30 YEARS ON, TIME HAS STOOD STILL FOR MILLIONS OF WOMEN IN SOUTH ASIA

Agence France Presse, March 6, 2005

Under the Taliban, Karima Hadyat and her friends would secretly gather in
a flat in Kabul's Soviet-era housing blocks on International Women's Day
to listen to crackly broadcasts on the BBC Persian service.

"We felt like the world had forgotten Afghan women. It was very painful,
enough to make you cry," Hadyat, a 45-year-old who runs law workshops for
Afghan women, told AFP ahead of the 30th UN annual awareness day.

"The worst moment every year was watching the boys go back to school and
knowing that the girls had to stay at home."

More than three years since the fall of the hardline Islamic Taliban
regime, life for women has improved in Afghanistan. Girls can go to
school, women can work and run for government office, and wearing the
all-enveloping blue burqa when venturing outside the home is no longer
compulsory.

Scratch the surface though, and the situation in much of the country has
changed little since 2001.

What's more, women are subjected to a culture which has turned back in
time and become more conservative than it was at the time of the first
International Women's Day in 1975, before Russian occupation and civil war
tore Afghanistan apart.

Outside Kabul and the relatively tolerant northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif,
most women must still cover themselves from head to toe in public and more
than 70 percent of Afghan girls and young women do not attend school.

"In the 1970s a young girl could leave the house by herself to borrow a
book for a library, but now it wouldn't be safe and her family wouldn't
let her travel unescorted," Hadyat said.

To attend the workshops about women's legal rights, elections and politics
which Hadyat runs for the Afghanistan Women's Research Center in Kabul and
surrounding provinces, women have to battle against the attitudes of their
male relatives.

"The rule of men is very strong in the families in the villages. It's very
hard to get women to join a workshop," she said.

The situation is mirrored across South Asia from Bangladesh to Pakistan,
Nepal to Sri Lanka, where societies remain largely conservative. Around
700 million women and girls in the region must still fight for equal
rights despite advances over the last three decades.

In India, women had become more vocal, particularly in cities, but were
still marginalised from decision-making processes, said high-profile
lawyer Poornima Advani, the former head of the National Commission for
Women.

"Time seems to have stood still for women in some villages," she told AFP.

A rise in religious fundamentalism, particularly in parts of Pakistan and
Afghanistan, has even set the cause of women back in some regions.

Shehnaz Bukhari, chief of the Progressive Women's Association in the
Pakistani capital Islamabad and a former winner of the US Civil Courage
Award, believes the social treatment of women was better 30 years ago.

"When I was in college, girls were not harassed the way they are treated
today," she said.

And while social issues are being highlighted more vigourously,
acid-burning, rape, murder and other punishments for the alleged crimes of
relatives are still rife across the subcontinent.

"Honour killings, burning of women and other forms of violence continue to
haunt women despite the fact that the media and many organisations
highlight these evil acts," Bukhari said.

According to Indian government figures in compiled in 2000, on average a
woman is raped every hour in India; while an Amnesty International report
last May said authorities were often complicit in the violence or turned a
blind eye.

Pakistani women's rights activist Kamila Hayat said there were areas in
South Asia where female development has kept track with other regions, but
low rates of female education and representation persisted.

"Girl children are not encouraged and their ratio in infant mortality is
on the higher side," she added.

In Pakistan, mortality for boys in 2003 was 121 per thousand while for
girls it was 135 per 1,000, according to a UN report.

Indian authorities also say there is a still a sharp preference for boys
over girls that has skewed the sex ratio in the country of more than a
billion.

From the ages of birth to six, there were 927 girls for 1,000 boys, down
from 945 girls a decade earlier, according to the country's 2001 census.

"The girl child is killed with more ferocity than cats or dogs," said
Lalitha, who uses one name and works for the Lawyer's Collective in New
Delhi, which takes up women's issues.