GENEVA (AFP)-A U.N. report accused the Taliban regime
in Afghanistan of violating women's rights with "unabated severity,"
including mass abductions and forced prostitution.
The report cited testimony from refugees about the
large-scale abduction of women and girls by the ruling Taliban movement
during fighting last year in the northern and central parts of the
country.
U.N. reporter Kamal Hossain provided testimony about
ethnic Hazara and Tajik women being rounded up in trucks and taken from
the regions of Mazar-e-Sharif, Pol-e-Khomri and Shamali to neighboring
Pakistan and the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.
"Many suspect that women and girls end up forced into
prostitution," adding, "Women have been killed and maimed trying to escape
from these trucks. Women from the Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif and Shamali
regions also gave accounts of forced marriages to Taliban members. Many
families in Shamali had sent their daughters away to avoid such a fate,”
said the report.
The Taliban swept to power nearly four years ago and
now control most of Afghanistan, although fighting against rival movements
continues in parts of the country.
Since coming to power, the Taliban have barred women
from attending schools or working outside the home. Women can only appear
in public dressed in head-to-toe robes.
Routinely targeted by the world community for abusing
women's rights, the Taliban on Wednesday marked International Women's Day
for the first time, bringing around 700 women to a Kabul women's hospital
in buses with dark curtains drawn.
But the U.N. report insisted the Taliban continued to
enforce its severe edicts against women's participation in public life
"with unabated severity."
It said the regime continued to deny women access to
education, health and employment and quoted refugees who spoke of “the
abduction of women, rape, infliction of the punishment of stoning, lashing
and other forms of inhuman punishment."
The report by Hossain, who conducted several visits to
Afghanistan and Pakistan, was based on a survey of internally displaced
Afghans and refugees who left the country between the end of 1998 and
third quarter of 1999.
The report was compiled in January and will be
presented to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights during meetings beginning
on March 20. Hossain gave evidence that non-Afghans, including Pakistanis
and Arabs, who are fighting alongside the Taliban, are also involved in
the rights violations against women and ethnic minorities.
Fighting in Afghanistan intensified last year in the
central highlands, particularly in Bamyan and in the Shamali Plains north
of Kabul.
Hossain related evidence of summary executions of
non-combatants by Taliban forces, arbitrary detentions and forced
labor.
"All these practices constitute grave human rights violations," he said. "The actions, reportedly
carried out by Taliban forces who were engaged in military operations, ran directly counter to assurances publicly given by the
Taliban leadership with regard to the rights of the civilian
populations," the report
said.
