Last significant update: 08 March 2001
This information can be freely reproduced in any medium, as long as the information is unmodified.
Thanks to Michelle Shukait for first bringing this to our attention on 25 February, 1999.
Please note that when I say that this chain mail is a waste of your time, I do not in any way mean to imply that the petition below is untrue. In fact, I suspect it is entirely accurate; I merely believe that this effort was doomed to fail from the start, and might even make matters worse. :-(
First, here is the text. Usually I would intersperse comments, but I'll leave it as is, and comment afterwards:
Support Women in Afghanistan
Please spare a minute to read this mail.
Thank you.
The government of Afghanistan is waging a war upon women. The situation
is getting so bad that one person in an editorial of the Times compared
the treatment of women there to the treatment of Jews in pre-Holocaust
Poland.
Since the Taliban took power in 1996, women have had to wear burqua 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 woman was beaten to DEATH by an angry mob of fundamentalists for
accidentally exposing her arm while she was driving. Another was stoned
to death for trying to leave the country with a man that 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 into 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 are never heard.
Women live in fear of their lives for the slightest misbehavior. Because
they cannot work, those without male relatives or husbands are either
starving to death or begging on the street, even if they hold Ph.D.'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 burqua, unwilling to speak, eat, or do
anything, but slowly wasting away. Others have gone mad and were 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' has 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. David Cornwell has said that those in the West
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 that the Carthaginians sacrificed their infant
children, that little girls are circumcised in parts of Africa, that
blacks in the US 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 human existence, even if they are women in a Muslim
country in a part of the world that Westerners may not understand. If
we can threaten military force in Kosovo in the name of human rights for
the sake of ethnic Albanians, then NATO and the West can certainly
express peaceful outrage at the oppression, murder and injustice
committed against women by the Taliban.
*************
STATEMENT:
In signing this, we agree that the current treatment of women in
Afghanistan is completely UNACCEPTABLE and deserves support and action
by the people of the United Nations and that the current situation in
Afghanistan will not be tolerated. Women's Rights is not a small issue
anywhere and it is UNACCEPTABLE for women in 1998 to be treated as
sub-human and so much as property. Equality and human decency is a RIGHT
not a freedom, whether one lives in Afghanistan or anywhere else.
*****
[list of names snipped]
On 25 February 1999, my Virus Buster colleague Adam Wilkinson wrote in response to a query about this:
I can echo that: I've heard reports on the BBC, which I consider extremely credible, that life for women under the Taliban *sucks*. While the details of the email may be over-exaggerated (or not; dunno), affixing one's signature seems warranted enough.
I rather doubt that the Taliban, being opposed even to TV, will put much weight to a petition from a Western country posted by email from a woman, but I also doubt it'll make their lives any worse. :-( That, sad to say, is probably next to impossible.
[snip: Adam speaking again:]
Agree. It might be a Denial of Service attack on the recipients, but that's probably unlikely.
Bottom line: If you feel passionately about this, do reply to the two addresses -- but don't expect any earth-shattering results. At least not good ones.
As for forwarding the petition, I oppose it on several grounds: it is chain mail; it originated in 1996 and may be long abandoned; this isn't the way to do it.
Instead, you should reply to the sender -- and as far back up the email
chain as you have energy -- pointing the originators to this URL
(http://www.umich.edu/~virus-busters/hoaxes/taliban.html)
For virus or hoax info, please see our main page
(http://www.umich.edu/~virus-busters/) or go to another reputable site,
like The Urban Legends Reference Pages (leaving our site).
-BPB
visits to this page since 08 March 2001 00:44 EST