Middle East specialist Sara Poya and Sydney University Student Representative Council Women's Officer Sara Haghdoosti spoke at a recent campus meeting on the struggle for women's rights in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Socialist Worker reprints edited versions of their speeches.

Sara Poya

SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq were carried out in name of freeing women from their oppressive cultures.

Western politicians and media have strengthened the existing stereotypes about women who may identify themselves with Islamic cultures, whether they are believers or secular.

One-sided portrayals omit images of these women as workers or outstanding members of communities, scholars, scientists or artists.

In the West, Muslim women including white women who have chosen to be Muslim and wear the hijab, have been stoned in the streets.

For many women of Islamic cultures, these attacks are the result of Islamophobia-a dominant racist ideology promoted by neo-conservatives in the USA and their supporters in the West.

Islamophobia is, therefore, a post-September 11 phenomenon and for many represents the contemporary form of cultural imperialism.

However, it has historical roots in the colonial period. The "civilizing mission" of the British colonialism in Egypt was largely about the de-veiling of women.

In Iran after the World War I, the pro British Reza Shah's Westernisation program included de-veiling of women. Women were attacked in the streets and chadors were pulled away from their heads.

With the outbreak of the World War II the allied forces occupied Iran and women had to re-veil for their own safety for fear of rape and sexual abuse by foreign soldiers.

False portrayal

Under the influence of today's cultural imperialism, many feminists and liberals do not challenge Islamophobia.

They ignore the racist public hysteria against people of Islamic cultures, refusing to defend the rights of Muslim women who choose to wear the hijab.

They see the hijab as the symbol of oppression and women's submission to male demand. They portray Muslim women as the passive victims of Muslim men.

They assume that Muslim men are embedded in patriarchal gender ideologies to a greater extent than supposedly liberated Western men.

They ignore the fact that for women of Islamic cultures hijab has different meanings. For some it could be the belief in wearing it. For others it can bring a sense of belonging, or solidarity with Islamic culture. It could also symbolise an anti imperialist sentiment.

Today the majority of women of Islamic culture who wear the hijab are young and educated. They are not forced by men to wear it.

They choose to wear it. For many of them, this is a visible way to reject cultural imperialism, racism, Islamophobia, the craziness of the wars. It is a way of expressing solidarity with people in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Although the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq was waged in the name of women's liberation and democracy, Western governments have for years ignored women's issues in these countries. They have supported dictators and warlords.

It is perhaps unsurprising that Muslim women deplore the idea that their liberation can only be achieved by Western military intervention, or by calls to reject their culture and faith.

In Iraq and in Afghanistan, where violence has intensified and any meaningful reconstruction is non-existent, women are playing an important role in maintaining the survival of their communities.

Today women exercise more rights in Iran than in neighbouring US-backed states. They have the right to vote and enjoy a more gender balanced family, education and employment status.

This is as a result of the efforts of Iranian women, workers and others to achieve the demands of the revolution of 1979, often in opposition to the policies of successive Islamic governments under Khomeini, Khamenei and Rafsanjani. The women's movement in Iran is playing an important role in the growing democracy movement, including successful campaigns against segregation in mosques or the ban on women attending football games.

However Western government, including many feminists, choose to ignore these achievements. For women in the Middle East and Afghanistan the concept of liberation and democracy is a product of intellectual and political engagement with philosophies of national liberation. They are actively trying to construct emancipatory models that derive from their own experience.

In some cases they have succeeded in changing sexist gender ideology and have convinced some men that they as well as women benefit from gender equality. But constant threats of sanctions, wars and regime change weaken these movements.

Afghan MP Malalai Joya (pictured centre) says the US-backed warlords in Afghanistan are just as oppressive as the Taliban.

Sara Haghdoosti

"At the moment, there are more pressing issues. A civil servant has too much on his mind to deal with women's rights. It's a matter of priorities."

Governor of Kandahar, Afghanistan, September 13, 2004

THIS STATEMENT, while abhorrent, is interesting in comparison to Laura Bush's speech just a few months before in favour of military intervention in Afghanistan in order to combat "the brutality against women and children by the Al-Qaeda terrorist network and the regime that supports it in Afghanistan-the Taliban."

These two statements highlight the contradiction in the US claim that it is liberating women.

The homogenous presentation of the burqa denies Afghani women agency.

It created an image of them as passive victims, completely ignoring the fact that many women had used the veil as a form of resistance and had used the cover of the burqa to smuggle books to underground schools and to take footage of Taliban practices.

However America's involvement in silencing women has more depth than this.

America's interest in Afghanistan began with Jimmy Carter signing a directive to begin covert operations against Soviet occupying forces by supplying funds and weapons to the Afghan Mujahedeen.

By 1986, under President Reagan, this program had become the largest covert operation since World War II.

It funneled over $3 billion to the Mujahedeen.

Only the most extreme groups were favored, marginalising secular and moderate voices.

One of the groups favored by America was headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a man known for throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.

His group received almost 50 per cent of the aid. When the US was questioned over this, a CIA official in Pakistan explained, "Fanatics fight better".

Moral equivalent

Zoya, a member of the Revolutionary Afghan Women's Association (RAWA) articulates this point beautifully:

"In 1985, President Ronald Regan received a group of bearded men with turbans-the Afghan Mujahedeen leaders.

"After meeting them in the White House he said, 'these are the moral equivalent of America's founding fathers.'

"In August 1998, President Bill Clinton ordered missile strikes on Osama bin Laden and his men in Afghanistan, who only a few years earlier was the moral equivalent of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson!

"These actions speak for themselves: for the US government, the terrorist of today. For the US, 'terrorist' has a different definition that what people of the world understand."

All this aside, there are those who still claim that the intervention benefited the people-especially the women of Afghanistan. According to a UNIFEM survey, 65 per cent of the 50,000 widows in Kabul think that suicide is their only option. Rape and abduction are at the highest levels and more alarmingly those who stand up are being killed.

The Afghan police killed two protesters who voiced dissent to a private torture prison in Paghman, a suburb of Kabul.

And more recently Safiye Amajan, the provincial head of the Ministry of Women's Affairs was gunned down and killed.

The final indictment of the US is its backing of the Afghan parliament, which includes members of the Northern Alliance who, according to RAWA, raped an 11 year old girl named Sanuber and traded her with a dog.

Even more shockingly, as pointed out by MP Malalai Joya, the same men have recently passed a bill in parliament preventing the prosecution of war crimes committed in the past 25 years. Most of these crimes were committed against women.

However it is important to listen to the people of Afghanistan. According to RAWA:

"It does not matter who rules in Kabul, the US wants just a puppet regime. An American military presence in Afghanistan has no benefit for our people.

"In addition, thousands of civilians lost their lives because of radioactive and cluster bombs and 'friendly fire'. This fact is obviously a disgrace for those who strongly defend American military presence in Afghanistan.

"Jaji Nek Mohammad who had lost his beloved in a NATO air strike in Kandahar said, 'I prefer to join the Taliban forces because the Taliban have so far killed only two people in my village while the coalition forces killed 63 people in a single day.'

"The disgraceful defeat and embarrassing situation in the war in Iraq left no option for the US except to illustrate Afghanistan as a success whether it results in pain and suffering for the Afghan people or not."