Is there a future for Afghanistan ?

I read this first article and got all inspired..

then I stumbled on the 2nd RAWA one ** and came down to earth with a bump - these attitudes still exist in Afghanistan


Afghan basketball star Sabrina takes brave shot for democracy

When she slips off her veil and dons Nike trainers for her daily basketball game at a Kabul gym, Sabrina Sagheb is already challenging many orthodoxies of Afghan society.

She will challenge many more when she becomes the youngest woman to stand in Afghanistan's first parliamentary elections on Sept 18.

The 25-year-old with a talent for shooting hoops will contest a seat in the lower house, the Wolesi Jirga.

This is a courageous decision in a country where it is still socially unacceptable in many areas for women to leave home without the company of a male relative and the anonymity of a burkha.

Moreover, Miss Sagheb will campaign on a platform of liberal reform and equality for the sexes. She hopes to make the wearing of the burkha a matter of choice for all women and advocates an end to forced marriages.

"I want basic human rights for men and for women," she said, adding that her parents will let her choose a husband.

Some 5,805 candidates have been declared eligible to contest the first post-Taliban parliamentary polls. A total of 2,778 candidates will stand for the 249-seat lower house and 3,027 in provincial councils. Some 583 women will run.

The elections have already been postponed from April and will take place against a background of mounting Taliban violence and instability.

Miss Sagheb is the minimum legal age for candidacy. In a country where female literacy is 14 per cent she is exceptional in being a fluent English speaker and a university graduate.

She escaped the Taliban bar on female education because her family fled to the relative permissiveness of Iran. Despite her youth, she is already the head of the Afghan Basketball Federation and an International Olympic Committee representative.

Every day, after work for an international NGO, she heads for the basketball court.

There are so few women players that she must sometimes resort to playing with schoolboys half her age. That in itself is controversial. If she were to play alongside grown men, it might attract death threats from conservatives.

Shaima Reyazee, a 24-year-old presenter on an MTV-style channel which was repeatedly denounced by the religious establishment for its western attitudes, was murdered in her Kabul home in May.

Two months earlier she was forced to quit Tolo TV under pressure from the mullahs. She was the only female presenter and appeared with her hair uncovered.

Miss Sagheb acknowledges that by standing she could face similar danger. She hopes that in the face of male aggression she can deploy less confrontational devices.

"Softness, kindness and subtlety are our weapons," she said. "In the office where I work the women have faced problems from male colleagues and we won our rights by using these means."

Other candidates include former Taliban leaders, who advocate strict adherence to Islamic Sharia law and the gender roles of Afghan cultural tradition.

Conservatives have been angered by the automatic allocation of 25 per cent of seats to women candidates following international pressure for greater representation of women.

"This is eating the rights of men," said Engineer Ahmed Shah Ahmedzai, a Wolesi Jirga candidate.

"We will never accept the interpretation of democracy in our Islamic republic that the West is trying to implement in Afghanistan."

A former Taliban commander who is standing for election but declined to be named, said: "We will give only those rights to women which are contained in Sharia law."

The list of candidates includes many people familiar to ordinary Afghans for their association with war crimes, the huge opium trade and the illegal militias that still proliferate.

Miss Sagheb hopes that the government and international community will enforce new election laws to throw such candidates off the ballot.

"I remember those crimes," she said. Like almost every Afghan, in a country at war for three decades, she is able to say: "I witnessed many with my own eyes."

The legitimacy of last year's presidential elections was diminished in the eyes of many Afghans when figures such as Rashid Dostum, a warlord accused of persistent human rights abuses, were allowed to stand.

Western diplomatic sources say there are at least 150 known commanders of illegal armed groups on the ballot.

the bad news - from RAWA

(RAWA are the oldest political/social organization of Afghan women struggling for peace, freedom, democracy and women's rights in fundamentalism-blighted Afghanistan since 1977 - the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan )

** 'A Life in the Day of Zoya' : www.rawa.org

the first one was from news.telegraph.co.uk sSheet=/news/2005/07/15/ixnewstop.h tml