AFGHANISTAN
There’s that pesky reality again.
Five years ago, when the repressive Islamist government was ousted, women celebrated the end of restrictions that banished them from jobs, schools or even walking alone on the street without a male family member. But social change has come neither dramatically nor as easily as some expected.
Afghanistan has a new constitution that guarantees equality for women - a rare declaration in the Islamic world. And nearly 2 million girls have returned to schools and women have returned to the workplace, including to Parliament, where a quarter of the members are women.
But women say the new freedoms are largely superficial - that profound cultural restrictions remain. Most women still wear burkas in public, and those who don’t must endure stares and hisses on the street.
“We do have rights on paper, but we don’t have them in reality,” said Fatima Kazimyan, Bamiyan’s representative for the Ministry of Women’s Affairs.
What quickly became clear after the Taliban’s ouster five years ago was that Afghanistan was not going to return to the ways of the 1980s, when the Soviet-backed government diminished Islamic influences, and women discarded their veils. Article
