Malali Joya is an angry woman

[eridani]

http://www.truthout.org/malalai-joya-is-angry-woman57321

Huma: The situation of women under the Taliban regime finally moved international public opinion. What's the situation today?

Malalai Joya: The Afghan Constitution has clauses concerning women's rights. I was one of the many delegates in 2003 at the Loya Jirga who pushed for their inclusion, but the meeting is marked by the strong influence of fundamentalists with whom Karzai and the West cut deals. The base text might very well declare equality between men and women, but the country is ruled by Sharia law. The so-called democracy of the official Constitution is systematically flouted. It's only there as a token to attract international aid, which is then usually embezzled. Today Afghanistan is a country where women - often girls as young as 14 or 15 years - fleeing their conjugal home to escape extreme violence, are considered criminal and are imprisoned. Yes, there's an increase in the number of girls returning to school, but the records don't take into account the girls who have to leave school again, due to threats to their safety and pressure from their families to get married. Suicide has become the ultimate weapon of desperate young women, who are aware that there are alternatives but know that they will never have the right to them.

Huma: And what exactly are these alternatives?

Malalai Joya: All of the troops must leave and the militia of the warlords must be dismantled. Democracy can't be established by an occupying force that does nothing more than spread out and strengthen the Talibanization of my country. And it's my people who suffer. If the US and UN troops who are occupying my country don't voluntarily quit Afghanistan within a reasonable timescale they will find themselves confronted by even stronger resistance from the Afghans. The Western governments deliberately ignore that people are fighting to reconstruct the peace and safety of their country, in ways respectful of the rights of each man and woman. Democratic parties and