamabad, a nurse named
>Rukhsana Kausar recalled fraternal-twin babies she had
>treated recently. At birth, the girl twin weighed one pound
>one ounce more than the boy. At seven months, their
>position was reversed: the boy weighed one pound 13 ounces
>more than his sister.
>
>Critics have complained that the treaty, in the words of
>Jesse Helms, was "negotiated by radical feminists with the
>intent of enshrining their radical anti-family agenda into
>international law" and is "a vehicle for imposing abortion
>on countries that still protect the rights of the unborn."
>
>That's absurd. Twenty years of experience with the treaty
>in the great majority of countries shows that it simply
>helps third-world women gain their barest human rights. In
>Pakistan, for example, women who become pregnant after
>being raped are often prosecuted for adultery and sentenced
>to death by stoning. But this treaty has helped them escape
>execution.
>
>How can we be against that? Do we really want to side with
>the Taliban mullahs, who, like Mr. Ashcroft, fretted that
>the treaty imposes sexual equality? Or do we dare side with
>third-world girls who die because of their gender, more
>than 2,000 of them today alone?
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/18/opinion/18KRIS.html?ex=1025420289&ei=1&en
=3807a863ccd6c112