Some news from Afghanistan

[centra]

I get email from Women's Alliance for Peace and Human Rights in Afghanistan (WAPHA), here are a couple of the news articles. I love these e-mails because I get alot of information just about Afghanistan with about 6 emails a week.

This aritcle struck me as strange. Everyone is complaining about Iraq less than a year after Saddam was overthrown, yet almost 2.5 years later Afghanistan has just adopted a constitution, which barely reconizes womens rights. In less than one year Iraq has a constitution that is a big step up for women in an Islamic country. The only reason I can see for all the complaining about the speed of progress in Iraq is because America is the main force and in charge. People expect America to do things better and faster than the EU or United Nations put together.

Articles below:


Updated: 08:45 AM EST
EU says Afghan elections may need delaying

BRUSSELS, March 2 (Reuters) - Afghanistan's elections, scheduled for June, may need to be delayed, the European Commission said on Tuesday, as only a tenth of voters have been registered and the job was not likely to be completed on time.

"We think it's more important for Afghanistan to have credible elections later than elections early that will not be trusted by the population," Commission External Relations spokeswoman Emma Udwin told a briefing.

"So if all of this means that the elections have to be delayed, perhaps until the autumn, so be it."

Both presidential and parliamentary elections are scheduled for June, and European Union officials have expressed worries over the target date because of the slow pace of registration.

"You can't have free and fair elections if you haven't registered the population and of course, notably in this country, the women, to vote," Udwin said, adding that only a tenth of the estimated 10.5 million voters have been registered.

The EU's executive Commission announced on Tuesday it was giving an extra eight million euros ($10 million) to fund the elections, taking the total from the Commission and separate contributions from member states to 30 million euros.

"We are putting in extra money, others will need to do so, there will need to be extra contributions to security as well," Udwin said, adding that the Afghan government appeared to recognise a delay may be needed.

"They have an understanding that it may be necessary to shift the date. They have not taken any final decision."
03/02/04 08:44 ET
Copyright 2004 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.In post-Taliban times, a young Afghan star is bornCarlotta Gall NYT
Wednesday, March 3, 2004

KABUL Marina Golbahari, the star of the award-winning Afghan film "Osama," is the envy of her classmates.

She flaunts a new silky outfit and high-heeled black boots and says three of her school friends want to be in the movies, too.

Yet her life has not changed dramatically since the Afghan film director Siddiq Barmak spotted her scavenging on the street one day about a year ago.

Despite the new clothes, Marina, 13, still looks much like the poor Kabuli child she was then. She is skinny, her hands rough, her face marked by sores. And though her family has moved into a two-room house bought with the help of Barmak and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an Iranian director who helped finance "Osama," Marina refuses requests to be interviewed at her home. She is embarrassed by its meager state and a little afraid of her father, who does not like visits from foreigners.

"We are living in very bad conditions, and when the rain and snow come, the roof leaks and drips everywhere," Marina said through an interpreter in an interview one afternoon at her school here. "When guests come, there is no room for them to stay overnight."

Though she and her seven siblings no longer beg on the streets, the family survives mostly on the $4 to $6 a day that her father earns from his street stall selling music cassettes. The children spend their mornings at a government school and their afternoons at a charitable school for poor neighborhood children, who get a daily meal and some basic classes there. Still, Marina, like Afghanistan itself, has come a long way.

When Barmak first asked her to sing for him, she thought he was going to offer her and her family some help, she recalled. But he wanted her to star in his film, the first feature made in Afghanistan since the fundamentalist Taliban movement, now ousted, took over Kabul in 1996, banning films, television and music. The idea of movie acting shocked her at first. "No, I am not an infidel," she recalled telling Barmak.

The only films she had ever seen were Indian Bollywood productions, viewed at her aunt's house after the Taliban fell. Women in these movies are brazen by Afghan standards: dancing, baring their midriffs and even embracing men on screen.

"I was thinking it would be like Indian films," she said of Barmak's "Osama," which recently won a Golden Globe award for best foreign-language film. "He laughed and said, 'No, it will not be like that.'"

"Osama" was to be about life under the Taliban, a subject Marina understood well. She plays a 12-year-old in Kabul whose father is dead and whose mother and grandmother are destitute and unable to feed the family. (Taliban restrictions forbade women to work or even to leave their homes without a male companion.)

With no man or boy around, her desperate mother cuts her daughter's hair, dresses her like a boy and sends her to work in a dairy shop. "They cut my hair," Marina said. "It was difficult. How can a girl be made like a boy and go to work?" She added, "In the film I had to go to school with boys at a religious school, and then they find out that I am a girl, and they take me out and they punish me, and they put me down a well."
Being lowered down the well on a rope was frightening, she said. But what upset her most was the ending, when she is pulled out of the well, declared a woman, covered in the all-enveloping burka and married off to the old mullah who runs the religious school.

"He was old and had a white beard," she said, hiding her face in her veil in embarrassment. Even though she and the man were acting, the experience overwhelmed her. "I was crying afterward as I went home," she remembered. "I was thinking, 'What did I do?'"

In a country where all marriages are arranged, the predicament of being wedded to an old man is every Afghan girl's dread. Marina recalled how two prepubescent girls from a neighbor's family were married to old men from the provinces.

Marina went with her parents and two of her sisters to see "Osama" when it was first shown at the Kabul Cinema, one of the few working movie houses here. "I did not like it because it showed the times of the Taliban," she said.

If the filming sometimes made Marina cry, it was also fun and empowering for a girl once accustomed to begging. Her fee, slight by American standards, was an above average salary for Afghanistan. "I earned $110 a month while I was filming, and then we bought the house," she said. Barmak and Makhmalbaf put up $10,000 to buy the two-room building. (Before, the family had rented a house.)

Today Marina is a lively teenager with a busy life, happy the Taliban times are over and a little star-struck. "I am very happy," she said. "School has started, and the country is free."

She has made a second film, a short called "Kurbani," or "Sacrifice," a harrowing tale of an Afghan girl trying to save her sick mother.

She is preparing to do another short film, but already her father is telling her to stop acting, she said. (Even with the increased freedom here, acting is often seen as immodest.) And her dream of making it to Hollywood seems remote.

"I'd like to be a big star in America," Marina said, "but as long as I don't speak English and don't finish my education, how can I be?"
The New York Times
Copyright © 2004 the International Herald Tribune All Rights Reserved

[Hannibal]

After being here almost 2 weeks I can say that the Afghans are really happy that we are here. I get to work with them daily and it is great.

If the EU was so worried where are the thousands of their troops and the billions of their dollars? I love how they do nothing but complain.

-Jason

[sfga6970]

Originally Posted by Hannibal

If the EU was so worried where are the thousands of their troops and the billions of their dollars? I love how they do nothing but complain.

-Jason

Great comment! Stay safe!

[bd]

Stay safe brother.

BD

[cb88]

Originally Posted by Hannibal

After being here almost 2 weeks I can say that the Afghans are really happy that we are here. I get to work with them daily and it is great.

If the EU was so worried where are the thousands of their troops and the billions of their dollars? I love how they do nothing but complain.

-Jason

Jason....

I'll keep you in my prayers.