TALIBAN DEMANDS RIGID CONFORMITY

Taliban Demands Rigid Conformity

InsightMag.com

By Timothy W. Maier
tmaier@InsightMag.com

In Afghanistan the radical Islamic-fundamentalist Taliban government runs a totalitarian regime that rivals any for its oppression. An undercover reporter shows the reality.

When President George W. Bush compared the Taliban regime to that of Nazi Germany in a stirring speech a week after the terrorist attacks, he may not have gone far enough. This is, after all, a government so oppressive that it executes little girls for the crime of attending school. Girls age 8 and older caught attending underground schools are subject to being taken to the Kabul soccer stadium and made to kneel in the penalty box while an executioner puts a machine gun to the back of their heads and pulls the trigger. Spectators scattered among the stands then are called upon to cheer.
       Saira Shah, a courageous independent reporter, captured Taliban atrocities on video for a film called Beneath the Veil, which has been airing on CNN and other electronic news outlets in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.
       A British citizen, Shah spent her childhood in Afghanistan and recalls a very different place. For instance, there is her memory of a beautiful garden — a public place to which her father used to take her as a child and about which he often spoke in later years. She had not been able to return to that garden because her once-beloved country has been at war since the Soviet Union occupied it in 1979, eventually being defeated in a decadelong war. The Taliban, a militia of fanatically religious Muslim men, took control in 1996. The fighters of the Northern Alliance continued to resist and have been mounting an even more intense effort in anticipation of a U.S. retaliatory attack against the Taliban, which has harbored terrorist Osama bin Laden.
       Shah was determined to go back to her country of 26 million and see for herself the despair that has left some 5 million starving to death and many more in exile or hiding. This year she made such a trip. Wearing the required burqa, a large cloth which covers a woman from head to toe, she saw abandoned women, denied employment outside the home and forced to beg on the streets for table scraps such as moldy bread, which they grind up at home for their children’s only meal. Other mothers turn to prostitution, knowing that if they are caught they will be taken to a soccer stadium to face the executioners. In February, the Associated Press reported that two women convicted of prostitution were hanged for “corrupting society.” Two others publicly were lashed for adultery. One of them was sentenced to 10 years in prison and the other to two years.
       As she passed from village to village, Shah says, there was a terrible sameness to the stories. The death, cruelty and abuse were everywhere. A little girl wearing white shoes was beaten by Taliban officials because the color of her shoes was the color of their flag — which the culture police declared shows disrespect. Another girl — perhaps only 12 years old — hid in a bread oven, watching in horror as the Taliban killed her father for his wristwatch and waistcoat. The little boys also were targets. One who was deemed to have a Western-style haircut was hunted down with dogs and beaten.
       As she headed toward the capital, Kabul, Shah says she noticed roadblocks festooned with confiscated cassette tapes. The Taliban has banned music — and the roadblocks are a constant reminder. In one of the villages, Shah ran into a family of three little girls hidden underneath their scarfs and garments while their father stared into space. The girls apparently had not moved in weeks. They had been made to watch as the Taliban militia shot their mother in front of them and then stayed in their home for two days while the mother’s body lay in the courtyard. Shah asked the girls what the Taliban men did to the children during those two days. “A 15-year-old sister wept silently,” Shah said.
       On a hillside, another man told Shah he had found the bodies of seven men scattered across his field. They were there because when the Taliban left the village they forced dozens of male civilians into pickup trucks. They didn’t have room for the last seven so they shot them. The killings appeared to be part of a pattern that Shah says she ran into throughout her journey. News reports confirm that mass graves — some containing as many as 300 Afghanis — are scattered throughout the country.
       When she confronted Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Mattawakil about this, he denied the massacres took place, claiming the opposition made it up. As for using the soccer stadium as a place for executions, Mattawakil acknowledged that this was true and explained that executions are a happy time for the victims of crimes. When she asked why they execute people in a place the international community helped build for sporting events, Mattawakil said that if the international community would build them a place suitable for public executions they would stop using the soccer stadium.
       Shah’s discoveries are nothing new in this impoverished land. While the Northern Alliance and the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) have been trying to call attention to these systemic outrages for some time, it’s been an uphill battle with the Taliban controlling about 95 percent of the country.
       A few months prior to the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, the Taliban rulers appeared to be more determined in their crackdown. In June, the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, required the printing of verses from the Koran on all manufactured products. This followed a ban on photographs of people and animals, including requiring businessmen and private companies not to import or produce anything depicting people or animals.
       Reuters reported earlier this year that Taliban laws against reproducing images of any kind provoked international protests when the Taliban ordered destruction of ancient Buddhist statues (see “Monuments of Destruction,” April 23) and appeared to some to steal a page from the Nazis by requiring all Hindus to carry a yellow sticker identifying them as members of a religious minority. The Hindus were required to raise yellow flags on their rooftops as well, and currently the Taliban is considering whether to have them wear a more distinguishing dress to identify them more easily. The Taliban claim they are doing this to protect non-Muslims from being herded into Islamic services.
       Women have been hit especially hard — even foreign women, who no longer are allowed to drive automobiles because the Taliban say this is damaging to Islamic society. In May the Taliban religious police, known as the “Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” raided an Italian-funded hospital, arresting and beating three local employees on charges they had eaten in the same room as women employees. The 121-bed hospital, which treated war victims, was then closed as a den of depravity. Four years earlier, the religious police had arrested foreign and local staff for watching television with local women employees, according to Reuters. Television, films and music since have been outlawed.  With no television, computers or even mail, Afghanistan has been cut off almost completely from the influence of the outside world. Intelligence experts suggest that some there may have no clue about the events of Sept. 11 or that the United States may be mounting a massive retaliatory attack. The Taliban defends the country’s isolation and works hard to keep its population in what President Bush referred to as the “Middle Ages,” suggesting it is necessary to enforce moral rules dictated by fanatical interpretations of the Koran. In May, for example, the Taliban staged a public lashing of an unmarried couple accused of sexual intimacy, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). The report claimed a woman identified as Nadia and a man called Fazl Rahman were given 100 lashes each at the Kabul sports stadium in front of thousands of Taliban militia.
       A local court had found them guilty of having sex three months earlier. Rahman initially was strong during the flogging but eventually collapsed. Taliban soldiers then held him up while the beating continued. Nadia sat on the grass while a judge lashed her on her back and legs. As if this weren’t bad enough, the French report says, “They execute murderers, chop off the hands of thieves and stone to death married adulterers.”
       The AFP also reports that the Taliban burned musical instruments at a public ceremony and punished more than 80 men who had trimmed their beards — a violation of its Islamic code. About 41 were humiliated and jailed for possessing music cassettes and another 21 for missing prayer meetings.
       In 1997, many Afghani women began to resist quietly by going underground. The RAWA formed a secret society to support girls and women who risk their lives by attending secret schools or by operating beauty parlors, which the Taliban also has outlawed, going so far as to punish women caught with polish on their fingernails. But these women continue to resist the oppression with the hope that a U.S. invasion might liberate them. In the meantime, as Shah points out in her documentary, if the Taliban catches them, they know where they will go —and it won’t be to watch a soccer match.

Timothy W. Maier is a writer at Insight.

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