scaramouche

...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

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Irreverent, contrarian, delighted to be out of synch with the zeitgeist, I depend on my sense of humour (such as it is) to keep me sane in this wacky world.

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Monday, 16 November 2009

Afghan women opt for self-immolation over forced marriage: Eight years after Western forces turfed out the Taliban, the situation of Afghan women has improved drastically, right?
Well, maybe in certain ways, although I’m not sure what they are, but since women still have absolutely no say in who they get to marry, many woman see only one way out--setting themselves on fire. From MSNBC:
HERAT, Afghanistan – We watched a teenage girl die last Friday.
Seventeen-year-old Shirin had been brought to the Herat Regional Hospital Burns Unit a few days before we met her. Ninety percent of her body was covered in third-degree burns.
Her mother-in-law said Shirin had burned herself by accident. The girl was preparing a meal in the kitchen but somehow confused cooking gasoline with petrol, she said. 
But Dr. Mohamed Aref Jalali, the director of the burns unit, said Shirin told him in private that she had set herself on fire deliberately after fighting with her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law.
Many girls in Afghanistan think self-immolation is the best solution for family problems, according to Jalali.
"[For these girls], it’s no good to solve the problem with the father-in-law, with the mother-in-law," said the doctor. "They think self-immolation will solve the problem."
It’s a "solution" that appears to be a major problem in Afghanistan, particularly among young women between the ages 13 and 25.
In the first seven months of this year, medical staff at the Herat’s burns unit – the only one of its kind in the entire country – said they have seen 51 cases of female self-immolation. Only 13 have survived.   
The practice comes from Iran, where many Afghan refugees had fled to during the decade-long war with the Soviet Union (1979-1989) and the era of mujahedeen fighting that followed in the 1990s, said Jalali. But its popularity has spread among Afghan women, often from poor, uneducated backgrounds, where the tradition of child or forced marriages runs strong.
"The forced marriage is the best reason and the important reason, and it starts from the economic problem," said Jalali. 
Often in arranged marriages, women are viewed in very stark terms. 
"She is here only to wash, to clean, to give baby … and nothing more," said Marie-Jose Brunel, a French volunteer nurse at the burns unit who was full of Gallic warmth and purposeful seriousness. "If they have no freedom, no possibility to study, to be considered like nothing, it’s very, very difficult."…
Yup, things are sooo much better for women since our troops went to “liberate” the place. My question: how horrible must it be to be married to some Pashtun dude that a woman would willingly chose a wretchedly painful death over marriage?

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:09 | link | comments (2)


Comments:
#1  17 November 2009 - 02:19
 
You get a view of how women have had to live for thousands of years in the Muslim world. Nothing is allowed to change in their debilitating dictatorial fundamentalist religious teaching. It petrifies their brain at and early age from curiostity, questioning, thinking......living....loving.. Sick.
Anonymous
#2  17 November 2009 - 10:27
 
The orgininators of keeping 'em barefoot, preggers, in the kitchen and/or on their backs.
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