Pimps

Yes PIMPS.

And, no, that's not too harsh a headline for NATO leaders who sold out Afghan women to keep their puppet Hamid ''Flying Carpet Salesman'' Karzai in power. Because that's what they did.

Turns out that, a couple of weeks ago when I blogged about amendments to that horrendous law that would allow Shia minority men to rape and/or starve their wives who weren't being agreeable, the law was actually being gazetted.

Via Dammit Janet! comes this report in The Guardian:

Afghanistan has quietly passed a law permitting Shia men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands' sexual demands, despite international outrage over an earlier version of the legislation which President Hamid Karzai had promised to review.

The new final draft of the legislation also grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work.

"It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying 'blood money' to a girl who was injured when he raped her," the US charity Human Rights Watch said.

In early April, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown joined an international chorus of condemnation when the Guardian revealed that the earlier version of the law legalised rape within marriage, according to the UN.

Although Karzai appeared to back down, activists say the revised version of the law still contains repressive measures and contradicts the Afghan constitution and international treaties signed by the country.

Islamic law experts and human rights activists say that although the language of the original law has been changed, many of the provisions that alarmed women's rights groups remain, including this one: "Tamkeen is the readiness of the wife to submit to her husband's reasonable sexual enjoyment, and her prohibition from going out of the house, except in extreme circumstances, without her husband's permission. If any of the above provisions are not followed by the wife she is considered disobedient."

<SNIP>

Human Rights Watch, which has obtained a copy of the final law, called on all candidates to pledge to repeal the law, which it says contradicts Afghanistan's own constitution.

The group said that Karzai had "made an unthinkable deal to sell Afghan women out in the support of fundamentalists in the August 20 election".

Brad Adams, the organisation's Asia director, said: "The rights of Afghan women are being ripped up by powerful men who are using women as pawns in manoeuvres to gain power.

"These kinds of barbaric laws were supposed to have been relegated to the past with the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, yet Karzai has revived them and given them his official stamp of approval."

More from Human Rights Watch here.

So what was that about being in Afghanistan to help secure women's rights???

Do something. Start by writing your MP and Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Then go here. And here.

Comments

[sooey]

I don't understand why we don't airlift all the women and children in Afghanistan to Canada. Leave the men there and in return send them our Rightwing Pundits, including the women who love them. That way, Afghanistan's women and children could enjoy the human rights established by Feminism here, while our Rightwing Pundits and their lady friends could enjoy living in a country where women have no rights.

[fern hill]

Excellent title! Dernit, wish I'd thought of it. ;)

Letters -- not that they'll do much good -- underway.

[Diana Marie]

.... And our young men and women are dying or being permanently injured so that Taliban practices against women can be continued under the 'democratically elected' government of Afghanistan....

Brilliant idea btw Sooey!