Most Oppressed Women in world take timid steps towards freedom, November 15, 2001

By Kate Clark in Kabul
15 November 2001

My first morning back in liberated Kabul, I awoke to some extraordinary sounds: the voices of women on the airwaves.

Three newly appointed female journalists were on Radio Kabul, reading the news, presenting music and chatting away on the very waveband the Taliban reserved for its puritanical and always music-free Radio Shariat.

After five years of tyranny from the petty-minded, whip-wielding religious police, the most oppressed, invisible women in the world were taking their first timid steps towards personal freedom.

Across the city the lively beautiful faces of Afghan women have started to peep out from beneath the hated burqas - the head-to-toe coverings they have been forced, under pain of savage lashings, to endure since the Taliban came to power. It is an unbelievable five years since anyone has been permitted to see the face of a woman not related to them.

When I ventured out, most remained covered up but the odd daring woman had thrown caution to the winds and substituted a soft head scarf for the stifling blue tent.

They have a long way to go before they start burning their burqas, but metaphorically that is what the women are now doing. They are smiling, and speaking without fear of punishment. It is as if a weight has been lifted off their shoulders and they can breathe again.

One woman beckoned me inside her house and kissed me. She was wearing just a scarf. "It is so nice to be able to say hello," she said.

But most are still cautious. "In a few days we will take them off," one woman said of the burqas. Like a prisoner about to be let out of a dark cell after a very long time she was worried it might be difficult to adapt. "If you have been wearing one of these for five years, it's very difficult to take it off."

The cloth of the burqa is heavy and coarse, particularly if you are too poor to afford finer material, and it has only a small crocheted grill to allow the wearer to breathe and to see. Driving through Kabul I always worried I would run a woman over because they can't see the traffic properly.

Reporters who visited Kabul as recently as the Nineties remember young women wearing miniskirts. The liking for fashion has not gone away, it has gone underground. Underneath the burqa many Kabul women have been clandestine wearers of high heels, stockings and lacy trousers. Big hair and pink lipstick are particular favourites: small gestures of defiance in the face of the Ministry for Vice and Virtue.

No one is sure how the men will react. One resident, Mohammed Shah, said: "It's not their decision alone to make. They have their husbands, fathers and brothers to think of."

More than lipstick will be needed to heal the invisible wounds of deep depression most women here suffer from. And although they are free to work again, there is barely an economy to speak of. While before there were women bank clerks and teachers, men now have all those jobs.

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