We have a joint meditation monthly on the first Sunday after the full moon, consistently at 10pm EST. We will be continuing to send energy to the women in Afghanistan during these meditations, and continuing to help raise attention on the issue. I hope you'll join us on these days and continue in your own way to help out where you can. Blessed be, LaughingKoala
Since the Taliban took power in 1996, women have had to wear burqa 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 women was beaten to DEATH by an angry mob of fundamentalists for accidentally exposing her arm while driving. Another was stoned to death for trying to leave the country with a man who 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 in 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 can never be heard. Women live in fear of their lives for the slightest misbehaviour.
Because they cannot work, those without male relatives or husbands are either starving to death or begging on the street, even if they hold PhD'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 depression 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 burqa, unwilling to speak, eat or do anything, but are slowly wasting away. Others have gone mad and are 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" have 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.
*A nameless person* has told me that we in the United States 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 drive and appear in public alone until only 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 name 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 the the Carthaginians sacrificed their infant children, that little girls are circumcised in parts of Africa, that blacks in the 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 existance, even if they are women in a Muslim country in a part of the world that Americans do not understand. If we can threaten military force in Kosovo in the name of human rights for the sake of ethnic Albanians, we can certainly express peaceful outrage at the oppression, murder and injustive committed against women by the Taliban.
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1999 20:50:33 -0500
To:
Subject: Re: petition
Precedence: Junk
X-Loop: sarabande@brandeis.edu
From: Chain Letter Autoreply
A Brandeis affiliate with good intentions but bad methodology started a chain letter recently.
Please do not redistribute it. Please do not write with further questions or comments either to postmaster or sarabande. The current rate of such messahes is around 2000 per day and increasing.
For the time being, personal mail to sarabande@brandeis.edu is being delivered but due to the geometric expansion of Internet chain letters of this kind, this will probably not be true for long. If you know sarabande's other email address, please use that for personal mail.
If you wish to learn how to do something productive about women's rights in Afghanistan, please refer to the websites run by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Feminist Majority, http://www.amnesty.org/ ... http://www.hrw.org and http://www.feminist.org/ respectively.
The latter is sponsoring a *real* petition which should be sent *only* via physical mail or fax, where is might have some effect. Virtual signatures are virtually useless at best. The text you received was mostly plagiarised from the real petition (without credit or reference), but is different enough that it will not be accepted (regardless of how the "signatures" were gathered).
For information on why Internet chain letters are never sanctioned by any responsible organisation, please refer to:
http://athos.rutgers.edu/~watrous/pbs-funding-chain-letter-petition.html
http://www.nbi.dk/~dickow/stop-chain-letter.txt
http://www.cancer.org/chain.html
http://www.wish.org/craig.htm
http://urbanlegends.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa021198.htm
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-run-adverts-00.txt
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-run-adverts-07.txt
http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACChainLetters.html
Rich Graves rcgraves@brandeis.edu
UNet Systems Administrator
My dear friend and *sister* Whiteraven is sponsoring a world meditation to send loving and healing energy to the women in Afghanistan. This is a very basic and effective meditation that anyone can participate in wherever they are. It is to be held on February 7th 1999 at 10pm EST (7pm PST, 8pm Mountain Time, 9pm CST, 5pm Hawaii/Alaska, 2pm Weds in Australia (DST)- I'm unsure of times elsewhere). For more information on the meditation please CLICK HERE or email me at Aerin@iname.com
... UPDATES ON THE SITUATION IN AFGHANISTAN!CLICK HERE.
... for more information on what you can do to help the women in Afghanistan, please CLICK HERE.