TRIBAL ISLAM WATCH
ABC News is reporting a truly disheartening account of the plight of many women in post-Taliban Afghanistan who are going to gruesome lengths to avoid being sold into marriage. (Buying and selling human beings: isn't that a definition of slavery?)
But even as Afghan females are finally enjoying basic human rights, such as the right to an education, to work and to vote. Afghanistan remains a profoundly conservative Muslim nation.
Cultural transformation--including age-old honor-bound codes of conduct--still shackle and oppress women, especially those living outside Kabul.
In the past few years, there have been an increasing number of news reports about suicides by self-immolation among Afghan women. Although nationwide statistics are hard to come by, hospitals and aid agencies in cities like Kabul and Herat in western Afghanistan have recorded a number of female burn cases.
Forced into marriages--often with older, richer men--and faced with a life of endless exploitation and drudgery, an untold number of Afghan females are dousing themselves with kerosene used in cooking stoves and setting themselves on fire.
The piece then quotes a Western aid worker with the World Medical Association:
"There is an absolute level of despair, that you will never be able to make a choice about your life and that really there is no way out, and knowing that you will have to live with a man you have not chosen, who is probably older than you are, who is going to allow you to work, to go out of the house."
In case we don't grasp to what ends this "absolute level of despair" is driving women, ABC News observes
Self-immolation is a horrific act that often results in a slow, tortuous death in hospital burn wards even as medical officials desperately struggle to save lives.
Seems our work is far from done in Afghanistan.