’Osama’ and the reality behind the film

By Kate Allen

The Guardian (UK)

In Osama, the new film from Afghanistan, women in blue
burkas are shown demonstrating against Taliban
repression before being cleared off the streets and
banished back to their homes or taken to prison.

The film, which goes on to show a young girl disguising
herself as a boy to earn money for her impoverished
family, is notable for several reasons. Like the
acclaimed Kandahar, whose Iranian director Mohsen
Makhmalbaf was also an uncredited prodcuer on Osama,
the film examines life for women in Afghanistan under
the Taliban symbolised by life under the burka. Osama’s
main character is played by 13-year-old Marina
Golbahari, apparently cast by the director Siddiq
Barmak after she begged for money from him.

The women and girls in the film are prevented from
working or attending school and are vindictively
punished when transgressing harsh social and cultural
norms. Osama reminds us that women’s human rights were
effectively extinguished under a regime that sheltered
Osama bin Laden and incorporated many of his extremist
views.

This is a moving and often very beautiful film. It is
the first entirely Afghan movie since the Taliban’s
removal from power, and it may, as its director says,
act as "a good messenger, a good bridge between people
for understanding each other." But in focusing only on
the cruelty of the Taliban’s ideologues it comes close
to perpetuating the myth that the warrior-students from
the madrassas were uniquely evil women-haters. The no
doubt well-intentioned remarks of leading figures such
as Laura Bush and Cherie Blair - who in 2001 denounced
the "repression and cruelty of the joyless Taliban
regime" - have added to the notion of the Taliban as
the exceptional bogeymen of anti-women repression.

Osama leaves us trapped in Taliban-land, jumping on the
spot like the child imprisoned in the film’s final
scene, shown forlornly skipping inside a prison. But,
contrary to popular opinion, since the Taliban were
swept from power in 2001 human rights abuses against
women have continued in Afghanistan.

Amnesty International recently documented the case of a
16-year-old girl who had been sentenced to two and a
half years’ imprisonment for the ’crime’ of running
away from an 85-year-old husband whom she had been
forced to marry aged nine. Another 14-year-old girl was
similarly sentenced to three years in prison for
’running away from home’ because she had been unwilling
to marry a 13- year-old cousin. These ’zina’ crimes -
loosely, ’sex crimes’ - are as much cultural as
religious.

The fact is that Afghan women and girls are still very
much on the receiving end of harsh punishments in a
male-dominated justice system. Last year it was
estimated that there were only 27 women judges out of a
total of 2,006. Armed groups are able to threaten
members of the judiciary into calling off
investigations. In rural areas the judicial system is
barely functioning, warlords are effectively above the
law, judges take bribes and relatives can pressure
courts into dropping investigations.

Even the recent loya jirga, or grand council, saw women
attendees threatened by male tribal delegates. If women
suffer violence they may find themselves not helped if
they report it, but punished into the bargain. In
Afghanistan prosecution for rape is a rarity. Forensic
capability is minimal and victims are apparently scared
of being punished for a zina crime if they report the
attack.

The international NGO worker who told Amnesty
International that during the Taliban era "if a woman
went to market and showed an inch of flesh she would
have been flogged - now she’s raped" identified a
chilling truth about this scarred country.

In revisiting the Taliban’s archetypal misogyny, Marina
Golbahari, the 13-year-old untrained actress from a
family of 13, effectively stepped out of the post-
Taliban Afghanistan for the duration of the film’s
production. But the reality of her society is one which
still offers few real rights for women and actually
fails to protect even girls of Marina’s age from
violence, abduction, forced marriage, imprisonment and
worse. In the film her by-now-terrorised character’s
fate is sealed when she is forcibly married off to an
elderly man who imprisons his numerous wives and
womenfolk in his fortress-like house. All too similar
to the fate of some Afghan women today.

The film needs a follow-up. One that shows how girls
and women are being left to their suffering right now
in Hamid Karzai’s Afghanistan.

Kate Allen is director of Amnesty International UK

Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1155003,00.html