The failed capture and subsequent shooting of this supposed Al Qaeda militant was masterfully staged. Minute by minute reports followed each other in the media of how the special police known as ‘Le RAID’ were waiting to catch him alive. Two dozen bullets later, courtesy their prime marksman, the young gunman’s corpse was extracted from the ruins of his building.

On one side we have a 23 year old boy called Mohammed Merah, on the other stands the hero of the day, the Gallic George Clooney look-alike and Sarkozy’s wannabee handsome alter-ego, Arnaud de Hautecloque, a scion of an arch-aristocratic family, backed by an entire battalion supposedly saving France from foreign terrorist attack.

What ‘s the real story ? Has this been France’s mini-version and dress rehearsal for her very own 9/11 as the media (+ Sarkozy and his crowd) have intimated ? Did anybody pause to try and understand how a typically suburban French kid dropped into petty crime, having even refused access to the notorious Foreign Legion, to seek solace with Islamic Fundamentalism ? Like so many others, he presumably went to overcrowded schools, met with indifferent school teachers, equally uncaring social workers, emerged semiliterate, presumably got some kind of minimum state hand-out to make sure that he could neither find work nor afford to idle about. The Sarkozy era has been characterized by major cuts in education, health and social services and massive privatization based on the ominous British model.

What’s in it for kids left out of this process ? Not a shred of respect or incentive in a society based on instant gratification, maximum profit, global capitalism gone wild, institutionalized unemployment and ubiquitous show business. What were the chances of this kid turning into today’s  perverse ideal social model, i.e. a stock-market gambler or an or an entrepreneur, except in the juicy areas of drug dealing and weapons which there are plentiful in French suburbia ? Even narrower are the chances of Merah becoming a professional of some kind because of his lack of decent schooling and the curse of living in a rotten suburb. Such summits are ultimately reserved for the middle-classes who live in the right place, get the right schooling have acquired the fine tuned the bourgeois skills of social ascension on an increasingly slippery slope. Of course suburban kids do manage to break into the system and lead highly successful  and personally satisfying lives, but it’s that much harder for them, deprived as they are of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called ‘social capital’.

So, for a minority of these outcasts,  Fundamentalism of every brand, Neo-Nazism and related ideologies  may well provide instant identity, reinstated maximal virility, suitably couched in extreme sexist ethics which systematically crush women. You can be a he-man on the cheap with added excitement because travel and play with heavy weapons is provided by avid recruiters. Had Merah not been to Afghanistan, plenty more destinations would have done, even in Europe. Pick your enemy- that’s easy enough Jews are an ideal  and alas  traditional target as are, in this particular  case, young Muslims who do not toe the extremist line. Next time it could be dissident Africans, gay parents, women’s groups or family planning clinics as in the US, but that may not be necessary in France as the government itself here has cut funding for the latter.
Naturally, not everyone who grows up in an ugly suburb necessarily turns to crime. Such a background does not constitute an alibi or an excuse for committing murder. In brief, before being anything else, Mohammed Merah is a typical casualty of the French society which has failed its promises of Liberté, Egalité Fraternité to its citizens. He went bezerk.And provided ideal fodder for Fundamentalist  militant groups recruiting some of Western society’s  most vulnerable casualties.

Carol Mann

Naturally, you don’t become the world’s leading narco-state without establishing the right kind of contacts with banks, mafias, professional money launderers etc. Opacity is the name of the game

None of this can be considered a scoop of any kind. However, it begs the following question :  is this nightmarish situation about to provide the business model for the burgeoning mining ventures that are emerging all over Afghanistan. All-precious lithium (used for batteries in computers and cell phones) in the first place, gold, copper, iron ore, copper, cobalt, lead, petroleum, natural gas are all there in abundance ; not to mention previous and semi-precious stones. The Chinese got the rights to the huge Aynak copper deposits in 2007- a bonanza year for Peking as they also signed a similarly mind-boggling contract with the Democratic Republic of Congo, bagging its main resources in exchange of building an increasingly unlikely infrastructure in the war-torn country.

Now a lot of sinister parallels can be drawn between both countries : the overpowering presence of mineral resources essential to modern life, especially IT, the lack of a strong government, powerful warlords, corruption of mythological proportion (DRC n° 168, Afghanistan n° 180 out of 182 countries), a badly paid army, an underpaid/unpaid civil servants, no labour laws, child labour, indifference to pollution, dwindling human rights, especially those concerning women. In both cases maternal and child mortality amongst the highest in the world- surely the strongest indicator of the state of any country.

Think of what opium and heroin has done to increase poverty in Afghanistan, undermine women’s condition (with younger and younger infant brides given away in debt payment), increasing corruption and despair. Multiply this by the amount of mines and resources you have in the country. Blood minerals, hitherto associated mainly with African countries and especially with the Democratic Republic of Congo are about to spread eastwards in the direction of Afghanistan. Unless measures are taken now and immediately by what is left of a thinking international community and the young generation of Afghans whose future is doomed to be gambled away on Stock Exchanges all over the capitalist world.

For the last ten years, I have been going just about every year first to Pakistan, then Afghanistan, coming back with long reports published on the FemAid site.
Now in under one year, I’ve been twice to DRC, to lecture in Kisangani university on gender issues, on the way to help setting up the first gender study institute in the country, with the extremely enterprising sociology department. As usual, aid projects are part of the project as can be seen from the site (http://femaid.org/Congobis.html)

This is the country formerly known as Zaïre, the Congo that had once been Belgian King Leopold’s private African back-garden, ruled with savagery beyond imagining. Little in common with Afghanistan and there again quite a bit, when it comes to rampant corruption and nepotism, an inefficient army and police, the tentacles of globalization in control of resource management and the local population as absolute victims of this combined process.

This piece is a meditation about both places, with unlikely comparisons between Afghanistan and the DRC, with thoughts about Afghani and Congolese women. An unlikely pairing, but I hope illuminating

to carry on reading, go to my FemAid site: http://www.femaid.org/PakreportI.html

Already in the late 60s and 70s, Rabbani was active in Muslim youth movements opposed to progressive Prime Minister Daoud, organizing along with Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was to become his closest ally and  Gulbeddin Hekmatyar demonstrations orchestrated by the Sharia Faculty on the campus of Kabul University. In one of these, Hekmattyar famously threw acid against girls’ legs.

Rabbani was the leader of the Afghan branch of the Jamiat-e-Islami, a political party of strong Fundamentalist leanings, not known for its open-mindedness. His party was one of the seven recognized by Pakistan at the time of the fight against the Soviet Intervention, all competing for American aid and resources and Rabbani positioned himself as the leading Tajik warlord with an agenda of his own.
Massoud, his military leader, and his men were the first to enter Kabul at the fall of the Communist government in 1992 and civil war ensued, one of the bloodiest periods of Afghan history. Rabbani at the time was made president, Massoud remained his military commander. They fought over Kabul against the coalition of Dostum and Hekmatyar. Amongst the more sinister- and little known events during his reign, was the massacre of Hazara residents of Kabul which included the rape of countless girls. It is said that Massoud acted on direct orders from Rabbani

The Guardian’s reporters forgot  to consult their own archives whilst bemoaning the passing of Rabbani.  On Nov. 16th 2001, they ran this story:

On February 11, 1993, Massoud and Sayyaf’s forces entered the Hazara suburb of Afshar, killing – by local accounts – “up to 1,000 civilians”, beheading old men, women, children and even their dogs, stuffing their bodies down the wells”

Need one be surprised that the Kabuli population actually greeted the arrival of the Taliban in 1994 with relief and gratitude. Anything was better than this senseless chaos. None of the politicians responsible for this reign of terror – Rabbani included – was ever brought to trial although the Tribunal of the Hague would have been appropriate. Unaccountability, as usual in Afghanistan, triumphed which contributes to the lack of confidence in politics and politicians in this country.

Rabbani, as we know, was to revamp himself as  a peace-broker, as the headof Afghanistan’s high peace Council which up till now does not seem to have achieved very much. Some of the appeal of that position may have grounded in the $200m trust fund for reintegration that he was handling.

So what was the point of this killing? The Jamiat  is a typical offshoot of Political Islam  movements and the distance between them and the Taliban cannot be said to be very great, especially when it comes to human rights and especially women’s rights. In fact all the competing factions in Afghanistan seem to have this attitude in common. So once again, we are back to tribal issues and especially territorial power brokerage in a country where the term ‘nation’ still does not have any meaning. Especially for the old generation of Mudjhadeen in power : the younger generation in cities has begun to think beyond stereotypes, but this, sadly, has hardly been encouraged by the powers in place. One of the major failures of the US and the coalition (and there are many) has been the inability to instil this notion by backing up competing groups, many led by notorious war criminals, in a continuous race for resources and privilege and a government bent on dividing to rule.

There is an old Pashtun proverb- also to be heard in Pakistan- which claims that men fight over three things , Zan, Zamin, Zar, women, land and gold. Bringing these three factors together in this way implies proprietorial rights on behalf of those fighting, who place these elements on an equal footing within the patriarchal Weltanschaung, which after all continues to rule the classic world order .

Here I will consider the Zan part of the proverb : to what extent are women causes to preserve, in that they might be considered as property, personifications of a national or tribal ideal, or mere excuses to start a fight between men.

Throughout history, from the ‘Face that launched a thousand ships’[1] onwards, lesser women than Helen of Troy have been an pretext to go to war. In a more prosaic manner, it is not the Spartan princess but indeed the wife of Menelaus who is the true culprit. Let’s examine the situation from a typically Pashtun point of view, that is to say the dominant tribal group in Afghanistan to which the Taliban belong. This group continues to be ruled by customary pre-Islamic law, known as Pashtunwali. The conjecture is not totally absurd in that it well possible that this particular group emigrated from the middle East some two and a half thousand years ago. In brief any way you interpret the situation, Helen is at fault . Presuming that she chose to follow handsome Paris, as her husband’s property, she was not allowed any autonomous action- least of all in the sexual domain. Even if the reckless young man actually abducted her against her will, she remains at fault as she has sullied her husband’s honour. In both cases, stoning would be in order, or any other form of capital punishment would be an mandatory according to Pashtunwali. The conservatives spearheaded by the Taliban have knitted in the demands of this violent code with their very personal interpretations of the Q’uran, thereby extending their popularity, especially as the repression of women is at the centre of their action. This explains the ongoing spate of executions by the Taliban of so called ‘adulterous” women. However, Afghan law is generally applied according to these criteria as well. ‘Adultery’ means any kind of sex outside the prescribed bond of marriage, and that includes rape, for which women (rather than the rapists) are imprisoned, or killed by the offended family. Menelaus (as would any self-respecting Pashtun husband) was given the option of a respectable “honour” killing when he pulled out his sword to punish his wayward wife. That he fell for her looks and relented is another matter- I doubt the Pashtun husband- or a lesser Greek would have been as sentimental, he would have had to save his reputation in front of his peers. But there again Menelaus was the king, and therefore had nothing prove. Benevolence is truly a royal privilege in such tightly structured societies.

Having said this, it would be possible to conjecture that Helen was just an sham excuse for a war between the Greeks and the Trojans which was on the cards anyway : perhaps she was presented as a deliberate provocation in order to justify a supposedly dignified reaction to an imagined attack.

Yet, it is important to return to the personal situation. Had Menelaus been stopped from asserting his full authority on his consort by Priam harping on Helen’s rights as a person, another indeed far bloodier war would have ensued. Such an attempt would have been seen as an invasion of the hallowed domain of private space and an unforgivable threat to the preservation of individual and collective male honour. Neither Menelaus nor even a single Spartan (or Trojan) would have stood for this. Helen would have been instantly executed and all the other women quashed into the most servile obedience, as matter of show to the enemy. Transpose this situation onto Afghanistan and things become clearer. The present day insistence by Western powers and especially American occupation forces on Western-style women’s rights has contributed to turn an occupation into a fully-fledged war against powerful reactionary deeply tribal forces led by the Taliban, today an umbrella-term which describes all kinds of ultra-conservative opposition to the Karzai government and its Western allies. This is not to say that they were wrong to intervene to help women out of indeed a dreadful situation, but that the humanitarian tactics used were and remain blunt, clumsy and supremely inefficient. Whether or not this insensitivity is partially deliberate is quite another debate into which I shall not enter right now…

With 15% of the military being female in Afghanistan and Iraq, one may wonder what effect this is really having, if any. What’s with the Hearts and Minds operations: is n’t it another patriarchal surge so typical of the military? Soldiers are no gentlemen and women in the military cannot be expected to be ladies. A la guerre comme à la guerre. Pushed to its absurd extreme, the militaristic rhetoric will soon recognize that once the quaint feminine touch of the ‘hearts and minds’ operation encounters inevitable failure and female soldiers command respect from their male peers, both genders will openly enact the script that has been written for them. And become unstoppable unisex killing machines of post-modern warfare

Read article in Viewpoint

see http://www.reseau-terra.eu/article1073.html

includes a chapter

and also

http://www.amazon.fr/Femmes-afghanes-guerre-Carol-Mann/dp/2914968817/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1288134416&sr=1-2

Let’s go back to origins. According to Gerda Lerner, author of the authoritative History of Patriarchy, the issue is a social one before becoming gendered. In ancient Babylon   concealing one’s head and shoulders was a sign of  respectability, it indicated high social status. Slaves, dancers, prostitutes were expressly forbidden to cover the heads, their hair  a metaphor for the public region, indicating sexual availability. In Ancient Egypt, they went even further: slaves, like animals, were naked, whereas the privileged were entitled to clothing.

Whose privilege is the next question ? By covering up the female body, one indicates male ownership. In the patriarchal societies which produced such customs, it means that any female belonged either to her father or her husband and therefore the covering indicated that someone had exclusive rights on the contents of the human package. Even looking was forbidden and the next step was the construction of a secluded space which doubled the function of the veiling. This how in the Middle-East, Assyrian and Babylonian potentates built massive harems filled with sexual slaves given the pompous name of concubines, which meant that any children they produced belonged to their father. These traditions were far stronger than in the Arab world of North Africa, as the customary top-till toe covering instituted by the Ottoman empire shows, and help explain where the Iranian type of veiling really comes from. Jews obliged married women to cover their heads- again as a sign of marital property, whereas their daughters could show off their crowning glory, an aid to attracting potential husbands, one presumes, notwithstanding that they probably had little to say in terms of choice, same as every other girl in the area.  Early Christians went further, Tertullian (c160-222), author of the definitive De Virginibus Velandis (Concerning the veil of virgins)  a stern theologian from Carthage in present day Tunisia, claimed that all women should be covered, as an eternal punishment for Original Sin which purportedly exiled Adam and Eve from monotheistic Paradise “ Women, you should always be in mourning, covered in rags and spend your time repenting in order to buy back the sin of having confounded mankind”. The covering he recommends is also a permanent marker of social inferiority, as women are not allowed any rights whatever or any kind of  participation in Christian religious ritual.

By the time Islam came along, there was a hefty patriarchal tradition which equated the covering of women to a total lack of independence or right to autonomy. naturally, Mohammed could not go totally against the dominant discourse. Nevertheless, as we know, he managed to introduce a partial right to inheritance (where there was none before), a theoretical right to accept or refuse a spouse and some kind of personal dowry (when this was unheard of). In Afghanistan today, customary law which supersedes any kind of other legislation, continues to base itself on such pre-Islamic practices which the prophet tried so hard to change. Alas, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, he failed to this day.

Head coverings ended up being ubiquitous in the Mediteranean world: Christian and Greek Orthodox women knotted black scarves round their chins, Spanish women bore alluring mantillas,  and besides Western women always went around wearing hats, till after World War Two.

Now about the all-envelopping Afghan burka with the net coving the eyes. It seems that this particular costume may have originated in the Ottoman Empire and somehow found its way into Northern India as a marker for the  (Muslim) Pathan upper classes. Once again this indicated social privilige, statutory inferiority and usually male wealth as women were naturally incapacitated by such restricted clothing. The same goes for the wearers of the abaya in the present-day Gulf States. Female idleness was the supreme indication that men were rich enough to keep them;   their main obligation was and remains reproductive (of males, that is) and sexual entertainment, preferably left to lesser wives and/or concubines. In the olden days as now, this supposed idleness was naturally something very few women could in fact enjoy: it is just that their work did not take place in public space, but on a domestic, therefore private scale. Pierre Bourdieu in his ground-breaking study of Kabyls has done much work about what constitutes male and female occupations and ways of occupying space. Practicially everything he has written applies to present day rural Afghanistan. Any kind of socially ennobling work- using metal tools, tasks carried out standing, sowing, trading etc was deemed male privilege whereas work implying a crouching position, or marketable skills from food preparation to  carpet weaving was and is carried out in the domestic space, then sold by the menfolk. This is not considered ‘work’ by men, since it is not carried out in a publicly visible manner. Whereas men will proudly show their faces, enact their sense of honour in a proactive aggressive way, women, on the contrary hide in veiled anonymity, their role being to passively sustain family respectability. Which is why they need to circulate in the all-covering burka. In the case of extreme poverty (in the Afghan refugee camps or in Kabul today), this is naturally a pretence, because the idleness it symbolizes and therefore the male financial success it is meant to advertise is non-existent. But the illusion remains and that suffices: family honour is safe.

What about the present day veiling in France which the French law now forbids. What is being debated here is not the scarf, but the niqab , the opaque black veil which entirely covers female faces. Some French intellectuals have sprung up, as is their wont, to violently criticize this. As I wrote in a recent post on this site, in answer to an article which concluded with a remark about what would happened to a veiled tourist arriving in Paris: “What would happen to any Western female traveller arriving in Teheran, Mecca or Kabul bare-headed wearing a sleeveless tee-shirt? We all know the answer to that one.
In the meantime, what has largely been forgotten is that this total veil is part of a package deal. It is generally worn in families of Muslims of Salafist/Wahabi persuasion, which includes many French converts. This a truly Fundamentalist creed which believes in the most literal reading of Islam:any form of bid’ah, innovation is totally forbidden. The Taliban were ardent defenders of this creed. Wahabbism implies that the notion of the state is unacceptable, let alone democracy, civil and human rights prescribed by most of the world’s constitutions. For these Fundamentalists, religion (the Islamic religion that is, not any other) has to be the guiding principle of any and every kind of government which excludes adherence to any laws put forward by a secular government that considers religion to be a private matter. The French sociologist Oliver Roy has written interesting texts about this now globalized form of Islam that bans the notion of any frontier and aims to unite the Umma under its radical banner.

This issue is at the centre of the most important debate going on within Muslim-majority countries today. Whilst self-righteous minds upbraid France for its purported racism against Muslims, they would do well to consider what is going in other countries where Muslims are dominant. Since 2008, the famed Al-Azhar university, specialized in the study of Sunnite Islam in Egypt, has forbidden the niqab on its premises, even the version where a slit has been accommodated for the eyes. Three other universities in the country forbid their female students to turn up to exams dressed in this way.  Since July 18th, the same law applies in Syria: female students, thus shrouded are not allowed access to university and 1200 teachers have been fired from their posts in June. Syrian feminists welcomed the ban. Ghiyat Barakat, the Syrian Education Minister claims that is not part of Syrian culture. Indeed he knows exactly what threat the spreading of this costume means to democratic institutions, something the Tunisian government has also been worried about.

These countries are fighting Political islam on home ground, because they know full well the issues that lie behind what is much more than a mere sartorial debate. France in its clumsy way is conscious of it too, remembering the civil war in the former colony Algeria (1992-2002) when the Islamic Salvation Front sought to control the country by extreme repressive means. Many victims have sought refuge in France. The rise of radical islam in French suburbs is a serious cause for concern for democrats and such groups  as the famous ‘Ni Putes ni Soumises’ (which translates as ‘neither sluts nor submissive), founded and run by feminist Algerian and Tunisian women.

In brief, it is essential to look at the whole veil issue in terms of history and sociology and meditate on its medium to long-term consequences

This piece will also appear on my friend Farooq’s excellent website www.viewpointonline .net

In the meantime, the show goes on usual! Taliban or no Taliban. In the village of Gardan-i-Top in the Ghor province, two little girls, Khadija Rasoul aged 13 and Basgol Sakhi 14 had been forced to marry old men in an exchange deal; because they were beaten, they tried to run off, disguised as boys. Presumably lost and not knowing how to move about in public space, they were caught by the police and sent back to their village, to their husbands, never mind that the Constitution outlaws both such early marriages and domestic violence.. There the local authorities decided to punish them by having them lashed in public. Here is the video which some locals proudly filmed. Watch this tiny little figure huddled under shawls being beaten by a brute whose turban slips off in his exertions. She tries so hard not to cry, not to collapse to keep the dignity which the thugs around have lost forever. Her face is being covered, not because anyone feels guilty about the tears but because a woman’s face should not be seen in public. Burqas are expensive items, doubtless these little girls were not deemed to deserve one- or would fallen over them, because, as you will see they are tiny, as are all the malnourished kids (especially girls) in this country. All this is the name of patriarchal privilege, sanctioned by a Fundamentalist reading of Islam.. This is a snippet of daily life in rural Afghanistan. And that caricature of a Peace Jirga will only continue to legitimate this kind of abject behaviour. With the blessing of the US and NATO sponsors of this farce.

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/05/30/world/asia/1247467951940/afghan-girls-flogged-for-running-away.html

This video wis being circulated Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission