Mick Hartley

Christina Lamb has a lengthy article in today's Sunday Times on women in Afghanistan:

In the past three years, going back and forth to Afghanistan, I have watched the situation for women deteriorate. Many of the new girls’ schools have been burnt down. According to the education ministry, 122 school buildings were blown up or burnt down in the past year and another 651 schools forced to close owing to lack of security. Last November acid was thrown in the faces of 15 girls and teachers going to school in Kandahar. Two months earlier, the city’s top policewoman, Malalai Kakar, was gunned down with her son. One of the country’s best-known actresses fled to Pakistan after her husband was shot dead, and two weeks ago a female-rights activist was murdered in broad daylight outside her house.

Malalai Joya, a young woman MP who criticised warlords, was suspended from parliament and now lives in hiding, protected by five gunmen. Last November she shocked a London audience by declaring that the situation for women in Afghanistan is now worse than it was under the Taliban. Earlier this month, Karzai even signed a law legalising marital rape. The legislation, which applies to the 15% of the population that is Shi’ite, gives men sweeping control of their spouses, forbidding women from leaving their homes without their husbands’ permission and stating: “As long as the husband is not travelling, he has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night.”

But the focus of the article is Nadia Anjuman: the most talented of the young women poets of the Herat Literary Society, and a symbol of everything that was hopeful about liberation from the rule of the Taliban. Now, killed by a husband jealous of her success, she's a symbol of how those hopes have been dashed. The husband served one month in prison…