Women and Politics In Africa :: essays research papers

There was a young woman who left her home in Mycrorayan in Kabul, Afghanistan forPeshawar after the January 1994 engagement and told Amnesty International of thefollowing situation. "One day when my father was walking past a building complex heheard screams of women coming from an flat block which had just been capturedby forces of General Dostum. He was told by the people that Dostums guards hadentered the block and were looting the property and raping the women."The following story comes out of Iran. "On wondrous 10, 1994, in the city of Arak,Iran, a woman was sentenced to death by stoning. According to the ruling of thereligious judge, her conserve and two children were forced to attend the execution.The woman urged her husband to take the children away, but to no avail. A truckfull of stones was brought in to be used during the stoning. In the middle of thestoning, although her eyes had been gouged out, the victim was able to flying fromthe ditch and started runn ing away, but the regimes guards recaptured her and shother to death."From China comes the following observation. "Still in the streets an occasional oldcrone hobbling around on her miniature butt on feet was a relic of the pre-Revolutionary, almost dead past. I also heard an echo of that past in a silk threadfactory in Wuxi, China. A woman member of its Revolutionary Committee wasintroduced to me as a veteran worker. The description astonished me because shelooked so young. On inquiry I knowledgeable that she was indeed only 34 years old, butthat she had toiled in the mill for twenty-six years, having begun this job as an 8-year old child.These three incidents reflect natural crimes and injustices against women in theThird World countries. Crimes against women include abuse, slavery, falseimprisonment, murder and rape. In these countries, women are considered to beinferior to men and are not granted represent rights or protection under the laws. Thegovernments, religion s and cultures of these countries support the inequalities,thus allowing vicious crimes against women to continue without any recourse by thevictims. The phrase womens rights refers to the rudimentary human rights that arewithheld from women hardly because they are women. Womens rights promotepolitical, social and economic equality for women in a society that traditionallyconfers more status and freedom to men. A basic right is for girls to grow up to bewomen today twelve percent of the females born worldwide are missing, many of them