Afghanistan: How bad is it?
It's this bad:
Starving Afghans sell girls of eight as brides (Observer UK):Regrettably, more people are interested in watching the bootleg video of Hussein's hanging, which means that this awful story of human desperation will probably get scant attention.
Villagers whose crops have failed after a second devastating drought are giving their young daughters in marriage to raise money for food
Azizgul is 10 years old, from the village of Houscha in western Afghanistan. This year the wheat crop failed again following a devastating drought. Her family was hungry. So, a little before Christmas, Azizgul's mother 'sold' her to be married to a 13-year-old boy.
'I need to sell my daughters because of the drought,' said her mother Sahatgul, 30. 'We don't have enough food and the bride price will enable us to buy food. Three months ago my 15-year-old daughter married.
'We were not so desperate before. Now I have to marry them younger. And all five of them will have to get married if the drought becomes worse. The bride price is 200,000 afghanis [£2,000]. His father came to our house to arrange it. The boy pays in installments. First he paid us 5,000 afghanis, which I used to buy food.'
Azizgul is not unique. Hers is one of a number of interviews and case studies collected by the charity Christian Aid - all of them young girls sold by their families to cope with the second ruinous drought to hit Afghanistan within three years.
While the world has focused on the war against the Taliban, the suffering of the drought-stricken villagers, almost 2.5 million of them, has largely gone unnoticed. And where once droughts would afflict Afghanistan once every couple of decades, this drought has come hard on the heels of the last one, from which the villagers were barely able to recover.
While prohibited by both Afghan civil and Islamic law, arranged marriages have long been a feature of Afghan life, particularly in rural areas. What is unusual is the age of some of the girls. And the reason: to buy food to survive.
[more]
Afghanistan used to be a place that was home to many educated, professional women. Today, however, after years of violence, dispossession, and discrimination, they are being reduced to the level of a commodity, a "human" resource, if you will pardon the expression. Although droughts are responsible for the worsening of people's lives, the fact that the country has been turned into a war zone for an American war on terror leaves Afghanis struggling even harder to survive.
"Billions for war, but nothing for the poor" seems to be the operative phrase here. Nations spend boatloads of cash fighting terrorists "over there," but ask those same nations to make a similar effort to reduce the impact of poverty...
Well, what do you right-wingers have to say about this? Military expenditures violate the "laws" of the so-called free market all the time, so don't play the free market angle here. I'll have a hard time accepting that poverty alleviation efforts are bound by them when spending on war are not. Besides, human lives are being trafficked using that same free market logic.
Me? I'll take spending on efforts to help improve people's lives over spending to destroy those same lives any day. Americans would never let such a terrible act of desperation come into being in our own nation. We shouldn't allow it elsewhere if we can help it... and I believe we can.
Labels: afghanistan, poverty, war
0 comment(s):
Post a comment
<< Home