This video is called Afghan women commit self-immolation to escape miseries.
From Green Left Weekly in Australia:
Afghanistan: Action needed to stop US-installed regime executing student
1 February 2008
The following is an abridged statement released by Left Radical of Afghanistan (LRA) on January 25.
Parviz Kambakhsh is one of the very recent victims of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan who, because of his personal beliefs, opinions and his political opposition to the US-installed regime, has been kept in the awful detention center of the National Security Department (SND) in Mazar e Sharif for the last three months.
Kambakhsh is a 23-year-old youth and a third year journalism student at the Mazar e Sharif University. He was a reporter for Jahan e Naw newspaper. He belongs to a poor family from the province of Saripul of Afghanistan.
He has been constantly physically and mentally tortured, and threatened with death unless he “confessed”. He has had no access to a lawyer, or to family or friends.
Even the death sentence handed down by the Mazar e Sharif attorney-general, Hafizullah Khaliqyar, was made secretly in Kambakhsh’s absence.
Kambakhsh was detained after the SND identified him as “secular, Marxist and [in] opposition” to the regime. He was accused of printing out “atheist” articles from the internet and distributing them to his fellow students.
According to Khaliqyar, “Kambakhsh disgraced Islam … and broke the constitution”. During an interview with Kelid Radio on January 23, he stated that not only had Kambakhsh “printed and written anti-religion articles but also he was an active Marxist who propagandised his opinions”.
Khaliqyar, the Ulama council (council of “religious experts”), the provisional council of Mazar e Sharif and the SND all demanded Kambakhsh be sentence[d] to be stoned to death.
The death sentence was handed down on January 23.
Yes, this is the real face of “democracy” in Afghanistan, a government created by US/NATO as a model of democracy in the region!
According to the third article of the new constitution of Afghanistan, “No other law can be made that opposes holy Islam religion’s beliefs and laws in Afghanistan”. Article 33 of the media law states that the media is forbidden to violate Islam and its principles.
Since the toppling of the Taliban’s dark and oppressive regime, we have not seen the establishment of any secular, socialist organisation in Afghanistan, while more than 95 Islamist-nationalist political parties have been established and registered by the government.
Left-wing forces, except some collaborationist elements, mainly continue their struggle and political activities underground, just like under the Taliban, and suffer constant persecution by the regime.
Everybody knows that the current government of President Hamid Karzai consists mainly of Islamic fundamentalist forces that possess the same beliefs and objectives as the Taliban. However, due to their specific obligations and interests, these forces continue to dance to the drum of US imperialism.
The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan banned Aftab Weekly in 2002 and sentenced its editors to death. In 2005, it arrested and sentenced to death Ali Mohaqiq Nasab for expressing his beliefs. It detained and sentenced to death Abdul Rahman who converted to Christianity in 2005.
The detention and death sentence for Kambakhsh is the latest such event.
Karzai’s regime has sent letters to officials in the education, work and social affairs ministries warning them not to allow political activities in their respective areas, and if they come across any such activities, to report them to the SND immediately.
Since the installation of the puppet regime, any opposition movement has been persecuted and suppressed more harshly than in the time of the Taliban. In 2002 and 2003, Kabul University student demonstrations were ended by the language of weapons, with demonstrators arrested.
In 2005, during demonstrations around the country against both [to] the regime and the US/NATO occupation, dozens were arrested including 3 LRA militants. On May 29, 2006, following big anti-occupation demonstrations in Kabul that were ruthlessly repressed by police, the chief of the Senate — an Islamic fundamentalist figure — blamed communists for holding such demonstrations.
Marxist, communist and kafer (infidel) are the good words the current jihadi-nationalist ruling fascists use under the so-called democratic new constitution to justify the legal persecution of political opponents.
Of course the manifesto of all socialists and Marxists demands the eradication of private property and exploitation; real equality between women and men; separation of religion from the state; the right to access abortion for women; and other measures that are in contradiction to the dictates of Islam and other religions.
However, this does not mean that Marxists are anti-Islam or religious individuals. Marxists take a scientific approach towards religion and treat it as a personal matter for individuals.
But the anti-communist and Marxist sentiments among Islamic fundamentalists and extremists were developed and encouraged by US imperialism during the Cold War to fight against the “danger of communism”.
And still US imperialism has two approaches towards Islamic fundamentalism. If it needs to repress its enemies, it supports Islamic extremist forces warmly under the pretext of defending human rights and democracy.
However, if these forces touch the interests of US imperialism, then it adds them to its black list as terrorists.
For instance, the US helped to create and bring to power the Taliban in Afghanistan and had no serious objection to it before September 11, 2001. But when the Taliban regime refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, suddenly the Taliban became terrorists!
But today as well, Islam is a good shield for non-democratic regimes to suppress opposition as “anti-Islamic” elements to protect themselves.
From AFP news agency, 30 March 2008:
The Kabul government “strongly condemned” yesterday a television programme that showed Afghan men and women dancing together, saying it undermined morality among youngsters.
The crisis of the Afghan occupation is a reminder of its fraudulent claims, growing cost in blood, and certainty of failure: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
See also:
Sex trade thrives in Afghanistan
By ALISA TANG, Associated Press Writer Sat Jun 14, 12:14 PM ET
KABUL, Afghanistan – The girl was 11 when she was molested by a man with no legs.
The man paid her $5. And that was how she started selling sex.
Afghanistan is one of the world’s most conservative countries, yet its sex trade appears to be thriving. Sex is sold most obviously at brothels full of women from China who serve both Afghans and foreigners. Far more controversial are Afghan prostitutes, who stay underground in a society that pretends they don’t exist.
Customs meant to keep women “pure” have not stopped prostitution. Girls are expected to remain virgins until their wedding nights, so some prostitutes have only anal sex.
Police make two to three prostitution arrests each week, according to Zia ul-Haq, the chief investigator in the Interior Ministry’s department of sexual crimes. They are often the casualties of nearly three decades of brutal war and a grinding poverty that forces most Afghans to live on less than $1 a day.
“Prostitution is in every country that has poverty, and it exists in Afghanistan,” says women’s rights activist Orzala Ashraf. “But society has black glasses and ignores these problems. Tradition is honor, and if we talk about these taboos, then we break tradition.”
The girl is now 13, and her features have just sharpened into striking beauty. She speaks four languages — the local languages of Pashtu and Dari, the Urdu she picked up as a refugee in Pakistan and the English she learned in a $2.40-a-month course she pays for herself in Kabul. She is the breadwinner in her family of 10.
She does not know what a condom is. She has not heard of AIDS.
The Associated Press learned her story in a dozen meetings over four months, as well as interviews with police and aid workers. For months she insisted she was a “good girl” — a virgin. But in March, she confessed to having anal sex with men for years, starting with the legless beggar.
She looked down as she spoke, her face and hands sooty from car exhaust. She tucked her hair repeatedly under her head scarf.
The girl grew up in Pakistan, where her family fled during a bloody civil war in Afghanistan in the early 1990s. She cleaned cars for money.
Five years ago, her family and a flood of other refugees returned to Afghanistan after the U.S.-led invasion toppled the Taliban regime. But her father could earn only $40 a month doing various odd jobs.
So she sold chewing gum and newspapers and cleaned car windows in the muddy, potholed streets of Kabul. She made about $3 a day.
That was where she met Uncle Lang, a nickname that literally means Uncle Legless.
Uncle Lang was a land mine victim. When the girl and a friend brought him tea and food, he forced himself upon them, police say.
“I didn’t know anything about sex,” she says. “But it happened.”
It’s hard to know how many other women in Afghanistan are prostitutes because of the extreme secrecy around the issue. A University of Manitoba report last September estimated about 900 female sex workers in Kabul.
A 2005 report by the German aid group Ora International drew data from 122 female sex workers, of whom less than 1 percent knew about AIDS. The youngest was 14.
Prostitutes in Afghanistan include scores of Chinese women serving Western customers who work for security firms, companies and aid groups in Afghanistan. Many of the women say they were tricked into the trade by middlemen who promised them respectable jobs, but Gen. Ali Shah Paktiawal, head of Kabul’s criminal investigations, denies this, saying: “They come here of their own will.”
The shame of prostitution in Afghanistan is intense.
“In our culture, it is very, very bad,” said Soraya Sobhrang, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commissioner for women’s affairs.
Under the Afghan penal code, prostitution is often considered adultery, which is punishable by five to 15 years in prison. Under Islamic law, married prostitutes can be stoned to death.
Some prostitutes are forced into the sex trade by their families. The Ora report said 39 percent of the sex workers interviewed found clients through their relatives — including 17 percent through their mothers and 15 percent through their husbands.
For many girls, there is little recourse.
“They think that if they tell us the truth, we will return them to their families, and their families will kill them, or that we will send them to an institution and they will be put in prison,” says Jamila Ghairat of the aid organization Women for Afghan Women. “The girls are afraid of their families, the government and everyone.”
In some cases, it is families that pimp out the girls. At one family-run brothel, the oldest girl was a 15-year-old, orphaned when her parents died in rocket attacks in Kabul. A relative had married her off to a 9-year-old boy whose father was a pimp. She ran away three times, but each time her father-in-law bribed police to bring her back. She finally escaped to the human rights commission.
Makeshift brothels exist all over Kabul, but they are always moving, says Esmatullah Nekzad, a policeman formerly with the force’s Department of Moral Crimes. The clients are mostly Afghan men.
“Most Afghan men have this hobby — young men from about 16 to 30 years of age,” says Nekzad. “You go, you take their phone number, then you tell your friends. It’s all by telephone.”
The girls stay in one place for anything from five days to three months, until neighbors learn of their business.
That’s what happened with the girl Uncle Lang raped. In November, he trafficked her and several others to the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif to beg and sell sex. Within days the neighbors became suspicious and tipped off police.
Police raided the place and arrested the prostitutes. Uncle Lang fled.
For a few weeks, the girl went daily to a women’s aid organization. She arrived in the morning, worked in the kitchen and had an hour of counseling every day. She left at 4 p.m.
Her hands became clean and soft. She was happier. She started praying to ask Allah forgiveness for her sins.
At first she said her family did not know she was selling sex, and her mother would kill her. But during the counseling sessions, she let it slip that her parents encouraged her to work with Uncle Lang. When she stopped seeing him, they sent her 10-year-old brother instead.
One day, an aid worker spotted her with Uncle Lang on a popular street lined with kebab and ice cream shops.
The aid worker confronted her. A day later, the girl stopped going to the organization.
She has not been seen or heard from since.
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