Getting back to work

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan – After Humaira’s beauty salon was closed by the Taliban, she hid her cans of hairspray, her portraits of coiffured women and her cracked hair dryer. A day after the Islamic militia fled, she reopened for business.

The chairs are old and torn, and the Taliban smashed her larger mirrors, but Humaira has scraped off the paint they splashed over her beauty salon sign. And she’s put her posters back on the walls, one showing a sassy young woman in heavily curled pigtails.

Women in the Afghan capital are heading back to work after the collapse of the Taliban social order.

Afghanistan was always a conservative place, and many women were wearing the burqa, the tentlike, all-enveloping robe, long before the Taliban seized power in 1996. But the Taliban’s extreme reading of Islamic law made the burqa mandatory. Women were barred from holding jobs, and girls older than 8 couldn’t go to school.

People were exhorted to paint their ground-floor windows black so women couldn’t be seen by passers-by. White stockings were taboo because the Taliban’s flag was white.

Shireen, 26, was a government statistician before the Taliban sent her home. Now she is trudging from one government ministry to the next, looking for work. She said she’s waiting for a regular government to take office and give official clearance to shed the burqa.

Until then, she remains cautious. She and several other women talked to a reporter only on condition that their surnames not be published.

The aviation ministry was closed, so Shireen went next door to Radio Afghanistan, where several women already have been given jobs delivering the news.

For young women who have been unable to acquire other skills during the Taliban years, broadcasting seems to be favored as a quick way back into the job market.

The medical profession also suffered under Taliban strictures.

At Rabia Balkhi hospital for women, female doctors were forbidden to work alongside male colleagues. Starting today, that rule is also dead, by order of the new health ministry. One woman waiting to apply for a news reader job at Radio Afghanistan told of being beaten by Taliban soldiers. Moving aside a tuft of hair to reveal a red welt, Marzia Adeel said it happened while she was buying shoes a few months ago. She couldn’t see through the mesh of her burqa and there was only an elderly salesman in the store, so she took a risk and uncovered her head.

Suddenly two Taliban soldiers burst in. One hit her with a cable. As she struggled to get her robe back on, he hit her again.

“I was bleeding. I was scared,” she whispered, speaking in the halting English she taught herself during five years of enforced idleness. “The man selling shoes was scared. He said, ‘Sister, please go. Leave.’ But I couldn’t see. Blood was dripping in my eyes.”

Another applicant at the radio station, Parveen Hashafi, said that under Taliban rule “we were neither alive nor dead.”

Single, jobless, her life was a monotonous routine of waking, eating, cleaning and sleeping, she said.

But she wondered whether the world that condemned the Taliban’s treatment of women would now force Afghanistan to enshrine their rights in a constitution.

“Or, now that they have what they want, will they forget about us again?” she asked.

Copyright ©2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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