Gender violence in Afghanistan

Another picture worth a thousand lies: this Afghan woman “liberated” by the US-NATO marines is reported as begging for alms in the brutal winter of Kabul but it looks more like she is simply weeping. Who knows what losses she has suffered in more than 11 years of brutal war & occupation?

For the past many years, the playwright Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues) has promoted February 14th as V-Day for educating about the massive social problem of violence toward women & raising money for projects to address it. As laudatory as V-Day seems, it is problematical because it equivocates about the sources of gender violence, how to organize against it & the allies in eradicating it.

In Afghanistan, Ensler plays directly into US war propaganda by speaking against “gender apartheid” but not denouncing US-NATO intervention. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she attributes rape as a weapon of war to the armies of diamond merchants but then calls on the US government (up to its eyeballs in the conflict & illegal trafficking) to intervene. In Haiti, she denounces the rape & prostitution of young girls & calls on the UN to address the problem--when it is UN officials & troops charged with these odious crimes. Recently, V-Day activists held a flash mob with the European Parliament of the EU. The European Union is directly responsible for austerity policies all over Europe causing massive homelessness, malnourishment, economic devastation for men, women, & children.

These political equivocations are a fatal flaw in V-Day. If you don’t identify the government & economic sources causing gender violence & pretend these sources are in fact allies in the fight against it, you end up providing cover for them. Gender violence isn’t an amorphous phenomenon generated by male hormones. Gender violence is institutionalized under capitalism because it serves indispensable commercial, economic, political, & military purposes.

Feminism is the ideology of women’s liberation & it’s needed as much in Afghanistan as it is in the US & everywhere else. But the democratic movement of women against gender violence cannot flourish in a country being bombed & occupied by foreign armies. US-NATO out of Afghanistan!  (Photo by Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images)