What Do Afghan Women Want?

The unveiling took place amid the giddy whirl of an all-star production of Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues" on Feb. 10, 2001. Raucous merriment had come and gone: Ensler conducted a chorus of ecstatically groaning celebrities, Glenn Close urged the audience to reclaim the c-word by yelling it at the top of its lungs. Then Oprah Winfrey recited Ensler's latest monologue, "Under the Burqa," and a hush fell over the crowd as Oprah exhorted its members to "imagine a huge dark piece of cloth / hung over your entire body / like you were a shameful statue." As the piece wound to a close, a figure in a burqa ascended to the stage. Oprah turned and lifted the head-to-toe shroud.

Voila! There stood Zoya, a young representative of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), the group of 2,000 Afghan women who had seized the West's imagination with ferociously anti-fundamentalist rhetoric, secret footage of Taliban atrocities and clandestine schools and hospitals for Afghan girls and women. Center stage, Zoya delivered a fiery speech about the oppression of Afghan women and RAWA's ongoing resistance to the Taliban regime. Eighteen thousand people leaped to their feet, and New York City's Madison Square Garden rang with cheers.

RAWA has always had a flair for the dramatic, and this appearance was no exception. It was pure, delicious theater: the stark words, the ominous, oppressive burqa and the "hey presto" transformation of suffering into strength with the flick of a hem. The unveiling also captured part of RAWA's appeal to American feminists, as it let the audience appreciate the friction between the image of silenced Afghan women and the brand of outspoken feminism that RAWA espouses.

Although the Pakistan- and Afghanistan-based group was founded in Kabul in 1977, RAWA didn't receive worldwide recognition until U.S. feminist campaigns for Afghan women's rights hit their stride in the late 1990s. After September 11, the attention only intensified. Hundreds of articles and two books chronicled RAWA's struggle, the group's burqa-clad members spoke across the United States and, at one point, a flashing banner reading "Welcome, Oprah viewers!" greeted visitors to RAWA's Web site.

But is a group that is inspirational in the United States effective in Afghanistan? With its confrontational, no-holds-barred language and allegiance to a secular society, RAWA reflects much of the Western feminist community's own values -- a fact that has earned RAWA strong support in the West but few friends in a strongly Muslim country weary of political battles and bloodshed. Similarly, part of RAWA's allure, for Ensler at least, has been its militant, radical, "uncompromising" nature, as Ensler told Salon.com in November 2001. But this quality has a dark side. RAWA has denounced numerous other Afghan women's groups as insufficientlly critical of fundamentalism. It has also publicly attacked prominent Afghan women activists -- some of whom have in turn raised questions about RAWA's own political connections. As a result, Afghan women's nongovernmental organizations and Afghan feminist expatriates have expressed concern about a radical, lone-wolf organization garnering so much Western attention. In Afghanistan's slow, painful shift from war to nation building, they say, perhaps the country needs stronger support for voices of coalition building rather than for those advocating solitary revolution.

To understand the nature of RAWA's partnership with Western feminists, it helps to return to the starting point for U.S. feminist activism on Afghan women's rights: the Feminist Majority's "Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan." Although the campaign has come under fire for a few alleged missteps -- some critics have charged it with focusing too much on the burqa as a symbol of victimhood -- the Feminist Majority's project has earned widespread praise for mobilizing grass-roots support and scoring significant U.S. political victories for Afghan women's rights.