The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures. This article was published more than 10 years ago. Some information in it may no longer be current. A United Nations report accused the radical Islamic regime in Afghanistan yesterday of violating women's rights with "unabated severity," including mass abductions and forced prostitution.
The report cited testimony from refugees about the large-scale abduction of women and girls by militia of the ruling Taliban movement during fighting last year in the northern and central parts of the country. UN investigator Kamal Hossain provided testimony about ethnic Hazara and Tajik women being rounded up in trucks and taken from the regions of Mazar-e-Sharif, Pol-e-Khomri and Shamali to neighbouring Pakistan and the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.
Women from the regions of Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif and Shamali also gave accounts of forced marriages to Taliban members, the report said. The Taliban militia, committed to a radical fundamentalist form of Islam, swept to power nearly four years ago and now control most of Afghanistan, although fighting against rival movements continues in parts of the country.
Since coming to power, the Taliban have barred women from attending schools or working outside the home. Women can only appear in public hidden in head-to-toe robes. Routinely criticized by the world community for abusing women's rights, the Taliban marked International Women's Day on Wednesday for the first time, bringing about women to a Kabul women's hospital in buses with dark curtains. But the UN report insisted that the Taliban continue to enforce their edicts against women's participation in public life "with unabated severity.
It said the regime continues to deny women access to education, health and employment, and quoted refugee accounts "of the abduction of women, rape, infliction of the punishment of stoning, lashing and other forms of inhuman punishment. The report by Mr. Hossain, who conducted several visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan, was based on a survey of internally displaced Afghans and refugees who left the country between the end of and third quarter of Hossain gave evidence that non-Afghans, including Pakistanis and Arabs, who are fighting alongside the Taliban, are also involved in the abuse of women and ethnic minorities.
