49
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES             H.R. NO.              
TWENTIETH LEGISLATURE, 2000                                
STATE OF HAWAII                                            
                                                             
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                     HOUSE  RESOLUTION
  SUPPORTING THE EFFORTS OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT TO FREE
    THE WOMEN OF AFGHANISTAN FROM THE OPPRESSION OF THE
    TALIBAN REGIME.



 1        WHEREAS, in Afghanistan, prior to Taliban control,
 2   especially in the capital of Kabul, women were educated and
 3   employed:  fifty per cent of the students and sixty per cent of
 4   the teachers at Kabul University were women, and seventy per
 5   cent of school teachers, fifty per cent of civilian government
 6   workers, and forty per cent of doctors in Kabul were women; and
 7   
 8        WHEREAS, Afghan women have a long history of participation
 9   in Afghan society and in political and economic life, including
10   employment as health professionals, teachers, and in government
11   offices; and
12   
13        WHEREAS, on September 27, 1996, the Taliban, an extremist
14   militia, seized control of the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul,
15   and violently plunged the occupied territories of Afghanistan
16   into a brutal state of gender apartheid in which women and
17   girls have been stripped of their basic human rights; and
18   
19        WHEREAS, upon seizing power, the Taliban instituted a
20   system of gender apartheid, thrusting the women of Afghanistan
21   into a state of virtual house arrest and stripping women of
22   their visibility, voice, and mobility; and
23   
24        WHEREAS, the Taliban initially imposed strict edicts that
25   banished women from the work force, closed schools to girls in
26   cities and expelled women from universities, prohibited women
27   from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a close male
28   relative, ordered the publicly visible windows of women's
29   houses painted black, forced women to wear the burqa, a garment
30   that completely shrouds the body, leaving only a small mesh-
31   covered opening through which to see, prohibited women and
32   girls from being examined by male physicians while at the same
33   time, prohibited most female doctors and nurses from working,
34   and brutally beating, flogging and even killing women for
35   violating Taliban decrees; and

 
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                                  H.R. NO.              
                                                        
                                                        

 
 1   
 2        WHEREAS, on June 16, 1998, the Taliban ordered the closing
 3   of more than one hundred privately funded schools where
 4   thousands of young women and girls were receiving training in
 5   skills that would have helped them support their families and
 6   issuing new rules for nongovernmental organizations providing
 7   the schooling, limiting education for girls to only those girls
 8   who are under the age of nine, and restricting even that
 9   education to the Koran; and
10   
11        WHEREAS, the U.S. annual human rights report produced by
12   the State Department for 1998 said that Afghanistan
13   "represented perhaps the most severe abuse of women's human
14   rights in the world"; and
15   
16        WHEREAS, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
17   characterized the Taliban's treatment of women and girls as
18   "despicable" during a visit to an Afghanistan refugee camp in
19   Pakistan; and
20   
21        WHEREAS, the international assistance group, Physicians
22   for Human Rights, studied the situation in Kabul and found that
23   ninety-seven per cent of women reported either poor or no
24   access to health care services in Kabul over the past year of
25   residence there, and fifty-three per cent of women described
26   occasions in which they were seriously ill and unable to seek
27   medical care; and
28   
29        WHEREAS, the United Nations' General Assembly has passed
30   numerous resolutions calling upon all parties to cease their
31   violations of human rights, and U.N. interlocutors have been
32   attempting to mediate the conflict for the past six years; and
33   
34        WHEREAS, even after international condemnation, the
35   Taliban has made only slight changes, and official Taliban
36   edicts and decrees have not been lifted to restore Afghan
37   women's rights to work, education and health care; and
38   
39        WHEREAS, no other regime in the world has so methodically
40   and violently forced half of its population into virtual house
41   arrest, prohibiting them on pain of physical punishment from
42   showing their faces, seeking medical care without a male
43   escort, or attending school; and
44   
45        WHEREAS, it is difficult to find another government or

 
 
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                                  H.R. NO.              
                                                        
                                                        

 
 1   would-be government in the world that has deliberately created
 2   such poverty by arbitrarily depriving half the population under
 3   its control of jobs, schooling, mobility, and health care,
 4   restrictions that are literally life threatening to women and
 5   to their children; and
 6   
 7        WHEREAS, while the Taliban claim to follow a pure,
 8   fundamentalist Islamic ideology, the oppression they perpetrate
 9   against women has no basis in Islam, which permits women to
10   earn and control their own money, and to participate in public
11   life, and respected Islamic organizations such as the fifty-
12   five-member Organization of Islamic Conference has refused to
13   recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan's official government and
14   the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, regarded by many as an ultra-
15   conservative organization, has denounced the Taliban's decrees;
16   and
17   
18        WHEREAS, Taliban policies of systematic discrimination
19   against women seriously undermine the health and well-being of
20   Afghan women and their capacity to survive, and constitute an
21   affront to the dignity and worth of Afghan women, and humanity
22   as a whole; now, therefore,
23   
24        BE IT RESOLVED by the House of Representatives of the
25   Twentieth Legislature of the State of Hawaii, Regular Session
26   of 2000, that the United States government is urged to follow
27   through on Secretary Albright's demand that the Taliban protect
28   and promote the human rights of women in Afghanistan; and
29   
30        BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the United States government
31   is urged to take every opportunity to condemn the Taliban's
32   oppression of women in international fora and to demand that
33   the Taliban adhere to the requirements of international law;
34   and
35   
36        BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the United States government
37   is urged to make plain that it does not and will not recognize
38   any government that systematically disenfranchises women and
39   should oppose a claim by the Taliban for a seat at the United
40   Nations as the government of Afghanistan; and
41   
42        BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the United States government
43   is urged to call upon the government of Pakistan and other
44   governments that support the Taliban to end that support; and
45   

 
 
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                                  H.R. NO.              
                                                        
                                                        

 
 1        BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the United States government
 2   is urged to do all that is possible to include the protection
 3   and promotion of women's human rights in humanitarian
 4   assistance policies; and
 5   
 6        BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the United States government
 7   is urged to work with the United Nations officials and other
 8   countries to designate Afghan women who flee gender-based
 9   persecution by the Taliban as refugees; and
10   
11        BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that certified copies of this
12   Resolution be transmitted to the President of the United
13   States, the Secretary of State, and the members of Hawaii's
14   Congressional delegation.
15   
16 
17 
18 
19                         OFFERED BY:  ____________________________