Disappearing Girls Before They Are Born & After They Arrive: A 2011 ALL-INDIA Encounter Against Female Innocents
Welcome to the Girl Murder Club: Parents in J&K kill their girl fetuses and infants like in every state in India.
In Census India 2011, in the age range 0-6, for every 1,000 boys counted in India, there are 914 girls, down from a ratio of 1,000 to 927 in 2001, and the lowest recorded female sex ratio at birth since Independence. Indian parents are murdering their girls, including in J&K. It's called female foeticide, it's called selective abortion, call it what you will, it's murder most foul, in the vast majority of instances.
In fact,Indian census data gathering system on this point is deficient, because India does not collect data on live births by sex. The Indian patriarchs in the PMO and the Sansad therefore prefer to collude and be complicit in the Indian societal criminal hypocrisy value-system and they prefer to collude in hiding rising girl murder data, from public scrutiny.
Pakistan reportedly does much better than India on ages 0-6 sex ratio, as reportedly do Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, their sex ratio numbers need to be verified.
Indian PATRIARCHY combines with post-feudal agrarian and urban nexus economics and lax criminal law penalties to consistently produce fewer girls than boys in our structurally flawed Civil Society and Democracy.
Only China, a totalitarian nation-state with limited human rights (and Armenia, where correlational data is still forthcoming) are worse than India -- China's one-child policy and sweatshop-nation-to-the-world trajectory of economic growth vs human development has resulted in a worse 2010 sex ratio: 1000 girls for every 1180 boys.
China takes the Girl Murder Gold Medal, India takes Silver. Ok, China and India, play the national anthems of these two Economic Titans as they take a
victory lap around a mountain of female fetuses and dead baby girls.
In China and India, girls lose even before they are born. Shame on China, shame on India, ***shame on both their governments and their PEOPLE***.
Kerala, a much touted model for female empowerment, is not really an exception to the rule of fetal and girl murder.
The 2011 sex ratio in the 0-6 age range in Kerala is 959 girls for every 1000 boys. In 2001, there were 960 female children for every 1,000 male children in the 0-6 age group.
Again, fewer girls are allowed to be born in Kerala just like every place else throughout India.
However once girls are permitted to be born, they have a better chance of surviving in Kerala than anywhere else in India.
Kerala's matrilineal family structures, land and property rights reform, universal healthcare including maternal and child care at the Primary Health Center (PHC) level, girls' and women's education, female paid employment both inside and outside the home and overseas, have combined to produce a sex ratio of 1084 females to every 1000 males in 2011. This is an improvement over the sex ration in 2001 Census which counted 1058 females for every 1000 males.
Girls are murdered because girls are undervalued and even degraded in Indian patriarchy.
Females are murdered because the patriarchal power system favors and rewards males in property rights and land ownership rights, dowry, marriage and marital rights including marital female rape, funeral rites and other customary societal obligations of families and communities.
Here's a conversational phrase in Hindi that bears scrutiny: 'beti paraya dhan hoti hai'...meaning ' a daughter is other's wealth'.
A girl is property, therefore not fully a person like a boy, property that belongs to others.
Again that same phrase in Haryanavi: 'chori dusre ka dhan hovai sai'.
Haryana has one of the most severely skewed female sex ratios in the country with 861 girls to every 1000 boys in the 0-6 age range. It is reported that two of Haryana's villages, Behrana and Dhimana, have ages 0-6 sex ratios of 378 and 444 females per 1000 males, respectively. That's gendercide. It's female murder.
***No matter which religion, patriarchy rules society. PATRIARCHY TRUMPS RELIGION, religion is defeated by patriarchy-based inequality and GIRLS LOSE.***
One of the most criminal and disgraceful features of Indian patriarchal power is the ***MILLION PLUS*** missing girls in our population. This is not a statistical aberration, it is a consistent DECADAL phenomenon throughout most parts of India, including J&K.
Girls don't make it out of the womb.
If girls are born they are more likely to die from neglect. malnutrition and murder than boys. Girls are expendable, girls are disposable.
One of the striking aspects of Indian patriarchal girl-child murder in the womb and between the ages of 0-6 is that such criminal activity on the part of parents, usually colluding with relatives, midwives, doctors and ultrasound technicians, goes largely unpunished.
Q.Where are the laws against fetal and neonatal girl murder?
A. None. Parental murder of girl fetuses and infant girls rarely reaches the court system. Girl murder is hushed up in sex selection clinics, maternity hospitals and homes.
There are many more factors that affect the female sex ratio that I have left undiscussed. India's female foeticide and infant girl murder civil society narrative is more complex than I have been able to address here.
One fact remains. Just being female appears to pose a severe liability from the womb onwards, in all parts of India, including J&K.
Wake up PEOPLE.
Girl Power is People Power.
Allow Girls to be Born.
Allow Girls to Survive & Thrive
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Draft Working version awaiting further data:
http://www.risingkashmir.com/news/decline-in-sex-ratio-a-damaging-phenomenon-omar-9901.aspx yesterday
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Disappearing Girls Before They Are Born & After They Arrive: A 2011 Encounter Against Female Innocents
Welcome to the Girl Murder Club: Parents in J&K kill their girl fetuses and infants, like in every state in India.
In Census India 2011, in the age range 0-6, for every 1,000 boys counted in India, there are 914 girls, down from a ratio of 1,000 to 927 in 2001, and now, the lowest recorded female sex ratio at birth since Independence. This means the unpunished crime of girl murder has been around for six decades and counting.
Indian parents, the same ones who visit temples, gurdwaras, mosques, undertake pilgrimages, take vows, make offerings (or not), are murdering their girls.
It's called female foeticide, it's called selective abortion, it's called gendercide, call it what you will, it's murder most foul, in the vast majority of instances.
In fact, Indian census data gathering is (intentionally?) deficient on this particular issue, because our census does not collect data on live births by sex.
The Indian patriarchs in the Sansad therefore prefer to collude and be complicit in Indian societal hypocrisy and they prefer to collude in hiding girl murder from public scrutiny. It is state-sanctioned girl murder since parental murder of girl fetuses, neonates and girl children is not criminalized.
Pakistan reportedly does much better than India on ages 0-6 sex ratio, as reportedly do Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, and their respective sex ratio numbers at birth and in the 0-6 age range need to be verified, before they can be included here.
Indian PATRIARCHY combines with post-feudal agrarian-urban nexus economics and lax criminal law penalties to consistently produce disproportionaly fewer girls than boys in our structurally flawed civil society and democracy.
One of the most criminal and disgraceful features of Indian patriarchal power is the ***millions*** of missing girls in our population. This is not a statistical aberration, it is a consistent phenomenon throughout most parts of India, including J&K.
Only China, a totalitarian nation-state with limited individual human rights (and Armenia in second place, a country case that needs further probing) are worse than India.
China's one-child policy and sweatshop-nation-to-the-world trajectory of economic growth vs human development has resulted in a worse 2010 sex ratio than India: 1000 girls for every 1180 boys.
China takes the Girl Murder Gold Medal, India takes Silver. Ok, China and India, go
ahead, play the national anthems of these two economic titans as they take a
victory lap around an ever-increasing mountain of female fetuses and dead baby girls.
In China and India, girls lose even before they are born. Shame on China, shame on India, ***shame on both their governments and their PEOPLE***. Especially shame on India, because it claims to be a democracy committed to HUMAN RIGHTS.
Q. What about protecting the human rights of female fetuses, neonates and infants?
Kerala, a much touted model for female empowerment, is not an exception to the India-wide rule of fetal, neonatal and infant girl murder.
The 2011 sex ratio in the 0-6 age range in Kerala is 959 girls for every 1000 boys. In 2001, there were 960 female children for every 1,000 male children in the 0-6 age group.
Again, fewer girls are allowed to be born in Kerala just like in every place else throughout India.
However once girls are permitted to be born, they have a better chance of surviving in Kerala than anywhere else in India.
Kerala's traditional matrilineal family structures, land and property rights reform, universal healthcare including maternal and child care at the Primary Health Center (PHC) level, girls' and women's education, female paid employment both inside and outside the home and overseas, have combined to produce a sex ratio of 1084 females to every 1000 males in 2011. This is a significant improvement over the sex ratio in the 2001 Census which counted 1058 females for every 1000 males. But it doesn't change the disheartening 0-6 sex ratio stat in Kerala.
Girls are murdered because girls are undervalued and even degraded in Indian patriarchy.
Females, especially the most vulnerable, are murdered because the patriarchal POWER SYSTEM favors and rewards males in property rights and land ownership rights, dowry, marriage and marital rights including marital female rape, funeral rites and other customary societal obligations of individuals, families and communities.
Here's a conversational phrase in Hindi that bears scrutiny: 'beti paraya dhan hoti hai'...meaning ' a daughter is other's wealth'.
A girl is property, therefore not fully a person like a boy, property that belongs to others.
Again that same phrase in Haryanavi: 'chori dusre ka dhan hovai sai'.
Haryana has one of the most severely skewed female sex ratios in the country with 861 girls to every 1000 boys in the 0-6 age range. It is reported that Two of Haryana's villages, Behrana and Dhimana, have ages 0-6 sex ratios of 378 and 444 per 1000 males, respectively. That's gendercide.
***No matter which religion, patriarchy rules society. Patriarchy trumps religion, religion is defeated by patriarchy-based inequality and girls lose.***
Girls don't make it out of the womb.
If girls are born they are more likely to die from neglect. malnutrition and murder than boys. Girls are expendable, girls are disposable.
One of the striking aspects of girl-child murder in the womb and between the ages of 0-6 is that such criminal activity on the part of parents, usually colluding with relatives, midwives, doctors and ultrasound technicians goes largely unpunished. Parental murder of girl fetuses and infant girls rarely, if ever reaches the court system. Girl murder is hushed up in sex selection clinics, maternity hospitals and homes.
There are many more factors that are implicated in the female sex ratio data that I have left undiscussed and more interrelated societal and political and economic factors certainly need to be discussed.
Our female foeticide and infant girl murder civil society narrative is more complex than I have been able to address here.
Yes we in India need to undertake a PUBLIC conversation on girl murder.
Today, one fact remains. Just being female appears to continue to pose a severe liability from the womb onwards, (with certain intra-national disparities), in all parts of India.
Wake up PEOPLE.
Girl Power is People Power.
Allow Girls to be Born.
Allow Girls to Survive & Thrive
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.iitrade.ac.in/kmarticle.asp?id=437
WTO copyright
Census 2011: India's population increased by 181 million; child sex ratio worst since independence
Category: Global Economy Sub-category: Indian Economy
Document type: news
31-Mar-2011
Census 2011India's population rose to 1.21 billion people over the last 10 years, an increase of 181 million; however, it is significant to note that the growth has been slower for the first time in nine decades.
According to the provisional Census report, 2011, India's headcount is almost equal to the combined population of the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Japan put together.
Interestingly, the addition of 181 million in population during 2001-2011 is slightly lower than the total population of Brazil, the fifth most populous country in the world.
The country's population, accounting for 17.5% of the world's population, comprises 623.7 million males and 586.5 million females. China is the most populous nation of the globe accounting for 19.4% of the total global population. The report said that the population has increased by about 181 million during the decade 2001-2011. In 2011, the growth rate is 17.64%, in contrast to 21.15% in 2001.
The 2001-2011 period is the first decade--with the exception of 1911-1921--which has actually added lesser population compared to the previous decade, Registrar General of India and Census Commissioner of India C Chandramauli said in presence of Home Secretary Gopal K Pillai.
Among the states and union territories, Uttar Pradesh is the most populous state with 199 million people and Lakshadweep the least populated at 64,429. Apart from UP, other most populous states are - Maharashtra (112.3 million), Bihar (103.8 million), West Bengal (91.3 million) and Andhra Pradesh (84.6 million). The combined population of UP and Maharashtra is more than that of the U.S. Besides Lakshadweep, smallest UTs and states are - Daman and Diu (2,42,911), Dadra and Nagar Haveli (3,42,853), Andaman and Nicobar Islands (7,79,944) and Sikkim (6,07,688).
The highest population density is in Delhi's north-east district (37,346 per sq. km) while the lowest is in Dibang Valley in Arunachal Pradesh (just one per sq. km).
The Census indicated a continuing preference for male children over female children. The latest child sex ratio in is 914 female against 1,000 male-the lowest since Independence. On a positive note, Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Mizoram and Andaman and Nicobar Islands have recorded an increasing trend in the child sex ratio (0-6 years). The highest child sex ratio is in Mizoram (971 females against 1000 males) and Meghalaya (970). However, Haryana (830), and Punjab (846), despite the improvement, are the bottom two states in 0-6 years' sex ratio.
The total number of children in the age group of 0-6 is 158.8 million - five million less since 2001.
Literacy RateAccording to the data, literates constitute 74% of the total population aged seven and above and illiterates form 26%. The literacy rate has gone up from 64.83% in 2001 to 74.04% in 2011, increase of 9.21%. During 2001-2011, literacy rate of males is 82.14% and of females is 65.46%. In 2001, the male literacy rate was 75.26% and female 53.67%.
Among the states and UTs, literacy rate in Kerala is highest - 93.91%, followed by Lakshadweep (92.28%) while lowest is in Bihar (63.82%) followed by Arunachal Pradesh (66.95%).
Mizoram's two districts - Serchhip (98.76%) and Aizawl (98.50%) have recorded highest literacy rates while Madhya Pradesh's Alirajpur district (37.22%) and Chhattisgarh's Bijapur district (41.58%) recorded lowest literacy rates.
The Census 2011 is the 15th census of India since 1872 and conducted in two phases--house-listing and housing census (April to September 2010) and population enumeration (February 9 to 28, 2011).
The Census covered all 35 states and UTs and cost Rs. 2,200 crore. 27 lakh enumerators were involved in the exercise where 8,000 metric tonnes of paper and 10,500 metric tonnes of material moved.
HIGHLIGHTS
o India's current population -- 1.21 billion
o Increase in population -- 181 million
o India's population as a percentage of world's population -- 17.5%
o Most populous state in India -- Uttar Pradesh
o Least populated among states and Union Territories -- Lakshadweep
o Highest Population Density -- Delhi's North-East District
o Lowest Population Density -- Dibang Valley in Arunachal Pradesh
o Latest child sex ratio -- 914 female against 1000 male
o Highest child sex ratio -- Mizoram
o Lowest child sex ratio --Punjab
o Total literate population (aged seven and above) -- 74%
o Literacy of males -- 82.14%
o Literacy of females -- 65.46%
o State with highest literacy rate -- Kerala
o State with lowest literacy rate -- Bihar
Child Sex Ratio
Image Source: The Wall Street Journal
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Economist copyright
http://www.economist.com/world/international/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=15636231
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http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/02/27/blowing-the-statistics/
Commentary Magazine copyright
Contentions
Blowing the Statistics
John Steele Gordon 02.27.2011 - 12:45 PM
Charles Blow in his New York Times column yesterday decried the fact that the United States ranks last among 33 developed countries in infant mortality. His solution — prepare to be shocked — is to reverse Republican proposed budget cuts for various government programs that deal with premature-birth and neonatal care. The column, which seems to be a reworked press release from the March of Dimes, contrasts Republican opposition to abortion with that party’s apparent indifference to newborn life, as evidenced by the budget cuts.
But how bad are the statistics really? That’s a good question that would take a lot of statistical horsepower to answer, if it’s even possible to do in a world where many countries quietly cook the books to make themselves look better. But had Mr. Blow dug deep in his research for the column — by, say, clicking on Infant Mortality in Wikipedia — he would have found that, while there is a standard definition of infant mortality from the World Health Organization (voluntary muscle contraction, a heart beat, or attempts to breathe spontaneously), many countries play fast and loose with it. The old Soviet Union, for instance, did not count as live births very premature babies who failed to survive for seven full days. France, the Netherlands, and other European countries don’t count as live births babies who weigh less than 500 grams or had less than 22 weeks of gestation. They are, instead, counted as stillbirths. Japan and Hong Kong, it seems, count babies that are almost a year old when they die as having lived a year and, thus, not an infant mortality.
So perhaps at least part of the reason for the low ranking of the United States with regard to infant mortality is that, in this country, we actually try to save premature and low-birth-weight babies rather than just chalk them up to stillbirths to make our numbers look good.
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Showing posts with label patriarchy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label patriarchy. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Ethical Children -- What Can Adults Learn From You?
My Comment #63 NYTimes
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/opinion/04kristof.html?sort=oldest&offset=3
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
March 4th, 2010
10:48 am
The world is full of ethical children. They go unnoticed. Unsung, ethical children.
Nujood Ali of Yemen, you and other children like you, are among their diverse courageous voices.
Q. What can adults learn from girls like you, Nujood?
Q. Nujood, Can journalists, especially US journalists (even a humane and competent one like Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times) attempt less simplistic explanations about Yemen and the world? At the same time, let it be noted Kristof makes powerful points about investing in children, especially girls and their mothers, rather than in missiles, as the US is prone to do. Kristof makes a powerful argument for going the Bangladesh way, as opposed to the Pakistan way, in terms of investment in women and girls. Of course Muhammad Yunus had a lot to do with influencing Bangladesh's policies of investing in women and girls.
Q. Nujood, Can journalists offer less simplistic explanations of your ethical capacity, when they share the worldview of the US military-corporate complex; operate and are paid for their work, within the broader context of the US military-corporate complex?
Q. Which adults urgently need to learn from you, Nujood, to advance a New Global Ethical order (NGEO)?
Those mainly male pseudo 'traditionalists' who support and even encourage forced marriage of girl children in certain parts of India; subscribe to female-hating patriarchy in the old world order, the Saudi Wahabis who have overrun Pakistan being among the worst contemporary examples; army rapists in the Republic of Congo; plus those cynical politicians and multinationals in the new world order, who control others through the military-corporate complex -- Can these destructive mainly male adults even begin to detect the ethical path you, Nujood and other children have charted?
Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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New York Times copyright
Op-Ed Columnist
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 3, 2010
Divorced Before Puberty
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/opinion/04kristof.html
It’s hard to imagine that there have been many younger divorcées — or braver ones — than a pint-size third grader named Nujood Ali.
Skip to next paragraph
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof
On the Ground
Share Your Comments About This Column
Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels.
Nujood is a Yemeni girl, and it’s no coincidence that Yemen abounds both in child brides and in terrorists (and now, thanks to Nujood, children who have been divorced). Societies that repress women tend to be prone to violence.
For Nujood, the nightmare began at age 10 when her family told her that she would be marrying a deliveryman in his 30s. Although Nujood’s mother was unhappy, she did not protest. “In our country it’s the men who give the orders, and the women who follow them,” Nujood writes in a powerful new autobiography just published in the United States this week, “I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.”
Her new husband forced her to drop out of school (she was in the second grade) because a married woman shouldn’t be a student. At her wedding, Nujood sat in the corner, her face swollen from crying.
Nujood’s father asked the husband not to touch her until a year after she had had her first menstrual period. But as soon as they were married, she writes, her husband forced himself on her.
He soon began to beat her as well, the memoir says, and her new mother-in-law offered no sympathy. “Hit her even harder,” the mother-in-law would tell her son.
Nujood had heard that judges could grant divorces, so one day she sneaked away, jumped into a taxi and asked to go to the courthouse.
“I want to talk to the judge,” the book quotes Nujood as forlornly telling a woman in the courthouse.
“Which judge are you looking for?”
“I just want to speak to a judge, that’s all.”
“But there are lots of judges in this courthouse.”
“Take me to a judge — it doesn’t matter which one!”
When she finally encountered a judge, Nujood declared firmly: “I want a divorce!”
Yemeni journalists turned Nujood into a cause célèbre, and she eventually won her divorce. The publicity inspired others, including an 8-year-old Saudi girl married to a man in his 50s, to seek annulments and divorces.
As a pioneer, Nujood came to the United States and was honored in 2008 as one of Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year.” Indeed, Nujood is probably the only third grader whom Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has described as “one of the greatest women I have ever seen.”
Nujood’s memoir spent five weeks as the No. 1 best-seller in France. It is being published in 18 other languages, including her own native language of Arabic.
I asked Nujood, now 12, what she thought of her life as a best-selling author. She said the foreign editions didn’t matter much to her, but she was looking forward to seeing it in Arabic. Since her divorce, she has returned to school and to her own family, which she is supporting with her book royalties.
At first, Nujood’s brothers criticized her for shaming the family. But now that Nujood is the main breadwinner, everybody sees things a bit differently. “They’re very nice to her now,” said Khadija al-Salami, a filmmaker who mentors Nujood and who translated for me. “They treat her like a queen.”
Yemen is one of my favorite countries, with glorious architecture and enormously hospitable people. Yet Yemen appears to be a time bomb. It is a hothouse for Al Qaeda and also faces an on-and-off war in the north and a secessionist movement in the south. It’s no coincidence that Yemen is also ranked dead last in the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index.
There are a couple of reasons countries that marginalize women often end up unstable.
First, those countries usually have very high birth rates, and that means a youth bulge in the population. One of the factors that most correlates to social conflict is the proportion of young men ages 15 to 24.
Second, those countries also tend to practice polygamy and have higher death rates for girls. That means fewer marriageable women — and more frustrated bachelors to be recruited by extremists.
So educating Nujood and giving her a chance to become a lawyer — her dream — isn’t just a matter of fairness. It’s also a way to help tame the entire country.
Consider Bangladesh. After it split off from Pakistan, Bangladesh began to educate girls in a way that Pakistan has never done. The educated women staffed an emerging garment industry and civil society, and those educated women are one reason Bangladesh is today far more stable than Pakistan.
The United States last month announced $150 million in military assistance for Yemen to fight extremists. In contrast, it costs just $50 to send a girl to public school for a year — and little girls like Nujood may prove more effective than missiles at defeating terrorists.
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Daily Mail copyright
The illegal child brides of India
By SUE LLOYD-ROBERTS, Daily Mail
Last updated at 09:21 07 June 2006
Mass ceremony
Cruel custom: An under-age girl is married off in one of Rajasthan's many hundreds of mass ceremonies
Forced to marry at six, mothers by 12, their bodies destroyed by 20, SUE LLOYD-ROBERTS finds the unspeakable abuse of India's illegal child brides is worse than ever:
When I was getting married, I had no idea what was going on, says Manemma. "I was only six and all I knew was that I had to leave home. I cried and cried and said I didn't want to, but they made me."
Manemma sits forlornly, surrounded by family members, on the floor of their two-room house in a village in the Indian Andhra Pradesh. Dressed in a bright red dress and with her plaits, she looks even younger than her 11 years.
I look accusingly at Manemma's father, Ghandrappa. How could he let such a thing happen to his daughter? Unembarrassed, he returns my stare, shrugs his shoulders and answers in a matter-of-fact tone. "It's the way things happen here," he says. "It's the tradition. Girls are married at a very young age, regardless of the age of their husbands, and they're expected to adjust to the situation."
Thousands of children get married in India every year, and as soon as they reach puberty, they are expected to conceive. According to the census of 2001, 300,000 girls under the age of 15 had given birth, some for the second time. Now, five years later, the number could be as many as half a million. With their bodies underdeveloped and often malnourished, early childbirth can be fatal. Some 100,000 mothers and one million babies die in India every year.
Manemma's marriage ended in disaster, before she could have a baby. After a couple of years, her 20-year-old husband wanted a more sexually mature woman and sent her packing. "How did your husband treat you?" I ask Manemma. I did not want to ask her directly whether he tried to have sex with her. Doctors had told me of the frequent cases of rape of prepubescent girls in her situation, but it is not a question you can ask in India.
Manemma squirms with embarrassment. "I don't want to talk about my husband," she says. She is still traumatised by the experience and shakes her head when I ask her if she will ever get married again. Throughout India, during the May festival of Akshaya Tritiya, the auspicious day in the year for weddings, streets resound to the cacophony of steel bands, firecrackers and women's voices singing as they prepare young brides to meet their grooms.
Behind closed doors in the town of Jaipur, two sisters, aged 11 and 13, Anjali and Vinisha, bow their heads as family members anoint their heads and limbs with a mixture of yoghurt and turmeric. Their hands and feet have already been covered with swirling patterns of henna. "Of course I'm nervous, wouldn't you be?" the older one says, irritated and frightened about what is about to happen to her. "We haven't even seen our husbands, let alone met them."
She explains how she loves her home, her sisters and her school, and now all that is to come to an end. "There's no chance of going to school at my in-laws' place. I'll just cook and do the housework. Nothing else. I shall have to cover my head with a veil and do whatever my mother-in-law says."
Child weddings are illegal in India. The Child Marriage Restraint Act, passed during British rule in 1929, specified that a girl must be 18 and a boy 21 before they can wed. Since independence in 1947, however, Indian governments have done little to implement the rule. During the wedding season, hundreds of mass ceremonies involving children as young as four take place across the country.
Large, garishly coloured wedding marquees litter the desert landscape, in full view and in defiance of the law. The state of Rajasthan has the highest number of child marriages in India. In the government buildings in Jodhpur, I find a handful of staff in the dusty Department for Child Welfare office, waiting for the phone to ring.
They have installed a hotline so that informers can tip them off about illegal ceremonies. It has not rung once during this year's wedding season. The director, Champala Suthar, explains that the wedding organisers are clever. "They are always one jump ahead of us. They announce a wedding and then change the date, or the venue. And Rajasthan is a big place. The police cannot patrol the area. Maybe if they had enough cars, they could stop the weddings, but it will take time."
Until then they must rely on a telephone that never rings. There is another problem, explains the local landowner who accompanies me to a mass wedding close to his estate. He claims that the landowners still rule in Rajasthan and that the area around his land is 'no go' for the police.
When we arrive at the wedding tent, the women are singing as they carry the brides' dowries, wrapped in silk carpets, towards the grooms' enclosure. In the brides' tent, a six-year-old child bride, dressed like a doll in crimson and gold, stares with kohl-encircled eyes, uncomprehending as the events unfold around her.
An older girl scowls at her mother and at me and then pulls her veil down over her face. The older girls in the tent know what is going on but they are helpless. Up to 15 girls, many under-age, will be married here today.
By the end of it, they will leave their homes for ever and move to their husbands' houses to begin a term of slavery to their mother-in-law and then, once they mature, a life of repeated pregnancies and unremitting childcare; if, that is, they survive their first pregnancy.
India has signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, with all the promises of the right to education and freedom from abuse which the Convention entails. Why, therefore, is this child abuse accepted on such a wide scale?
Some states are attempting to confront the problem by insisting that all marriages are registered. To register a marriage, the bride must produce a birth certificate to prove she is over 18.
But nothing is that simple in India, where the gulf between the passing of a law and its implementation can be a wide one. In Andhra Pradesh, four years after the law was passed, registration officers have still not been appointed at village level and, as elsewhere in the country, the police turn a blind eye.
In the Warangal district, three hours' drive from the capital Hyderabad, Meena Akashi, a local mother and activist, decided she had had enough of watching young girls in her area being abused by mothers-in-law and husbands alike. Walking from village to village, she collected the names of 60 girls who were about to be married and took them to the local police station and asked the inspector in charge to stop the weddings.
I asked Inspector Mogili Durgaiah how many weddings he had stopped and how many priests or parents he had arrested? "None," he replied. "You see, these people are illiterate and they do not understand the law." It is an astonishingly softly-softly approach for the police to take.
Michel Saint Lot, head of UNICEF for southern India, explains. "The police themselves are part of the tradition. This is the culture in which they are raised.
"They are not going to turn on their own families and tell them that a centuries-old custom is wrong. They need to be educated and trained in this matter."
But until this education and training can take place, what hope is there for the thousands of young girls who continue to be sacrificed on the altar of child marriages?
At the Mahatma Gandhi Hospital in Hyderabad, a 15-year-old is rushed into casualty. She is having convulsions and is writhing in pain. "She offers a classic example of what can go wrong if you have a baby too young," Dr Shailaja says. "She has high blood pressure and, because her body is not yet fully developed, her pelvic passage is too small and the baby will get stuck. We shall have to carry out a Caesarean."
The girl travelled 200 kilometres to get to the hospital. She is lucky. The majority of mothers give birth at home and, with similar problems, both mother and baby would die.
The doctor passes through the neo-natal ward, pointing to the underweight, sickly babies born of undernourished, undeveloped children. She stops at the bed of a 15-year-old who is cradling a tiny baby.
"Look what happens if you have babies too young," she says and asks the mother to stick out her tongue. "Look, she's anaemic, most of them are. And look at the baby - only four pounds in weight. He'll be lucky to survive." Fortunately, the mother cannot understand the doctor's English.
When we move on to the outpatients' department, I ask the collection of teenagers who have come for check-ups whether they had been told of the dangers of early childbirth. They all shake their heads. And contraception? I get the same response.
We pass on to the gynaecological ward. Here, women as young as 23 have hysterectomies. Their bodies, ravaged by multiple pregnancies, are already worn out.
When they get home, they will be unable to conceive and will be too weak to work in the fields. More often than not, their husbands will discard them.
But, abandoned by their parents, the police and the lawmakers alike, the children of India are beginning to fight back. I met 14-year-old Jengri as she was addressing a group of younger school children. They listened with rapt concentration as the tiny, four-foot-something girl told them her life story.
She was married at the age of 11 to an alcoholic truck driver more than 20 years her senior. Three days after the wedding, he was killed in a traffic accident. Because the wedding was never registered, she received no compensation.
As a widow, albeit 11 years old, it appeared her life was effectively over - until she decided to change from victim to activist. She now lectures other children and their parents on the perils of early marriages to older men.
Surely the parents do not want to hear what she has to say, I ask? Her expression is anxious but determined. "Of course, I get scared when I talk to parents but I steel myself, telling myself that I must do it. I tell them my story and I hope that it will change their minds," she says.
Suddenly, she breaks into a huge smile. "You see, I thought my life was over but now I have a cause and I have a new life."
Jengri is one small voice in a vast country. But it is a beginning. Unless more people speak out, thousands more girls will suffer trauma, rape and the possibility of death in childbirth in the name of time-honoured tradition.
Sue Lloyd-Roberts' film on India's Child Brides will be shown tonight on Newsnight on BBC2.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-389469/The-illegal-child-brides-India.html#ixzz0hJIjIM8A
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http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/opinion/04kristof.html?sort=oldest&offset=3
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
March 4th, 2010
10:48 am
The world is full of ethical children. They go unnoticed. Unsung, ethical children.
Nujood Ali of Yemen, you and other children like you, are among their diverse courageous voices.
Q. What can adults learn from girls like you, Nujood?
Q. Nujood, Can journalists, especially US journalists (even a humane and competent one like Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times) attempt less simplistic explanations about Yemen and the world? At the same time, let it be noted Kristof makes powerful points about investing in children, especially girls and their mothers, rather than in missiles, as the US is prone to do. Kristof makes a powerful argument for going the Bangladesh way, as opposed to the Pakistan way, in terms of investment in women and girls. Of course Muhammad Yunus had a lot to do with influencing Bangladesh's policies of investing in women and girls.
Q. Nujood, Can journalists offer less simplistic explanations of your ethical capacity, when they share the worldview of the US military-corporate complex; operate and are paid for their work, within the broader context of the US military-corporate complex?
Q. Which adults urgently need to learn from you, Nujood, to advance a New Global Ethical order (NGEO)?
Those mainly male pseudo 'traditionalists' who support and even encourage forced marriage of girl children in certain parts of India; subscribe to female-hating patriarchy in the old world order, the Saudi Wahabis who have overrun Pakistan being among the worst contemporary examples; army rapists in the Republic of Congo; plus those cynical politicians and multinationals in the new world order, who control others through the military-corporate complex -- Can these destructive mainly male adults even begin to detect the ethical path you, Nujood and other children have charted?
Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New York Times copyright
Op-Ed Columnist
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 3, 2010
Divorced Before Puberty
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/opinion/04kristof.html
It’s hard to imagine that there have been many younger divorcées — or braver ones — than a pint-size third grader named Nujood Ali.
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof
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Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels.
Nujood is a Yemeni girl, and it’s no coincidence that Yemen abounds both in child brides and in terrorists (and now, thanks to Nujood, children who have been divorced). Societies that repress women tend to be prone to violence.
For Nujood, the nightmare began at age 10 when her family told her that she would be marrying a deliveryman in his 30s. Although Nujood’s mother was unhappy, she did not protest. “In our country it’s the men who give the orders, and the women who follow them,” Nujood writes in a powerful new autobiography just published in the United States this week, “I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.”
Her new husband forced her to drop out of school (she was in the second grade) because a married woman shouldn’t be a student. At her wedding, Nujood sat in the corner, her face swollen from crying.
Nujood’s father asked the husband not to touch her until a year after she had had her first menstrual period. But as soon as they were married, she writes, her husband forced himself on her.
He soon began to beat her as well, the memoir says, and her new mother-in-law offered no sympathy. “Hit her even harder,” the mother-in-law would tell her son.
Nujood had heard that judges could grant divorces, so one day she sneaked away, jumped into a taxi and asked to go to the courthouse.
“I want to talk to the judge,” the book quotes Nujood as forlornly telling a woman in the courthouse.
“Which judge are you looking for?”
“I just want to speak to a judge, that’s all.”
“But there are lots of judges in this courthouse.”
“Take me to a judge — it doesn’t matter which one!”
When she finally encountered a judge, Nujood declared firmly: “I want a divorce!”
Yemeni journalists turned Nujood into a cause célèbre, and she eventually won her divorce. The publicity inspired others, including an 8-year-old Saudi girl married to a man in his 50s, to seek annulments and divorces.
As a pioneer, Nujood came to the United States and was honored in 2008 as one of Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year.” Indeed, Nujood is probably the only third grader whom Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has described as “one of the greatest women I have ever seen.”
Nujood’s memoir spent five weeks as the No. 1 best-seller in France. It is being published in 18 other languages, including her own native language of Arabic.
I asked Nujood, now 12, what she thought of her life as a best-selling author. She said the foreign editions didn’t matter much to her, but she was looking forward to seeing it in Arabic. Since her divorce, she has returned to school and to her own family, which she is supporting with her book royalties.
At first, Nujood’s brothers criticized her for shaming the family. But now that Nujood is the main breadwinner, everybody sees things a bit differently. “They’re very nice to her now,” said Khadija al-Salami, a filmmaker who mentors Nujood and who translated for me. “They treat her like a queen.”
Yemen is one of my favorite countries, with glorious architecture and enormously hospitable people. Yet Yemen appears to be a time bomb. It is a hothouse for Al Qaeda and also faces an on-and-off war in the north and a secessionist movement in the south. It’s no coincidence that Yemen is also ranked dead last in the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index.
There are a couple of reasons countries that marginalize women often end up unstable.
First, those countries usually have very high birth rates, and that means a youth bulge in the population. One of the factors that most correlates to social conflict is the proportion of young men ages 15 to 24.
Second, those countries also tend to practice polygamy and have higher death rates for girls. That means fewer marriageable women — and more frustrated bachelors to be recruited by extremists.
So educating Nujood and giving her a chance to become a lawyer — her dream — isn’t just a matter of fairness. It’s also a way to help tame the entire country.
Consider Bangladesh. After it split off from Pakistan, Bangladesh began to educate girls in a way that Pakistan has never done. The educated women staffed an emerging garment industry and civil society, and those educated women are one reason Bangladesh is today far more stable than Pakistan.
The United States last month announced $150 million in military assistance for Yemen to fight extremists. In contrast, it costs just $50 to send a girl to public school for a year — and little girls like Nujood may prove more effective than missiles at defeating terrorists.
============================
Daily Mail copyright
The illegal child brides of India
By SUE LLOYD-ROBERTS, Daily Mail
Last updated at 09:21 07 June 2006
Mass ceremony
Cruel custom: An under-age girl is married off in one of Rajasthan's many hundreds of mass ceremonies
Forced to marry at six, mothers by 12, their bodies destroyed by 20, SUE LLOYD-ROBERTS finds the unspeakable abuse of India's illegal child brides is worse than ever:
When I was getting married, I had no idea what was going on, says Manemma. "I was only six and all I knew was that I had to leave home. I cried and cried and said I didn't want to, but they made me."
Manemma sits forlornly, surrounded by family members, on the floor of their two-room house in a village in the Indian Andhra Pradesh. Dressed in a bright red dress and with her plaits, she looks even younger than her 11 years.
I look accusingly at Manemma's father, Ghandrappa. How could he let such a thing happen to his daughter? Unembarrassed, he returns my stare, shrugs his shoulders and answers in a matter-of-fact tone. "It's the way things happen here," he says. "It's the tradition. Girls are married at a very young age, regardless of the age of their husbands, and they're expected to adjust to the situation."
Thousands of children get married in India every year, and as soon as they reach puberty, they are expected to conceive. According to the census of 2001, 300,000 girls under the age of 15 had given birth, some for the second time. Now, five years later, the number could be as many as half a million. With their bodies underdeveloped and often malnourished, early childbirth can be fatal. Some 100,000 mothers and one million babies die in India every year.
Manemma's marriage ended in disaster, before she could have a baby. After a couple of years, her 20-year-old husband wanted a more sexually mature woman and sent her packing. "How did your husband treat you?" I ask Manemma. I did not want to ask her directly whether he tried to have sex with her. Doctors had told me of the frequent cases of rape of prepubescent girls in her situation, but it is not a question you can ask in India.
Manemma squirms with embarrassment. "I don't want to talk about my husband," she says. She is still traumatised by the experience and shakes her head when I ask her if she will ever get married again. Throughout India, during the May festival of Akshaya Tritiya, the auspicious day in the year for weddings, streets resound to the cacophony of steel bands, firecrackers and women's voices singing as they prepare young brides to meet their grooms.
Behind closed doors in the town of Jaipur, two sisters, aged 11 and 13, Anjali and Vinisha, bow their heads as family members anoint their heads and limbs with a mixture of yoghurt and turmeric. Their hands and feet have already been covered with swirling patterns of henna. "Of course I'm nervous, wouldn't you be?" the older one says, irritated and frightened about what is about to happen to her. "We haven't even seen our husbands, let alone met them."
She explains how she loves her home, her sisters and her school, and now all that is to come to an end. "There's no chance of going to school at my in-laws' place. I'll just cook and do the housework. Nothing else. I shall have to cover my head with a veil and do whatever my mother-in-law says."
Child weddings are illegal in India. The Child Marriage Restraint Act, passed during British rule in 1929, specified that a girl must be 18 and a boy 21 before they can wed. Since independence in 1947, however, Indian governments have done little to implement the rule. During the wedding season, hundreds of mass ceremonies involving children as young as four take place across the country.
Large, garishly coloured wedding marquees litter the desert landscape, in full view and in defiance of the law. The state of Rajasthan has the highest number of child marriages in India. In the government buildings in Jodhpur, I find a handful of staff in the dusty Department for Child Welfare office, waiting for the phone to ring.
They have installed a hotline so that informers can tip them off about illegal ceremonies. It has not rung once during this year's wedding season. The director, Champala Suthar, explains that the wedding organisers are clever. "They are always one jump ahead of us. They announce a wedding and then change the date, or the venue. And Rajasthan is a big place. The police cannot patrol the area. Maybe if they had enough cars, they could stop the weddings, but it will take time."
Until then they must rely on a telephone that never rings. There is another problem, explains the local landowner who accompanies me to a mass wedding close to his estate. He claims that the landowners still rule in Rajasthan and that the area around his land is 'no go' for the police.
When we arrive at the wedding tent, the women are singing as they carry the brides' dowries, wrapped in silk carpets, towards the grooms' enclosure. In the brides' tent, a six-year-old child bride, dressed like a doll in crimson and gold, stares with kohl-encircled eyes, uncomprehending as the events unfold around her.
An older girl scowls at her mother and at me and then pulls her veil down over her face. The older girls in the tent know what is going on but they are helpless. Up to 15 girls, many under-age, will be married here today.
By the end of it, they will leave their homes for ever and move to their husbands' houses to begin a term of slavery to their mother-in-law and then, once they mature, a life of repeated pregnancies and unremitting childcare; if, that is, they survive their first pregnancy.
India has signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, with all the promises of the right to education and freedom from abuse which the Convention entails. Why, therefore, is this child abuse accepted on such a wide scale?
Some states are attempting to confront the problem by insisting that all marriages are registered. To register a marriage, the bride must produce a birth certificate to prove she is over 18.
But nothing is that simple in India, where the gulf between the passing of a law and its implementation can be a wide one. In Andhra Pradesh, four years after the law was passed, registration officers have still not been appointed at village level and, as elsewhere in the country, the police turn a blind eye.
In the Warangal district, three hours' drive from the capital Hyderabad, Meena Akashi, a local mother and activist, decided she had had enough of watching young girls in her area being abused by mothers-in-law and husbands alike. Walking from village to village, she collected the names of 60 girls who were about to be married and took them to the local police station and asked the inspector in charge to stop the weddings.
I asked Inspector Mogili Durgaiah how many weddings he had stopped and how many priests or parents he had arrested? "None," he replied. "You see, these people are illiterate and they do not understand the law." It is an astonishingly softly-softly approach for the police to take.
Michel Saint Lot, head of UNICEF for southern India, explains. "The police themselves are part of the tradition. This is the culture in which they are raised.
"They are not going to turn on their own families and tell them that a centuries-old custom is wrong. They need to be educated and trained in this matter."
But until this education and training can take place, what hope is there for the thousands of young girls who continue to be sacrificed on the altar of child marriages?
At the Mahatma Gandhi Hospital in Hyderabad, a 15-year-old is rushed into casualty. She is having convulsions and is writhing in pain. "She offers a classic example of what can go wrong if you have a baby too young," Dr Shailaja says. "She has high blood pressure and, because her body is not yet fully developed, her pelvic passage is too small and the baby will get stuck. We shall have to carry out a Caesarean."
The girl travelled 200 kilometres to get to the hospital. She is lucky. The majority of mothers give birth at home and, with similar problems, both mother and baby would die.
The doctor passes through the neo-natal ward, pointing to the underweight, sickly babies born of undernourished, undeveloped children. She stops at the bed of a 15-year-old who is cradling a tiny baby.
"Look what happens if you have babies too young," she says and asks the mother to stick out her tongue. "Look, she's anaemic, most of them are. And look at the baby - only four pounds in weight. He'll be lucky to survive." Fortunately, the mother cannot understand the doctor's English.
When we move on to the outpatients' department, I ask the collection of teenagers who have come for check-ups whether they had been told of the dangers of early childbirth. They all shake their heads. And contraception? I get the same response.
We pass on to the gynaecological ward. Here, women as young as 23 have hysterectomies. Their bodies, ravaged by multiple pregnancies, are already worn out.
When they get home, they will be unable to conceive and will be too weak to work in the fields. More often than not, their husbands will discard them.
But, abandoned by their parents, the police and the lawmakers alike, the children of India are beginning to fight back. I met 14-year-old Jengri as she was addressing a group of younger school children. They listened with rapt concentration as the tiny, four-foot-something girl told them her life story.
She was married at the age of 11 to an alcoholic truck driver more than 20 years her senior. Three days after the wedding, he was killed in a traffic accident. Because the wedding was never registered, she received no compensation.
As a widow, albeit 11 years old, it appeared her life was effectively over - until she decided to change from victim to activist. She now lectures other children and their parents on the perils of early marriages to older men.
Surely the parents do not want to hear what she has to say, I ask? Her expression is anxious but determined. "Of course, I get scared when I talk to parents but I steel myself, telling myself that I must do it. I tell them my story and I hope that it will change their minds," she says.
Suddenly, she breaks into a huge smile. "You see, I thought my life was over but now I have a cause and I have a new life."
Jengri is one small voice in a vast country. But it is a beginning. Unless more people speak out, thousands more girls will suffer trauma, rape and the possibility of death in childbirth in the name of time-honoured tradition.
Sue Lloyd-Roberts' film on India's Child Brides will be shown tonight on Newsnight on BBC2.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-389469/The-illegal-child-brides-India.html#ixzz0hJIjIM8A
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Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Women, Religion, Patriarchy and Militarism in South Asia
My NYT Comment #114 published April 16, 2009 8:36 am
Women, Patriarchy, Religion, Militarism & the Ethics of Tolerance in the South Asia Region
How interesting that Randy Cohen is posing the question of Tolerance (see below) as a living ethical precept. That's vitally important to do. But here, as elsewhere, the additional crucial questions are -- Tolerance of what? By Whom? Of Whom? What is the specific political context in which the precept of Tolerance is being posited? What is the social-political location of the one posing the questions?
Afghan women have been courageous for decades, actually centuries. This street protest (against an ordinance signed by Karzai, that targets mainly Shiite women), is the latest example of Afghan women's civil society heroism, their capacity to survive and endure, assert their human dignity, raise and protect their families.
It is a grave mistake to construct and advocate a division between Afghan women and Afghan men.
Afghan women and men belong to the same social fabric and their lives are bound together by common aspirations for escape from poverty, freedom from hunger, freedom from violence and a desire for employment, education, peace, stability, dignity.
Afghan men have suffered and endured, because men were particularly targeted during British colonial campaigns against them. Their fierce resistance defeated every British attempt to colonize them.
Before the Brits, Afghan men were forcibly recruited by every conqueror coming through the mountain passes, on their way to set up empires in New Delhi, or simply to loot and carry away treasure from western and northern India.
Now, after the end of repressive and exploitative colonial occupation by the Brits and after the 9-year Soviet debacle in Afghanistan, Afghan women and men jointly face the daily neo-imperial threat of US and US-led NATO campaigns against them.
Did the US (using Pakistan's ISI) create, train and fund the Mujahadeen who evolved into the Taliban? Was Osama bin Laden the CIA's star pupil?
Into the above toxic mix, throw in Saudi Wahabbism supported by weapons and fueled by Saudi money, a fact conveniently ignored by the US govt as the US shields its longstanding repressive petrodollar ally.
The US and US-led NATO have absolutely no legitimacy in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
They must get out ASAP, so that AFGHAN WOMEN can forge their own destiny together with their male kin, their families and communities and their own political and religious leaders.
The US, US-led NATO presence distorts any possibility of normalcy and creates new problems for the entire South Asia region.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
— EthicalDemocracy, New York, NY
---------------------------------------
New York Times copyright
The Limits of Tolerance
By Randy Cohen
http://ethicist.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/limited-tolerance/?apage=5#comments
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My comment April 16, 2009 8:25 am
Women, Patriarchy, Religion, Militarism
Afghan women have been courageous for decades, actually centuries. This street protest (against an ordinance signed by Karzai, that targets mainly Shiite women), is the latest example of Afghan women's civil society heroism, their capacity to survive and endure, assert their human dignity, raise and protect their families.
It is a grave mistake to construct and advocate a division between Afghan women and Afghan men.
Afghan women and men belong to the same social fabric and their lives are bound together by common aspirations for escape from poverty, freedom from hunger, freedom from violence and a desire for employment, education, peace, stability, dignity.
Afghan men have suffered and endured, because men were particularly targeted during British colonial campaigns against them. Their fierce resistance defeated every British attempt to colonize them.
Before the Brits, Afghan men were forcibly recruited by every conqueror coming through the mountain passes, on their way to set up empires in New Delhi, or simply to loot and carry away treasure from western and northern India.
Now, after the end of repressive and exploitative colonial occupation by the Brits and after the 9-year Soviet debacle in Afghanistan, Afghan women and men jointly face the daily neo-imperial threat of US and US-led NATO campaigns against them.
Did the US (using Pakistan's ISI) create, train and fund the Mujahadeen who evolved into the Taliban? Was Osama bin Laden the CIA's star pupil?
Into the above toxic mix, throw in Saudi Wahabbism supported by weapons and fueled by Saudi money, a fact conveniently ignored by the US govt as the US shields its longstanding repressive petrodollar ally.
The US and US-led NATO have absolutely no legitimacy in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
They must get out ASAP, so that AFGHAN WOMEN can forge their own destiny together with their male kin, their families and communities and their own political and religious leaders.
The US, US-led NATO presence distorts any possibility of normalcy and creates new problems for the entire South Asia region.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
— EthicalDemocracy, New York, NY
------------------------
My NYT comment #24 published
April 15, 2009 8:18 am
April 15th, 2009 4:26 am
Women, Religion and Militarism
As the editorial (below) notes, a woman was publicly flogged in Swat in Pakistan and earlier Afghanistan's Karzai signed into law an edit that appears to sanction rape in marriage.
Both these incidents show how religion and patriarchal culture can be deployed as deadly weapons against women.
But ...
I would submit that the US govt. and the US-led NATO forces don't give a hoot for women in either Pakistan or Afghanistan.
It seems hypocritical to argue that the US is concerned about women, when drone strikes kill women and children from the air. This happened (again) last week in a NATO airstrike and the civilian death toll which included women and children, was confirmed by President Karzai, with no denial from the US.
There's more to come, with more women dying when Obama sends more troops.
How would Obama feel if his wife and two daughters were killed in a drone strike?
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------------------
New York Times copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/opinion/15wed1.html
Editorial: Women, Extremism and Two Key States
Published: April 14, 2009
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/04/15/opinion/15wed1.html
Women, Patriarchy, Religion, Militarism & the Ethics of Tolerance in the South Asia Region
How interesting that Randy Cohen is posing the question of Tolerance (see below) as a living ethical precept. That's vitally important to do. But here, as elsewhere, the additional crucial questions are -- Tolerance of what? By Whom? Of Whom? What is the specific political context in which the precept of Tolerance is being posited? What is the social-political location of the one posing the questions?
Afghan women have been courageous for decades, actually centuries. This street protest (against an ordinance signed by Karzai, that targets mainly Shiite women), is the latest example of Afghan women's civil society heroism, their capacity to survive and endure, assert their human dignity, raise and protect their families.
It is a grave mistake to construct and advocate a division between Afghan women and Afghan men.
Afghan women and men belong to the same social fabric and their lives are bound together by common aspirations for escape from poverty, freedom from hunger, freedom from violence and a desire for employment, education, peace, stability, dignity.
Afghan men have suffered and endured, because men were particularly targeted during British colonial campaigns against them. Their fierce resistance defeated every British attempt to colonize them.
Before the Brits, Afghan men were forcibly recruited by every conqueror coming through the mountain passes, on their way to set up empires in New Delhi, or simply to loot and carry away treasure from western and northern India.
Now, after the end of repressive and exploitative colonial occupation by the Brits and after the 9-year Soviet debacle in Afghanistan, Afghan women and men jointly face the daily neo-imperial threat of US and US-led NATO campaigns against them.
Did the US (using Pakistan's ISI) create, train and fund the Mujahadeen who evolved into the Taliban? Was Osama bin Laden the CIA's star pupil?
Into the above toxic mix, throw in Saudi Wahabbism supported by weapons and fueled by Saudi money, a fact conveniently ignored by the US govt as the US shields its longstanding repressive petrodollar ally.
The US and US-led NATO have absolutely no legitimacy in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
They must get out ASAP, so that AFGHAN WOMEN can forge their own destiny together with their male kin, their families and communities and their own political and religious leaders.
The US, US-led NATO presence distorts any possibility of normalcy and creates new problems for the entire South Asia region.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
— EthicalDemocracy, New York, NY
---------------------------------------
New York Times copyright
The Limits of Tolerance
By Randy Cohen
http://ethicist.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/limited-tolerance/?apage=5#comments
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My comment April 16, 2009 8:25 am
Women, Patriarchy, Religion, Militarism
Afghan women have been courageous for decades, actually centuries. This street protest (against an ordinance signed by Karzai, that targets mainly Shiite women), is the latest example of Afghan women's civil society heroism, their capacity to survive and endure, assert their human dignity, raise and protect their families.
It is a grave mistake to construct and advocate a division between Afghan women and Afghan men.
Afghan women and men belong to the same social fabric and their lives are bound together by common aspirations for escape from poverty, freedom from hunger, freedom from violence and a desire for employment, education, peace, stability, dignity.
Afghan men have suffered and endured, because men were particularly targeted during British colonial campaigns against them. Their fierce resistance defeated every British attempt to colonize them.
Before the Brits, Afghan men were forcibly recruited by every conqueror coming through the mountain passes, on their way to set up empires in New Delhi, or simply to loot and carry away treasure from western and northern India.
Now, after the end of repressive and exploitative colonial occupation by the Brits and after the 9-year Soviet debacle in Afghanistan, Afghan women and men jointly face the daily neo-imperial threat of US and US-led NATO campaigns against them.
Did the US (using Pakistan's ISI) create, train and fund the Mujahadeen who evolved into the Taliban? Was Osama bin Laden the CIA's star pupil?
Into the above toxic mix, throw in Saudi Wahabbism supported by weapons and fueled by Saudi money, a fact conveniently ignored by the US govt as the US shields its longstanding repressive petrodollar ally.
The US and US-led NATO have absolutely no legitimacy in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
They must get out ASAP, so that AFGHAN WOMEN can forge their own destiny together with their male kin, their families and communities and their own political and religious leaders.
The US, US-led NATO presence distorts any possibility of normalcy and creates new problems for the entire South Asia region.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
— EthicalDemocracy, New York, NY
------------------------
My NYT comment #24 published
April 15, 2009 8:18 am
April 15th, 2009 4:26 am
Women, Religion and Militarism
As the editorial (below) notes, a woman was publicly flogged in Swat in Pakistan and earlier Afghanistan's Karzai signed into law an edit that appears to sanction rape in marriage.
Both these incidents show how religion and patriarchal culture can be deployed as deadly weapons against women.
But ...
I would submit that the US govt. and the US-led NATO forces don't give a hoot for women in either Pakistan or Afghanistan.
It seems hypocritical to argue that the US is concerned about women, when drone strikes kill women and children from the air. This happened (again) last week in a NATO airstrike and the civilian death toll which included women and children, was confirmed by President Karzai, with no denial from the US.
There's more to come, with more women dying when Obama sends more troops.
How would Obama feel if his wife and two daughters were killed in a drone strike?
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------------------
New York Times copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/opinion/15wed1.html
Editorial: Women, Extremism and Two Key States
Published: April 14, 2009
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/04/15/opinion/15wed1.html
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