Throughout the world, women are victims of violence on a daily basis whether in the context of peace or in conflict. Perpetrators may be officials of the state, armed opposition groups or individuals - including family members.

Here, in Afghanistan, women are traded for debts. It forces me to ask a question, can women in Muslim countries ever expect to breathe in the air of self- approbation?

In Helmand, southern Afghanistan, a man who was not in a position to pay his debt, married off his daughter to an opium dealer, who already had a wife and four children. What’s more worse was yet to come. Unable to withstand the callousness of life in her husband’s home, she ‘grabbed the AK-47 from the policeman guarding the council meeting in the Grishk district of southern Helmand province and killed herself.’

This is just a single incident but the province is saturated with these kinds of cases, many of those go unreported.

Afghanistan produces more than 90% of the opium available in the world today. Local drug dealers pay in advance to farmers for their poppy yield but they often end up giving their daughters to the drug traffickers when they fail to harvest the expected yield.

Staggering figures shows

1. In 2006 alone, 69 cases of self-immolation and murders from Helmand and Kandahar provinces were related to marriages in exchange for drugs.

2. More than 20 women and girls had committed suicide over the past 10 months most of them had been handed over to dealers instead of drugs.

3. Women as old as 32 and girls as young as three being given to another family in exchange for debts.

4. 60% to 80% of all marriages in Afghanistan were forced.

Afghanistan is still facing an internal armed conflict and is ruled by a fragile government. Condition of women has hardly improved even after the fall of Taliban regime. Cases of violence are generally kept secret in rural areas but if the victim or family chooses to complain, tribal Jirgas or local councils are convened to resolve it.

There is a huge gap between the reality on the ground and the ‘remarkable progress’ claimed by western diplomats who sit in fortified compounds behind guards and concrete blocks and who never leave Kabul. The only area in which the country could really be said to have made remarkable progress is in growing the poppy.

End of the Taliban was meant to be like this?

Image

Read