British government and Afghan women, propaganda, not practice

This video about Afghan feminist Malalai Joya in the USA says about itself:

Noam Chomsky & Malalai Joya: The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan, March 25, 2011, Memorial Church, Harvard University: Filmed by Paul Hubbard.

The talk by NATO country governments about supposedly supporting Afghan women’s rights has nothing to do with the, deteriorating, real situation of Afghan women under war ond occupation. It is war propaganda, aimed at stuffing the bloody costly Afghan war down NATO countries’ taxpayers’ throats.

By Paddy McGuffin in Britain:

Britain ‘must do more’ to support Afghan women

Thursday 07 March 2013

Britain must do more to support Afghan women‘s rights and combating violence against women and girls in the country, Amnesty urged today.

The charity warned ministers that the work done so far has been merely “a drop in the ocean.”

Though the government says it is a “staunch supporter” of Afghan women’s rights, little of its recent work in the country has specifically focused on women’s rights, Amnesty said.

It said that while the Department for International Development (DfID) has spent £178 million on over 100 reconstruction and development projects in Afghanistan, only two have specifically addressed women’s rights, and both were completed in 2010.

Amnesty has launched a new petition to coincide with International Women’s Day pressing British ministers to ensure women’s rights in Afghanistan are properly prioritised.

In particular the charity is calling for tangible support on issues such as providing women’s shelters and higher recruitment and retention rates of female police officers.

Currently just one 1 per cent of Afghan police officers are women.

Concerns have also been raised that women’s rights could be sacrificed in reconciliation talks with the Taliban.

NGOs have pointed out that the Afghan government’s 70-strong High Peace Council, set up to thrash out a peace deal, includes only nine women.

Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen said time was running out.

“The Taliban are waiting and watching, and if they see us soft-pedalling on women’s rights they’ll take this as a signal that neither we nor the Afghan government are actually serious about the issue.”

She welcomed International Development Secretary Justine Greening’s announcement earlier this week that tackling violence against women will be made a “country strategic priority” for DfID in Afghanistan after 2015.

But Ms Allen said this this prioritisation must be reflected cross-departmentally.

“The bottom line is that there can be no peace in Afghanistan without women’s rights,” she said.

US defense secretary’s Afghanistan trip a debacle: here.

Related articles

• Afghan women march against violence (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• ‘The Afghan People Are Fed Up’: An Interview with Malalai Joya by Malalai Joya (zcommunications.org)
• Afghan Women Rally For Rights In Kabul (rferl.org)
• A Voice for Peace in Afghanistan: ‘Stop This Criminal War’ (commondreams.org)

Afghan women march against violence

This video says about itself:

Afghan Member of Parliament Malalai Joya speaks about the troubling and declining status of women’s rights in Afghanistan.

Interview recorded September 2006.

Malalai Joya was illegally expelled from the Afghan parliament by the pro-warlord pro-NATO Kabul government.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Afghan women join global demand to end violence

Thursday 14 February 2013

by Our Foreign Desk

Hundreds of Afghans marked Valentine’s Day today by marching in Kabul to denounce violence against women.

Rights groups found last year that more and more Afghan women are being attacked, despite harsher laws and officials’ pledges to prosecute the perpetrators.

Activist Humaira Rasouli said the marchers wanted violence against women “to be eliminated or at least reduced in Afghanistan,” but unfortunately it “is increasing day to day.”

Riot police stood guard as women and men walked from the Darul Aman Palace outside Kabul to an area near parliament.

Today’s march was peaceful, unlikely previous protests that had been marred by stone-throwing and insults.

It was part of the global One Billion Rising campaign that demands an end to violence against women and uses Valentine’s Day to highlight abuse.

Similar demonstrations were held around the world.

Flashmobs, marches, singing and dances were planned in about 200 countries and, significantly, many occurred in countries where women’s rights are severely held back by religious or social manacles.

In Bangladesh, acid attack survivors rallied across the country.

Monira Rahman of the Acid Survivors’ Foundation said: “It is important to mobilise society in this way to break the silence surrounding violence against women and show that people from all backgrounds have zero tolerance for it.

“In Bangladesh there is currently a big movement against war criminals and we are linking these huge demonstrations to One Billion Rising, because these men severely violated women and encouraged others to rape during the war.”

Indians also protested in New Delhi, Mumbai and other cities, galvanised by the recent fatal gang-rape that shocked the country.

In Indonesia, hundreds of students in Sumatra and Central Java held Valentine’s Day protests on Wednesday.

…

In Peru the mayor of Lima, Susana Villaran, officially declared today One Billion Rising Day.

From European capitals to Asian villages women and their supporters made the message clear: violence against women must stop.

Related articles

• Afghan women march against violence (dawn.com)

European Union, undeserving Nobel Peace Prize winner

Alfred Nobel from Sweden was a capitalist, but critical of capitalism.

He made lots of money from wars, but did not like war.

The Nobel Peace Prize, bequeathed by him, should be, according to Alfred Nobel, for those who have “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

The European Union, winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, does not deserve that prize. The European Union has not contributed anything to the reduction of standing armies, let alone their abolition. Quite the contrary: in the European Union’s proposed constitution (rejected by referendum voters in France and in the Netherlands) there was a clause making it mandatory for European Union member states to increase their “defence” war budgets. The European Union also wants to have its own armed forces, as if the member states’ armed forces are not already bad enough.

The European Union pressures Greece, like it pressures other countries, to make cuts in health care and poor people’s incomes. On the other hand, it pressures Greece to increase its military budget, for the sake of the profits of weapon industry fat cats in Germany and France.

Alfred Nobel in his will left decisions about the Nobel Peace Prize to the parliament of Norway. Norway then was a neutral country. In 2012, however, it is a member of the NATO military alliance.

So, now the bureaucracy in Brussels joins other undeserving Nobel Peace Prize winners; from Martti Ahtisaari from Finland (another ex-neutral, now European Union, country) to Barack Obama (who had only been president of the USA for a short time when he got the prize, and after winning it, escalated the war in Afghanistan).

Last year, Ms Tawakul Karman from Yemen did deserve the peace prize.

This video says about itself:

10 Years! Malalai Joya on Women in Afghanistan

“History shows that no nation can bring liberation to another nation.”

Now, there are plenty of individuals and organizations who would have deserved the prize a lot more than the European Union. From the Christian pacifists of the Society of Friends, aka the Quakers, or the Iraq Veterans Against the War, in the USA; to Military Families Against the War in Britain; to human rights activist Maryam al-Khawaja in Bahrain or Afghan feminist Malalai Joya.

Daily News Line in Britain comments on this year’s award:

Saturday, 13 October 2012

Peace Prize for the ‘Fourth Reich’

The European Union has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ‘six decades of work in advancing peace in Europe’, according to Thorbjoern Jagland of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, who added: ‘Since 1945 reconciliation has become a reality.’

Try telling that to the workers of Greece and Spain who are being savaged by the EU’s class war austerity measures, to the point where thousands of families are going hungry, and where the Greek workers regard the German-led EU as the ‘Fourth Reich’.

As the world crisis of capitalism deepens, along with its financial crisis, the costs of the maintenance of the EU and the eurozone will see the class war imposed throughout Europe, especially on the streets of its capitals, as workers understand that since the EU can only survive by breaking them, to survive they will have to break the EU, and advance to a Socialist United States of Europe.

With a stunning hypocrisy, the Nobel Committee said the EU had helped to transform Europe ‘from a continent of war to a continent of peace’, and that for over 40 years it had prevented a new Franco-German war.

This new European war has been prevented thus far, by the bourgeoisie of France and Germany uniting to try to carry through what Hitler attempted and could not achieve, uniting Europe, this time under the heel of German and French capital. This is what has kept them from each other’s throats, so far.

On this basis this alliance went forward to break all the pledges that were made to Gorbachev not to advance the EU’s borders and the NATO alliance up to Russia’s frontiers.

In the process the EU played a leading role in a great European war, destroying Yugoslavia and creating a dozen or so new states all under the thumb of Brussels, through the means of pogroms the likes of which had not been seen since Hitler’s days, air attacks and military interventions on the ground, including the mass bombing of Belgrade.

The most recent interventions of the peace-loving EU has been the Italian, French and UK air assault on Libya, with the murder of Gadaffi, and the support for puppet forces in Syria to attempt the overthrow of the Assad government through destroying the country, with France openly calling for military intervention.

Now, with the advent of the capitalist crisis, imperialist wars have been joined by civil wars to preserve the EU by smashing the working class of Europe.

EU ‘democracy’ now sees the EU bankers and politicians appointing key members of the Greek and Italian governments.

This is while the Franco-German alliance weakens, as German capital attacks the ‘lazy southerners’ who are said to be responsible for the entire EU crisis. The Franco-German alliance is now weakening to the point where the German bosses openly proclaim that they are the masters of the new Europe, and that the Greeks and the others must be starved so that the ‘peace loving’ EU can continue.

The truth of the matter is that the Nobel Committee is desperately seeking to prop up the collapsing EU, whose attempt to unite Europe under the rule of Franco-German capital is collapsing.

The EU was an attempt to reconcile the contradictions of the imperialist powers at the expense of the workers of the EU and the workers of Africa and the Middle East especially.

Why Europe Did Not Deserve a Nobel Peace Prize: here.

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union is aimed at providing political support to all those who are carrying out the most brutal attacks against working people since the 1930s: here.

AT the same moment as France and Germany were being given a Nobel prize for keeping the peace in Europe, ie not going to war with each other for the last 60 years, the two countries were in fact squaring up to each other over the future of the EU, the single currency and ‘policing’ the budgets of the eurozone states: here.

Watchdog the International Peace Bureau branded the decision to hand the Nobel Peace prize to the European Union unlawful today: here.

EU looks to ramp up its military might: here.

Related articles

• Peace group brands EU Nobel win ‘unlawful’ (thelocal.no)
• Global Peace Network: ‘Unlawful’ to Award Nobel Peace Prize to EU (commondreams.org)
• The 2012 Nobel Peace Prize is unlawful and cannot be paid to the EU (warisacrime.org)
• Nobel Peace Prize To European Union Criticized In View Of Gypsy Apartheid‏ (eurasiareview.com)
• Global Peace Network: ‘Unlawful’ to Award Nobel Peace Prize to EU | Common Dreams (2012indyinfo.com)

Afghan Malalai Joya interviewed

This video from the USA says about itself:

Noam Chomsky & Malalai Joya: The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan March 25, 2011 Memorial Church, Harvard University: Filmed by Paul Hubbard.

The Film fra Sør Foundation and the Norwegian branch of the United Nations work together on the ‘Film fra Sør Norge Rundt’ project, a film touring programme bringing important films to schools and high schools all over the country. In this regard, the UN’s Stian Bragtvedt conducted an interview with renowned Afghan activist Malalai Joya: here.

Malalai Joya: Democracy never comes with invasion: here.

Afghan electoral officials said today that nine MPs should be removed from their seats because of electoral fraud: here.

The compound of the British Council headquarters in the Afghan capital, Kabul, came under a sustained guerrilla attack on Friday, resulting in nine deaths and 22 casualties: here.

Britain: Peace campaigners said today’s attack on the British Council offices in Kabul showed the continued folly of foreign intervention in the country: here.

Afghan civilians pay lethal price for new policy on air strikes: here.

Few Treatment Options for Afghans as Drug Use Rises: here.

British soldiers in Afghanistan have been banned from wearing skull-and-crossbones badges on their uniforms that declare ‘Death To The Taliban’ and proclaim membership of a ‘Taliban Hunting Club’. The unofficial stick-on badges are now a cult accessory among British troops fighting Taliban insurgents: here. And here.

In 2007, Australian government officials repeatedly told the US embassy in Canberra of its plans to increase Australian troop commitments in Afghanistan, but asked the US government to keep quiet about it, as the plans had not yet been made public: here.

The families of victims of a 2009 Nato air strike in Afghanistan are to sue Germany’s Ministry of Defence for compensation, their lawyer announced on Thursday: here.

More Afghan soldiers deserting the army, NATO statistics show: here.

Afghan feminist against war

This video, recorded in the USA, says about itself:

Malalai Joya Lecture

Malalai Joya, former female Member of the Afghan Parliament, founded an illegal school for girls when she was only 16 and has since founded more schools, health clinics, and an orphanage. She was elected to the national parliament at the age of 25, but was driven out by warlords—even facing 4 assassination attempts. She calls for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. BBC has called her “the bravest woman in Afghanistan.”

British anti-war protests: here.

A Groundswell Grows for Significant Afghanistan Withdrawal: here.

Secret US and Afghanistan talks could see troops stay for decades: here.

Ninety Percent of Petraeus’ “Taliban” Captures Were Civilians: here.

British soldiers kill Afghan woman

This video from the USA about Afghanistan is called Democracy Now! “Stop These Massacres ” Part 1/2. Malalai Joya Interviewed.

Part 2/2 is here.

Not just “kill teams” or other United States soldiers kill Afghan civilians. So did Dutch soldiers when they still were in Afghanistan (and they may start doing that again if they will go to Kunduz province, according to the Rightist Dutch government plans). So do other foreign troops; including from Britain.

From Reuters:

UK troops kill Afghan woman in car accident – police

Wed Apr 6, 2011 10:35am GMT

By Hamid Shalizi

KABUL – British troops killed an Afghan woman and wounded a woman and a child in a car accident in Kabul Wednesday, a spokesman for the Kabul police chief said, adding that initial reports a man had been shot dead at the scene were wrong.

Spokesman Hashmat Stanekzai said information he had initially given out, that two women and a man had been killed, was the result of miscommunication between security forces.

The accident came at a time of heightened anti-Western sentiment across Afghanistan because of the burning of a Koran by a radical fundamentalist U.S. pastor in late March.

There have been days of protests about the desecration of Islam’s holy book, some of which have turned deadly. Seven foreign U.N. staff and at least 17 Afghans have been killed in violence in northern Mazar-i-Sharif and southern Kandahar city.

Afghanistan: NATO kills two civilians in an accident, another shot: here.

USA: Adam Ashton, The Tacoma News Tribune: “A former Afghan lawmaker told an audience of South Sound peace activists Tuesday that photos of Joint Base Lewis-McChord soldiers grinning over the corpse of a boy they allegedly murdered revealed a disregard for civilian lives among U.S. forces fighting in her country. ‘They are making fun with the dead bodies of my people,’ said Malalai Joya, 32, a human rights activist who visited the University of Washington Tacoma on her U.S. speaking tour. About 80 people attended her talk, which was hosted by the group Peace Action of Washington and was her seventh in the Puget Sound area this week”: here.

Australians protest Afghan war

This video from Australia is called Afghanistan: 8yrs! – Sydney Stop the War Rally.

By Helen Patterson & Rupen Savoulian in Australia:

Stop the Afghan war — protest Obama

13 March 2010

An article posted at RAWA.org on March 10 by Marc W. Herold said that on February 27, the US/NATO forces occupying Afghanistan “killed three people, including two children, in Alasai district of Kapisa province”.

“Mohammad Ashraf, a tribal elder of Kotki area of Alasai district, [said] French soldiers … in an area far from Waldikhel village of Kotki area laid an ambush.

“‘When people of the area learned about the arrival of these forces, they started fleeing from their village when the French forces opened fire at them.’”

Ashraf said the three people killed included nine-year-old Joma Gul and 10-year-old Angar Khan.

Herold pointed out such atrocities were not isolated events, but daily occurrences in occupied Afghanistan. He said the level of civilian deaths directly caused by occupying forces was growing. In February, there were at least 80-86 such deaths, compared with 50 in February 2009.

US President Barack Obama was elected in November 2008 on the back of a groundswell of opposition to the policies of the Bush administration — including a rejection of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, while Obama made much of his opposition to the Iraq war, he not only pledged to continue the US-led occupation of Afghanistan in his election campaign, but spoke of escalating it.

In office, Obama has continued the aggressive and militaristic policies of past administrations to extend the reach of US imperial power.

The Obama administration has indeed escalated the Afghanistan war — and dramatically increased its extension into neighbouring Pakistan. The conflict is increasingly referred to as the “Af-Pak” war. …

Af-Pak

The Af-Pak escalation has not only worsened conditions inside Afghanistan, but has also undermined stability in Pakistan.

Using the pretense of fighting Taliban militants taking refuge in Pakistan, the US has increasingly resorted to unmanned drone strikes that have killed thousands of Pakistani civilians.

Head of the US military in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal has admitted drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan help fuel the anti-US insurgency.

The latest escalation of the Afghan war is Operation Moshtarak in Helmand province, which began on February 13. This offensive immediately resulted in scores of civilian casualties and the displacement of thousands of refugees.

In cooperation with the government of President Hamid Karzai, a corrupt regime dominated by warlords and fundamentalists, this offensive marks a clear line that makes the Afghan war more than a conflict inherited from the Bush regime. …

Malalai Joya is an Afghani feminist and outspoken opponent of the US/NATO occupation who was elected to Afghani parliament and then driven out for condemning the warlords who sat in it. She told the February 15 British Independent that corruption is endemic in Karzai’s government, and cited uranium deposits and opium as motivation for the Helmand offensive.

“It is ridiculous”, Joya told the Independent. “On the one hand they call on [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar to join the puppet regime. On another hand they launch this attack in which defenceless and poor people will be the prime victims.

“Like before, they will be killed in the Nato bombings and used as human shields by the Taliban. Helmand’s people have suffered for years and thousands of innocent people have been killed so far.”

The Independent said: “Her fears were confirmed when Nato reported yesterday that a rocket that missed its target had killed 12 civilians at a house in Marjah.”

Joya wrote in a November 30 British article, entitled “A troop surge can only magnify the crime against Afghanistan”, that Transparency International listed the Karzai regime as the second most corrupt in the world.

The United Nations Development Program listed Afghanistan as second last in terms of human development.

A key justification for the ongoing occupation of Afghanistan is the need to defeat the misogynistic and fundamentalist Taliban, which rule by terror from 1996 until the 2001 US-led invasion.

However, the US’ allies in the Af-Pak war are simply different factions of the same misogynistic, fundamentalist forces.

US-backing

During the 1980s, the US funded and trained Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas in Afghanistan and Pakistan to defeat Afghanistan’s secular government that was backed by the Soviet Union. …

The US never officially recognised the Taliban government, but representatives of US oil corporation Union Oil of California (Unocal) entered into negotiations with the Taliban in 1996.

While the Taliban was gradually securing control over Afghanistan, Unocal opened an office in Kandahar.

One explanation offered for the US invasion has been its desire to construct an oil pipe to ferry oil and natural gas supplies from Central Asia through Afghanistan.

However, this alone cannot explain the invasion and ongoing occupation. The Taliban had been willing to negotiate the construction of such a pipeline.

Overthrowing the Taliban has not established th[e] stable regime required for a pipeline’s construction — it has plunged the country into even greater chaos.

The invasion and ongoing occupation has been driven by a greater US need to impose its power over the regime. …

Afghanistan was first in the firing line as part of a campaign to use military force against any government willing to challenge US interests. The invasion was intended to set an example.

Although most of the September 11 hijackers came from US-ally Saudi Arabia, some were based in Afghanistan. War-devastated Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest nations, was seen in Washington as an easy first target.

But the war drive has been bogged down in the quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq. The US surge in Afghanistan, and the extension of the conflict to Pakistan, is the US response — seeking to impose its will through greater levels of brutal force at whatever cost to the local population.

It is a risky move that threatens to further destablise the region and provoke even greater resistance to US domination. But the alternative, accepting defeat, risks undermining US power in the resource-rich region.

Military power

Facing a deep economic crisis, the US position as the world’s superpower is upheld by its military dominance — meaning it can ill-afford a defeat in Afghanistan.

For the long-suffering Afghani people, this spells even more horror. There is no accurate count of the civilian death toll over the course of the nearly nine years of the US-led war, but it is in the many thousands and rising daily.

However, there is growing opposition in a number of countries participating in the US/NATO occupation. The Dutch government collapsed on February 20 over attempts to extend participation by the Dutch military in the occupation beyond the current deadline of August.

In Germany, opinion polls show more than 80% opposition to German participation in the conflict. The German government nonetheless voted on February 26 to extend its military role in the occupation.

Some 76 members of parliament from the left-wing Die Linke (Left Party), the only party in parliament to oppose the war, were suspended for staging a protest during the vote.

Die Linke MPs had held up placards with the names of Afghani civilians killed in a German-ordered air strike.

When US President Barack Obama visits Australia in late March, it is likely he will demand the Australian government play a larger role in the occupation.

US officials have publicly criticised Australia for placing limits on the participation of the Australian soldiers in Afghanistan in the fighting. The March 9 Sydney Morning Herald said McChrystal had “warned that the Rudd government’s refusal to allow Australian troops to take the fight to the Taliban was impairing the US-led war effort”.

It is up to ordinary people the world over to stand up to oppose the ongoing bloodshed that serves no purpose other than shoring up US power — regardless of who occupies the White House.

[Check the activist calendar for details of protests when Obama visits Australia.]

See also here.

An Angry Woman, by Malalai Joya: here.

US congressman Patrick Kennedy blasts US policy in Afghanistan and the press: here.

Pakistani women workers march: here.

This is a video about a recent protest in the German parliament against the Afghan war.

The White House is considering whether to detain international terrorism suspects at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan [Bagram], senior U.S. officials said, an option that would lead to another prison with the same purpose as Guantanamo Bay, which it has promised to close: here.

Malalai Joya on occupied ‘new’ Afghanistan

This video says about itself:

Afghan Member of Parliament [then, in 2006, still; before she was expelled] Malalai Joya speaks about the troubling and declining status of women’s rights in Afghanistan.

Book review by Phil Shannon in Australia:

Malalai Joya: her struggle is our struggle

2 December 2009

Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of the Afghan Woman Who Dares to Speak Out By Malalai Joya Macmillan, 2009 278 pages, $34.99 (pb)

When Malalai Joya described some members of the Afghan parliament in 2007 as belonging in a “zoo or a stable” in 2007, the howls and screeches from its fundamentalist and warlord members was predictable. They seized on her comments as a pretext for a plot to have the feminist parliamentarian permanently suspended for “insulting the institution of parliament”.

In her autobiography, Raising My Voice, Joya notes the irony that the leaders of the countries with troops in Afghanistan never commented on her illegal suspension “even through they say their militaries are in Afghanistan to help build democracy”.

Joya’s book recounts many other examples of the undemocratic new Afghanistan ruled by pro-US religious extremists and warlords.

…

After 16 years in exile, Joya courageously returned to an Afghanistan ruled by the “depraved and medieval” Taliban, which had emerged victorious in 1996 during the vicious civil war among the US-funded mujahideen following their ousting of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the overthrow of the pro-Soviet People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan government in 1992.

Working through the Organisation for Promoting Afghan Women’s Capabilities (OPAWC), Joya’s aim was to educate girls and women. Teaching was literally underground (in sympathisers’ basements) where she found the compulsory burqua (“a symbol of women’s oppression, like a shroud for the living”) useful for “hiding books and other forbidden objects”.

Joya risked kidnap, rape, torture and murder on a daily basis. She survived thanks to the quiet resistance, instinctive solidarity and human kindness of strangers. Afghan men, for example, at risk of their own lives, would step to claim to be a close male relative of lone women stopped by Taliban patrols for moving about the streets unaccompanied.

When the Taliban fled in 2001 after the US invasion, many Afghans were sympathetic to the Americans. This support soon collapsed as the US and allied military continued to kill civilians and installed a corrupt government of warlords and fundamentalists.

Joya, as a feminist and democrat, needed (and still needs) an armed bodyguard, a network of safe houses and the burqua to hide her identity. She remains in the sights of the CIA-backed Northern Alliance made up of “ruthless men with a dark past” who now dominate the US-approved government of President Hamid Karzai.

These were the same thugs and terrorists that pillaged Afghanistan during the post-Soviet civil war between 1992 and 1996. They were eager to resume their power and self-enrichment in a post-Taliban Afghanistan under US protection. Women were again the first victims of the pro-US Karzai regime — as they were in the anti-Soviet and Taliban regimes that preceded it.

Joya took the fight up to the new rulers as well, first against the local officials appointed by warlords in Joya’s province of Farah who were hostile to the free medical clinic and orphanage run by Joya and the OPAWC.

Joya then raised the political level by standing, successfully, in UN-supervised elections in 2003 to the Loya Jirga (constituent assembly) to approve the new constitution.

Joya used her three-minute speech to parliament to attack the warlords at the gathering. Halfway through, however, her microphone was cut as accusations (“communist!”, “prostitute!”, “infidel!”) and death threats were rained on her.

Joya was the youngest member of parliament elected in the 2005 elections. The physical and verbal attacks on her continued inside and outside parliament, culminating in the plot to suspend her. This, she says, was because she “spoke the truth about the warlords and criminals in the puppet government of Karzai”.

Human Rights Watch said about 60% of the members of the 2005 parliament were warlords or their allies who got elected through fraud, intimidation or US-financed bribery.

At the head of the current regime is the “impeccably mannered” Karzai whose “own hands”, says Joya, are “stained with the blood of the innocent people of Afghanistan because he had put so many warlords and criminals into positions of power”.

Under Karzai’s watch, corruption and nest-feathering has been raised to a fine art. Misogynist laws were introduced and the war criminals in parliament, in the name of “reconciliation”, granted themselves amnesty for all war crimes committed during the past three decades.

The claim that the US and its allies have brought justice, democracy and women’s rights to Afghanistan “is all a lie, dust in the eyes of the world”, says Joya. Afghanistan is still ruled by “women-hating criminals” — in most places it is still not safe for women to appear in public uncovered or to walk on the street without a male relative.

Girls are still sold into marriage. Rape, in and out of marriage, goes unpunished. Life expectancy is less than 45 years and 70% of the population lives on less than $2 a day. Half of all men and 80% of women are illiterate. The US alone spends $100 million a day on the war but total international aid for reconstruction is a mere fraction of this and mostly falls into corrupt hands.

The Afghan people, says Joya, are sandwiched between two enemies — the anti-US terrorists of the Taliban and the pro-US terrorists (originally armed and financed by US proxy efforts against the Soviets in Afghanistan) that came back to power with the Northern Alliance in the 2001 invasion.

US President Barak Obama, she says, continues the same failed policies as his predecessor. That is, more troops and support of corrupt, violent pro-US rulers in the pursuit of US military, regional, economic and strategic interests in the Central Asia region.

Joya’s book is valuable for dispelling the fluff that passes for most analysis and reporting on the West’s war in Afghanistan. It’s also valuable for her clear perspective that neither the Taliban, nor the corrupt, warlord-riddled government of President Karzai, nor the Western occupation troops, offer anything but a diet of terrorism, misogyny, economic deprivation and censorship. She does not rule out armed struggle.

Joya’s analysis is enriched by the stories of her personal experiences with the people of Afghanistan and their enemies. She puts faces and names to what it means when US-protected warlords are running society and brings the “poor and forgotten” people of Afghanistan, their traumas and humanity, out from the shadows of Western media stereotypes.

Afghans, she shows, are not backward people mired in Islamic fundamentalism. This does not stop her from having “hard discussions with men who thought that they could treat women and girls like property”.

Joya says the struggle for Afghanistan’s people is “hard and risky” but there is no other option. She says, quoting Bertholt Brecht — “those who do struggle often fail, but those who do not struggle have already failed”.

Despite the personal dangers (Joya has survived five assassination attempts and uncounted plots), she feels “proud that even though I have no private army, no money and no world powers behind me, these brutal despots are afraid of me and scheme to eliminate me”. Her outspoken stance for equality and democracy has won her many friends and protectors, and her grassroots support is both enormous and enthusiastic, especially among young Afghans.

International support, she writes, is very important in the struggle — messages of support are invaluable for keeping up the spirit of democratic activists and showing the people of Afghanistan that they are not alone. Joya’s struggle is our struggle.

No explicit provision in the Afghan penal code that criminalises rape: here.

The official excuse of the US Bush administration for the Afghan war was that it was in order to catch Osama bin Laden. Well, after after all those years, they still have not caught him. Did they try seriously?

According to DNA news in India:

Washington: Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was cornered by US forces in the Afghan mountains of Tora Bora just months after 9/11 and could have been killed or captured, but the military top brass decided not to attack him with the massive force at their disposal, a Senate report says.

Afghanistan: Harsh Treatment Reported In Secret American Prison: here.

Recent reports reveal that the US military continues to carry on torture and illegal detention in Afghanistan at a dungeon known to inmates as “the black prison”: here.

An Open Letter to President Obama from Michael Moore: here.

Get out of Afghanistan, Afghan feminist says

This video from Afghanistan says about itself:

Dec.17, 2003, Loya Jirga in Kabul

When her time came to make her 3-minute statement, she tugged her black headscarf over her hair, stepped up to the microphone, and with emotional electricity made the speech that would alter her life.

After she spoke, there was a moment of stunned silence. Then there was an uproar. Male mujahideen, some who literally had guns at their feet, rushed towards her, shouting. She was brought [out] under the protection of UN security forces.

In a nation where few dare to say the word “warlord” aloud, Joya had spoken fiercely against a proposal to appoint high clergy members and fundamentalist leaders to guide planning groups. She objected that several of those religious leaders were war criminals who should be tried for their actions—not national heroes to influence the new government.

Despite the commands of Assembly Chairman, Joya refused to apologize.

From WA Today in Australia:

‘Please get out of Afghanistan‘

Chalpat Sonti

July 7, 2009 – 7:16AM

Malalai Joya has been through, and seen, a lot.

At 31, she has lived many lives. Persecuted under the oppressive Taliban regime that ruled her native Afghanistan, she was seemingly the shining star for the democracy that followed the US-led invasion of the country following the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Elected at the age of 27 to her country’s fledgling parliament, Ms Joya seemed to offer hope for women everywhere in the strife-torn nation.

But six years later, Ms Joya knows she is living on borrowed time. From seemingly bringing women out from the invisibleness that cloaked them during the reign of the Taliban, she now lives in hiding.

Once, in the Taliban days, forced to hide books under her burqua to fulfill her role as a school teacher – women were banned from doing any kind of work – she has now had to revert to the dress to survive.

A fierce critic of the warlords and others who rule her country – and famously referred to by one of her many foreign admirers as “the bravest woman in Afghanistan” – her voice has made her a prime target.

In Perth to promote her book Raising My Voice, Ms Joya told Radio 6PR’s Howard Sattler that a cabal of politicians and warlords, supported by the West, had made Afghanistan unliveable.

And her life was even more so. When she spoke in parliament, other MPs publicly threatened to beat and rape her. Bottles were hurled at Ms Joya during one speech in 2006 when she accused some MPs of being warlords trying to legitimise themselves.

Suspended from parliament a year later, reportedly for calling it a “stable or zoo”, she lives in hiding, changing houses sometimes thrice-weekly.

“(There are) different tactics I use. Just I want to be alive,” she said.

But it for the UN occupation she reserves her harshest words. She had a simple message for Australia and the rest of the US-led force: get out.

The forces lent legitimacy to the “puppet” president Hamid Karzai, she said.

“We don’t need puppets,” she said.

“Karzai today is rotten. This shameless man who betrayed my people supported the enemies of my people.”

Australia played its part in the legitimisation.

While she had nothing but respect for those who lost their lives in her country, “all of (the troops) are victims of wrong policies of their governments“.

Foreign aid money flowing into Afghanistan went straight into the pockets of the warlords.

“The city of (the capital) Kabul has changed into a city of beggars. People are ready to sell babies for only $10.”

She pleaded for Australia’s foreign affairs minister, and Perth MP, Stephen Smith, to listen.

“Your government is supporting a Mafia system. Raise your voice against injustice. It’s impossible to bring democracy… in support of enemies of those principles.”

She believed her own people could “reclaim our country” if left to do so themselves.

The Federal Government has said Ms Joya’s suspension from the Afghan parliament is a matter for that country.

But despite the danger, she will return to Afghanistan. Much the same way she left, under cover. To get to Australia she was smuggled out, ironically wearing a burqua, by van to Pakistan, from where she flew to Thailand.

“The main problem for women in Afghanistan is not the burqua… the main problem of my people is security.

“They want to kill (me) but they never can hide the truth… because I believe we must try ourselves… sacrifice to achieve those values,” Ms Joya said.

And she’d do it all again, to get her message across.

“The silence of good people is worse than the action of bad people,” she said.

Another US soldier dies in Afghanistan: here.

British minister admits ‘gloom and worry’ over Afghanistan: here.

Afghan Malalai Joya on US bombs

This video, put on YouTube by Afghan women’s organization RAWA, says about itself:

Officials in Western Afghanistan say over 147 innocent civilians, many of them women and children, were killed when US war planes bombed villages of Gerani and Gangabad in Bala Baluk district of Farah Province on May 5, 2009.

This is one out of many war crime cases committed by the US troops in Afghanistan over the past few years. The number of innocent civilians killed since Obama took office in Jan.21, reaches to 300 and his so-called new strategy for Afghanistan and surge in number of troops has result in more such terrible tragedies.

More here.

Statement by illegally expelled Afghan member of parliament, Ms Malalai Joya:

MP for Farah Province condemns NATO bombings:

’This massacre offers the world a glimpse at horrors faced by our people’

As an elected representative for Farah, Afghanistan, I add my voice to those condemning the NATO bombing that claimed over 150 civilian lives in my province earlier this month. This latest massacre offers the world a glimpse of the horrors faced by our people.

However, as I explained at a May 11 press conference in Kabul, the U.S. military authorities do not want you to see this reality. As usual, they have tried to downplay the number of civilian casualties, but I have information that as many as 164 civilians were killed in the bombings. One grief stricken man from the village of Geranai explained at the press conference that he had lost 20 members of his family in the massacre.

The Afghan government commission, furthermore, appears to have failed to list infants under the age of three who were killed. The government commission that went to the village after three days — when all the victims had been buried in mass graves by the villagers — is not willing to make their list public. How can the precious lives of Afghans be treated with such disrespect?

The news last week is that the U.S. has replaced their top military commander in Afghanistan, but I think this is just a trick to deceive our people and put off responsibility for their disastrous overall strategy in Afghanistan on the shoulders of one person.

The Afghan ambassador in the U.S. said in an interview with Al Jazeera that if a ‘proper apology’ is made, then ‘people will understand’ the civilian deaths. But the Afghan people do not just want to hear ‘sorry.’ We ask for an end to the occupation of Afghanistan and a stop to such tragic war crimes.

The demonstrations by students and others against these latest air strikes, like last month’s protest by hundreds of Afghan women in Kabul, show the world the way forward for real democracy in Afghanistan. In the face of harassment and threats, women took to the streets to demand the scrapping of the law that would legalize rape within marriage and codify the oppression of our country’s Shia women. Just as the U.S. air strikes have not brought security to Afghans, nor has the occupation brought security to Afghan women. The reality is quite the opposite.

This now infamous law is but the tip of the iceberg of the women’s rights catastrophe in our occupied country. The whole system, and especially the judiciary, is infected with the virus of fundamentalism and so, in Afghanistan, men who commit crimes against women do so with impunity. Rates of abduction, gang rape, and domestic violence are as high as ever, and so is the number of women’s self-immolations and other forms of suicide. Tragically, women would rather set themselves on fire than endure the hell of life in our ‘liberated’ country.

The Afghan Constitution does include provisions for women’s rights – I was one of many female delegates to the 2003 Loya Jirga who pushed hard to include them. But this founding document of the ‘new Afghanistan’ was also scarred by the heavy influence of fundamentalists and warlords, with whom Karzai and the West have been compromising from the beginning.

In fact, I was not really surprised by this latest law against women. When the U.S. and its allies replaced the Taliban with the old notorious warlords and fundamentalists of the Northern Alliance, I could see that the only change we would see was from the frying pan to the fire.

There have been a whole series of outrageous laws and court decisions in recent years. For instance, there was the disgusting law passed on the pretext of ‘national reconciliation’ that provided immunity from prosecution to warlords and notorious war criminals, many of whom sit in the Afghan Parliament. At that time, the world media and governments turned a blind eye to it.

My opposition to this law was one of the reasons that I, as an elected MP from Farah Province, was expelled from Parliament in May 2007. More recently, there was the outrageous 20-year sentence handed down against Parvez Kambakhsh, a young man whose only crime was to allegedly distribute a dissenting article at his university.

We are told that additional U.S. and NATO troops are coming to Afghanistan to help secure the upcoming presidential election. But frankly the Afghan people have no hope in this election – we know that there can be no true democracy under the guns of warlords, the drug trafficking mafia and occupation.

With the exception of Ramazan Bashardost, most of the other candidates are the known, discredited faces that have been part and parcel of the mafia-like, failed government of Hamid Karzai. We know that one puppet can be replaced by another puppet, and that the winner of this election will most certainly be selected behind closed doors in the White House and the Pentagon. I must conclude that this presidential election is merely a drama to legitimize the future U.S. puppet.

Just like in Iraq, war has not brought liberation to Afghanistan. Neither war was really about democracy or justice or uprooting terrorist groups; rather they were and are about U.S. strategic interests in the region. We Afghans have never liked being pawns in the ‘Great Game’ of empire, as the British and the Soviets learned in the past century.

It is a shame that so much of Afghanistan’s reality has been kept veiled by a western media consensus in support of the ‘good war.’ Perhaps if the citizens of North America had been better informed about my country, President Obama would not have dared to send more troops and spend taxpayers’ money on a war that is only adding to the suffering of our people and pushing the region into deeper conflicts.

A troop ‘surge’ in Afghanistan, and continued air strikes, will do nothing to help the liberation of Afghan women. The only thing it will do is increase the number of civilian casualties and increase the resistance to occupation.

To really help Afghan women, citizens in the U.S. and elsewhere must tell their government to stop propping up and covering for a regime of warlords and extremists. If these thugs were finally brought to justice, Afghan women and men would prove quite capable of helping ourselves.

Malalai Joya was the youngest member of the Afghan Parliament, elected in 2005 to represent Farah Province. In May 2007 she was unjustly suspended from Parliament. Her memoir, Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice, is forthcoming later this year from Rider.

From Lenin’s Tomb blog in England:

One of the most interesting questions that came up in my talk at Wadham College last night was whether those who lead us into war on the pretext of saving women from oppression or upholding human rights are purely cynics, or whether there is a sense in which they uphold a sort of neoliberal or bourgeois ‘common sense’ which happens to be contiguous with a defence of ruling class interests.