[ChotooMotoo]

Afghan women face harsh male attitudes

by Bronwen Roberts

KABUL (AFP) - Farida Tarana's music video is nothing like the raunchy Bollywood or Central Asian ones regularly shown on Afghan television, albeit with bare female arms, shoulders and cleavage smudged out.

The 25-year-old is conservatively dressed and stands almost still as she sings her first single, Qalbam Fedayat (My heart belongs to you).

But the performance is daring in its own way: Tarana does not wear a headscarf, making her the first Afghan woman inside the country to record a music video with her hair uncovered since the Taliban regime fell six years ago.

"It was a big step," she told AFP nervously around the time the song was released mid-February. "Someone had to do it."

"People like my mother prefer to wear a headscarf but the new generation -- if they had the freedom, they would give it up."

There were threats, said Tarana. "They were calling to tell me they would kill me, that they would put a bomb in my car or home," she said.

Two weeks after the release of her single, she left the country, saying from her parents' home in Iran that she was afraid.

Choosing whether to wear a headscarf does not top the mountain of hardships facing Afghan women, who have the second-highest chance in the world of dying giving birth and also face forced marriages and violence.

Indeed most women wear a face-covering burqa when in public. But Tarana's decision, and the sharp reaction, reflect attitudes towards Afghan women in a society juggling religious fundamentalism as it nudges towards modernity.

As countries mark International Women's Day on Saturday, such issues also illustrate their efforts to assert themselves in a conservative society.

Government employee Lailuma Sadid, one of a handful of women in Kabul who usually does not cover her hair, said she brushes off insults about her dress.

In the most recent incident, a man told her in the city centre, "If you stand here for another minute, I will put a bullet in your head and drag your body on the road tied to a car," she recounted.

"If we take things like this seriously, then we better not leave the house," Sadid said.

Afghan women are trapped by a "backward society, ignorance, illiteracy and cultural retardation," she said. Most are treated as property once they are married and few enjoy equal rights in the post-Taliban constitution.

But there have been improvements since the hardline Taliban were ejected.

"Women can work, go to school, leave home without a male relative. We have women represented in the cabinet -- maybe not enough, we have women in the parliament."

The biggest challenge remains maternal mortality, said Ramesh Penumaka, country representative for UN Population Fund.

About 24,000 women die around childbirth a year, he told reporters this week. The figure is about 25 times the number of civilians being killed in violence linked to a Taliban-led insurgency.

"It's because girls are married very young. More than half the girls are married before they are 18 years, some as young as eight years," he said, adding 87 percent of cases were preventable.

But Penumaka also noted developments. Four percent of pregnant women were seen by a health professional in 2001; this rose to 30 percent last year.

Only six percent of deliveries were conducted by a skilled birth attendant in 2001, but last year it was 18 percent.

Cook and cleaner Mahjan Sultani says she is definitely happier.

"I can work now. Under Taliban I could not. Life was difficult," said the Kabul resident. "My life is getting better."

But conservative cultural attitudes mean many "families will not permit female members to go to school, or work and be an equal member of the family like men are," she said.

"Women better do more fundamental work to change their lives than looking at clothes and headscarves," Sultani said.

The head of Afghanistan's first women's led political party -- National Need, launched mid-February -- agreed.

Afghan women are oppressed by "indecent traditions and customs," parliamentarian Fatima Nazari told AFP.

"To be able to carry out jobs and meet our goals, it's better to behave as required by society so we are not forced to stop as Farida was."

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It's definately written from a western perspective, hence the over emphasis on hijab, and downplaying of the real problems faced by these women. The statistics on infant and maternal fatality though, though are just It really does make it seem like these women are not valued in society, when the deaths of these women get so little attention.