> The government of Afghanistan is waging a war upon women. 
> The situation is getting so bad that one person in an editorial of the 
> Times compared the treatment of women there to the treatment of Jews in 
> pre-Holocaust Poland. 
> 
> Since the Taliban took power in 1996,women have had to wear burqua and 
> have been beaten and stoned in public for not having the proper 
> attire,even if this means simply not having the mesh covering in front 
> of their eyes. 
> 
> One woman was beaten to death by an angry mob of fundamentalists for 
> accidentally exposing her arm while she was driving. Another was stoned 
> to death for trying to leave the country with a man that was not a 
> relative. 
> 
> Women are not allowed to work or even go out in public without a male 
> relative; professional women such as professors, 
> translators,doctors,lawyers, artists and writers have been forced from 
> their jobs and stuffed into their homes, so that depression is becoming 
> so widespread that it has reached emergency levels. There is no way in 
> such an extreme Islamic society to know the suicide rate with certainty, 
> but relief workers are estimating that the suicide rate among women, 
> who cannot find proper medication and treatment for severe depression 
> and would rather take their lives than live in such conditions, has 
> increased significantly. 
> 
> Homes where a woman is present must have their windows painted so that 
> she can never be seen by outsiders. They must wear silent shoes so that 
> they are never heard. Women live in fear of their lives for the 
> slightest misbehavior. Because they cannot work, those without male 
> relatives or husbands are either starving to death or begging on the 
> street, even if they hold Ph.D.'s. There are almost no medical 
> facilities available for women, and relief workers, in protest,have 
> mostly left the country, taking medicine and psychologists and other 
> things necessary to treat the sky-rocketing level of epression among 
> women. At one of the rare hospitals for women, a reporter found still, 
> nearly lifeless bodies lying motionless on top of beds, wrapped in their 
> burqua, unwilling to speak,eat, or do anything, but slowly wasting away. 
> Others have gone mad and were seen crouched in corners, perpetually 
> rocking or crying, most of them in fear. 
> 
> One doctor is considering, when what little medication that is left 
> finally runs out, leaving these women in front of the president's 
> residence as a form of peaceful protest. It is at the point where 
> the term 'human rights violations' has become an understatement. 
> Husbands have the power of life and death over their women relatives, 
> especially their wives, but an angry mob has just as much right to stone 
> or beat a woman, often to death, for exposing an inch of flesh or 
> offending them in the slightest way. David Cornwell has said that those 
> in the West should not judge the Afghan people for such treatment 
> because it is a 'cultural thing', but this is not even true. Women 
> enjoyed relative freedom,to work, dress generally as they wanted, and 
> 1996 - the rapidity of this transition is the main reason for the 
> depression and suicide; women who were once educators or doctors or 
> simply used to basic human freedoms are now severely restricted and 
> treated as sub-human in the same of right-wing fundamentalist Islam. It 
> is not their tradition or 'culture', but is alien to them, and it is 
> extreme even for those cultures where fundamentalism is the rule. 
> Besides, if we could excuse everything on cultural grounds, then we 
> should not be appalled that the Carthaginians sacrificed their infant 
> children, that little girls are circumcised in parts of Africa, that 
> blacks in the US deep south in the 1930's were lynched, prohibited from 
> voting, and forced to submit to unjust Jim Crow laws. 
> 
> Everyone has a right to a tolerable human existence,even if they are 
> women in a Muslim country in a part of the world thatWesterners may not 
> understand. If life can threaten military force in Kosovo in the name of 
> human rights for the sake of ethnic Albanians,then NATO and the West can 
> certainly express peaceful outrage at the oppression, murder and 
> injustice committed against women by the Taliban. 
> 
> 
> STATEMENT: 
> In signing this, we agree that the current treatment of women in 
> Afghanistan is completely UNACCEPTABLE and deserves support and action 
> by the people of the United Nations and that the current situation in 
> Afghanistan will not be tolerated. Women's Rights is not a small issue 
> anywhere and it is UNACCEPTABLE for women in 1999 to be treated as 

1) Piero Bonvicini, Padova, Italia
2) Mauro Masiero, Padova, Italia 
3) Chiara Bonello, Padova, Italia 
Please sign to support, and include your town and country. Then copy and 
e-mail to as many people as possible. If you receive this list with more 
than 50 names on it, please e-mail a copy of it to: 

Mary Robinson, 
High Commissioner, 
UNHCHR, [log in to unmask]  
mailto:[log in to unmask]
and to:
Angela King, 
Special Advisor on Gender Issues and the 
Advancement of Women, UN, 
[log in to unmask] < mailto:[log in to unmask]
Even if you decide not to sign, please be considerate and do not kill 
the petition. Thank you. 

It is best to copy rather than forward the 
petition.----------
Piero Bonvicini
Servizio di Medicina di Laboratorio
Azienda Ospedaliera 
Via Giustiniani 
35128  Padova (ITALIA)
tel ++39 49 821 2799  fax  ++39 49 821 3997



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