On March 8th, 2006, International Women’s Day, Pacifica Radio Network broadcast nation-wide coverage focusing on women. Uprising participated in the coverage with a special look at Afghan women.

Afghan MP Challenges Western Imperialism and Religious Fundamentalism

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Eight years ago, the European Union embraced a campaign to dedicate International women’s day to the women of Afghanistan. The campaign, called “A Flower for the Women of Kabul” was embraced around the world in solidarity with Afghan women who were living under the draconian rule of the Taliban regime. Today, despite the fall of the Taliban, life for ordinary Afghan women, particularly outside the capital, Kabul, is much the same. But international attention has dropped to nearly nothing.

The ideological twins of the Taliban now dominate the Afghan landscape politically, militarily, and economically. They are the warlords, the Mujahideen party leaders who were once elevated to power by billions of US dollars in a “jihad” against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. They committed unspeakable crimes against Afghans, particularly women, in a civil war after the Soviets withdrew.

During the Taliban era, they united and called themselves the Northern Alliance. The US engaged their old friends in the Northern Alliance to help to defeat the Taliban in 2001. In 2004 the US-backed candidate for president, Hamid Karzai, was elected by a majority on an anti-warlord platform. Promptly after his election, he appointed Northern Alliance warlords to his cabinet. Today Karzai is widely considered to be a US puppet president. The warlords run private armed militias that rule the country side, and a drug trade income greater than the nation’s GNP. In the recent parliamentary election, many warlords secured seats to the Afghan National Assembly by intimidation and election-fraud.

Also winning a seat to the Afghan National Assembly, was a young, independent female candidate named Malalai Joya from the remote western Farah province. Joya gained international attention in 2003 when she spoke out against the Northern Alliance, at a gathering to adopt the Constitution. In addition to being one of the youngest members of Parliament, Malalai Joya is also one of the most popular MPs in the country. She has taken on Afghanistan’s most powerful and dangerous institutions and has won the hearts of millions of ordinary Afghans whose voices have been silenced. Her life has been threatened many times and she has survived four assassination attempts.

Malalai Joya is currently in the United States on a nation-wide tour to raise awareness of the continued suffering of Afghans, particularly women. I helped organize her tour through my volunteer work with the Afghan Women’s Mission. I spoke with Malalai in studio earlier this week.

Malalai Joya is currently on a speaking tour of the United States, and we end today’s International Women’s Day Programming with an excerpt of the speech she gave at the first event of her tour in Los Angeles where she covered on-going women’s oppression, the drug trade and its ties to warlords in the government, and how Afghans are caught between the forces of US imperialism and religious fundamentalism.

To find out more about her work, and her US tour, visit www.malalaijoya.com.