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EDITORIAL: After the burqa in Afghanistan
Thursday, November 29, 2001
(12:00 AM PT)
The Seattle Times

An Afghan woman smiles after lifting her burqa in the United Nations World Food Program bakery in Kabul last week.
Photo Credit: Laura Rauch / The Associated Press.

No smile is as wide and engaging as one that has been hidden behind a full cloth covering for five years. Afghan women are coming out from behind traditional burqas, smiling as the sunshine warms their faces.

Women in areas of Afghanistan no longer controlled by the Taliban are once again looking for jobs, walking without male chaperones and reopening business shut down by Taliban rulers. Women suffered considerably under the Taliban, so their moments of freedom and reawakening are among the most rewarding to watch.

Afghan women have been non-people since the Taliban seized power in 1996.

"We had no life, nothing for us to do, we were not people," said a female beauty shop operator, who reopened her salon one day after the Islamic militia fled. "We were neither alive nor dead."
(More: SeattleTimes.com News Source)
2001 © The Seattle Times Company.

Dan