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Fighting for basic human rights is not some delusional feminist obsession

When did basic women’s rights come to be regarded as 'privileged'?

Some weeks stories of human savagery can be overwhelming even a century apart. Right now we are witnessing the furious judgement on efforts to impose "western values" on Afghanistan. A hundred years on from the Irish Civil War, haunting shadows are brought back to life by Prof Diarmaid Ferriter's new book.

The link is women. I apologise.

Ferriter’s book, Between Two Hells: The Irish Civil War, not only casts a spotlight on the naked misogyny and sexual violence meted out to women activists, victims and bystanders by their brave civil war compatriots but also on their treatment in the aftermath. Bereaved, deserted, destitute, mentally and physically broken by a savage, futile war, their desperate pleas to officialdom for compensation and pensions have come into the public domain, and reveal the big qualifying question for activists – what precisely constituted “active service”? Did you fire a gun like the hard lads who just had to list a bunch of ambushes to qualify? Was a stepmother a real mother? Had the meagre income of dead sons/daughters/husbands really been all that crucial to the impoverished family’s survival?

When did basic women's rights come to be regarded as 'privileged' or synonymous with 'western values'?

Men suffered horribly of course but the women’s need to be heard, to be understood, to be recognised as individual sensate beings in these files echoes down the decades. They were looking for nothing as fancy as equality, just basic rights and a little respect.

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While reading it last week, I was keeping an eye on the comments about my column (a masochistic exercise founded on perpetual optimism for a nuanced counterpoint or an interesting on-the-ground experience perhaps). The column was on Afghanistan and argued that the glib impulse to dismiss the West’s 20 years there as a total waste ignored some real gains. The big problem with this argument it seems, is that these were women’s gains.

Gains such as Shabana Basij-Rasikh’s in 2002, who a few months after the fall of the Taliban was one of thousands of Afghan girls invited to the nearest public school to participate in a placement test because the fanatical thugs had burned all female students’ records to erase their existence.

Or in 2004, a few years into the US invasion with the country perpetually tensed for a Taliban spectacular, when I was reporting from an Afghanistan with a new constitution where vital health facilities, further education, livelihoods and careers were opening up again for women. A place where women were tip-toeing back into public spaces with visible faces as opposed to the burqa-clad, sight-impaired non-persons under Taliban rule, their public faces erased.

The gains were deeply unequal yes, but to conclude they were worthless and could be rolled into all-purpose rockets of abuse about the imposition of “western values” brings us back to sickeningly familiar territory. When did basic women’s rights come to be regarded as “privileged” or synonymous with “western values”?

Listen hard to the new generation of young Afghan women, many leading important social, educational and political projects. Listen to their terror of being extinguished, listen to them pleading for the right to continue as fully functioning human beings. Listen and decide for yourself if those gains meant nothing. Or are they simply not important enough in the macho, geopolitical Great Game scheme of things?

Back in the comments sections, several posters felt obliged to explain that the US invasion was not about human rights and that the West-approved government and warlords were not choir boys. This, I can confirm, had not gone unnoticed all of 20 years before. One diagnosed me as "delusional" adding, "some improvements may have temporarily improved the lives of Afghanis during the 20 years of military intervention but any slight improvement will most likely be rolled back very quickly, with the Taliban in charge". So the answer is to forget about them?

But this was my favourite: “Oh for goodness sake, lift your head out of your privileged obsessions and survey the broad sweep of history. Up to 140 years ago on these islands, married women were legally defined as part of the goods and chattels of their husbands.” Thank you, Mr H. That historical pattern had damn near slipped past us women. But I’ll admit to being quite surprised to hear advances in healthcare, education and maternal survival described as “privileged obsessions”.

The notion that fighting for basic human rights is reducible to some delusional feminist obsession unworthy of a place on history’s scales of justice reflects a particular mindset. It’s one that swerves dangerously close to the attitudes of the time as shown in Ferriter’s civil war history, dripping with misogyny and condescension. We know better now. Don’t we?

Shabana Basij-Rasikh, the girl who was part of that exciting post-Taliban school placement test in 2002, became an educator and founder of an all-girls boarding school in Afghanistan. Last week she was forced to burn her students’ records – not to erase them, but to protect them and their families. Meanwhile Afghan women stock up on burqas and go back into hiding.

And the Great Game plays on.