What holiday would you create
If I could create a new holiday, it would be a holiday that honors the freedom and progress of the Afghan women. I would established the holiday to multiply efforts of the Feminist Majority Foundation with the Campaign to help Afghan Women and young girls to ensure that women’s rights are fully and permanently restored after the fall of the Taliban regime, which symbolized the brutality against the women in Afghanistan in the past years.
When the Taliban took control in 1996, they instituted a gender apartheid for the women where they imposed strict edicts such as banished women from the work force, closed school to girls, expelled women from universities, prohibited women from leaving their home unless accompanied by a close male relative, forced women to use the burga or chadari, paint windows of women’s houses black, prohibited women from being examined by male physicians, while at the same time prohibited most female doctors and nurses from practicing.
The reality for the women during Taliban control shows a lot of horrors against the women who defied the rules of the Taliban and were severely punished. For example some girls were killed in front of their families because they run to the schools; some women were brutally heated because their ankle was accidentally showed from underneath their burga. Two women accused of prostitution were publicly hanged in the stadium.
Today, after the fall of Taliban, women can leave their homes without the escort of a male family member. They no longer have to cram into the back of buses and give up their seats to men. They can get their hair and nails done in beauty salons that have opened up all over Kabul. Girls can go to school, and young women to universities, where they sometimes even share classrooms with men. Being a woman can sometimes be an advantage in the job market. In Kabul, Indian models are admired for their fashion, but many Afghan women still wear the traditional burqa.
I would like that the people celebrate the new holiday by publishing the advances of the campaign through web sites, organizing some lectures about the progress of the afghan women, promoting scholarships for women to study, and encouraging the women from all over the world to maintain the faith to pursue the dreams.
The reason why I would create an international holiday for the Afghan women is because the international community must now act to ensure that women’s rights are fully and permanently restored, to reestablish a constitutional democracy in Afghanistan that is representative of women and ethnic minorities, and to show an example to women of the world of how can we solve difficulties in this way.
