Author Archives: Kevin
Female Anti-Narcotics Officers in Afghanistan
TO NEIGHBOURS, Sheima looks like a kindergarten teacher. The diminutive 26-year-old Afghan sets off from her mud-brick house in west Kabul each morning in a headscarf, long shirt and baggy pants. She even tucks textbooks under her arm to keep up the illusion.
But Sheima’s job is far from elementary. She is part of a new counter-narcotics force fighting on the front line of Afghanistan’s war on drugs. Once she has made her way through the dusty chaos of Kabul’s streets, she swaps her traditional garb for khaki fatigues, combat boots, dark sunglasses and an AK-47 Kalashnikov.
“I have to live a double life,†said Sheima, who — unusually for an Afghan woman — wears her hair short and chews gum.
“Only my immediate family know what I do. I haven’t even told my other relatives because the heroin traders have spies everywhere. If they found out, they’d probably kill me.â€
Good Business
Tarsian & Blinkley, with the young designer as the creative and managing director, directly impacts the lives of 300 women in Kabul.
“Afghan women have gone completely unnoticed in the past,†observed Takesh who explained that despite the country undergoing a devastating phase it retains a rich cultural legacy.
The firm pays the women they employ wages that are well above the country’s standards and expose them to market-sensitive practices of quality control while its partners provide the women with skill training such as tailoring and literacy.
In exchange for the opportunity to make a sustainable living, feed themselves and their families, Tarsian & Blinkley gets loyal employees who stitch, embroider, bead, and knit clothing and accessories using age-old handicrafts techniques unique to central Asia.
“When I met some of these women for the first time, they used to cover their faces, but now they use mobile phones,†Takesh said
News link
Tarsian & Blinkley’s site offers their merchandise, story, and mission
2 Women Catch 2 Al Qaeda Terrorists
An intelligence official said one of the suspects had identified himself as Ahmed and said he came from Egypt. “He is in his 60s and has been living in the area for about two years,†the official said, on condition of anonymity.
“Two female undercover agents posing as village women visited the home and then intelligence agents conducted the raid,†another security official said.
“He is an old Arab claiming to be Egyptian and married to a local ethnic Pashtun girl.â€
Small Part of Afghanistan’s Pilfered Cultural Heritage Returned
Investigators for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency tracked down the two stolen coins in the United States a few months ago, after they had surfaced earlier in Pakistan.
The Indo-Greek coins, dating to between 171 and 160 B.C. — soon after the time of Alexander the Great – had originally been discovered by a 1971 French-led archeological expedition near the Oxus River in northeastern Afghanistan.
Handing the coins over to Karzai after a brief signing ceremony, Michael Garcia, Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for immigration and customs enforcement, said the effort to help Afghans to recover their rich cultural heritage reflected “that great spirit of respect and cooperation that exists between our two countries.â€
Women and the Democratization of the Middle East
Driving across town today I heard PBS’s To the Point discussion on women in the middle east. It is worth listening to.
Link
Audio Link
First Lady Laura Bush is just back from her good-will tour of the Middle East. Along with touting education in her speeches in Jordan, Israel and Egypt, she emphasized the importance of women’s roles in any democracy. In Afghanistan, women comprised 40% of the voters in the most recent elections. Just last week, women in Kuwait were granted the right to vote. Yet while many women in the Middle East are starting their own businesses, millions of others are seriously disadvantaged in education, healthcare and the justice system. Life is an often violent hardship. Guest host Diana Nyad speaks with social anthropologists, women’s advocates, activists, and a State Department coordinator who accompanied Mrs. Bush on her recent trip about democratization of the Middle East and the daily struggle for women there.
“What’s another name for pirate treasure?”
Heinrich Schliemann’s famous “Gold of Troy” at the Pushkin Museum’s “booty” exhibition.
None have been seen in public in more than 60 years. All are spoils of war, seized by Soviet troops from the ruins of Berlin in 1945 and carted back to Moscow. The exhibition – especially because of its timing – could easily be viewed as either a memorial to the ravages of war or as the taunt of a boastful victor.
…
The most famous is a collection of gold known as Priam’s Treasure, recovered by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in 1873 in what he believed to be ancient Troy. The Pushkin displayed the treasures in 1996 and has since dropped any question of its return. The gold is back in storage.
Afghan Music Project
Adam Gouttierre and Chris Becherer, both MBA students at UC Berkeley, blogging about their trip to Afghanistan as a part of the Afghan Music Project (AMP). “The Afghan Music Project (AMP) is a social venture with the goal of raising the awareness of the beauty of traditional Afghan music and the tragic, but uplifting, story of Afghan women through a professionally recorded album. Proceeds from the AMP album will go towards funding educational scholarships for Afghan women.” Their blog entries have been extremely interesting so far (Link) – particularly as they talk about the impact of the Newsweek article (Link) and the rumored kidnapping of another westerner (Link).
Link
From boingboing.net
Pakistani Women Athletes Beaten Down by Islamists
LAHORE, Pakistan, May 14 — More than two dozen people were detained Saturday after taking part in a foot race that included women, defying a ban imposed after Islamic hard-liners had attacked participants in a similar event.
…
Authorities banned women from competing in foot races after hard-liners, who regard women’s participation in sports as against Islam, attacked runners at a similar event in Punjab province last month.
A Reuters photographer said police also beat and arrested protesters from Islamist parties who had planned to attack participants in the race.
…
Among those arrested was group of female rights activists who attempted to lead a rally demanding for women the right to run in marathons alongside men.Pakistan’s internationally known human rights activist Asma Jehangir was also arrested, witnesses said.
“The police surrounded Asma’s office and detained her as she came out of the office along with other participants,†witness Abdullah Iqbal said.
New York Times (login required)
Pakistani authorities had banned women from taking part in marathons last month after violent protests by hard-line Islamic parties. A marathon in Gujranwala, 85 miles south of Islamabad, in early April was attacked by a mob of Islamic extremists wielding batons and guns. Cross-fire between the police and the Islamists left 80 people injured.
The organizers of the run on Saturday said they wanted to highlight violence against women and protest against the increasing influence of Islamic extremist political parties.
James Opie on Afghanistan
I stumbled across this piece by the author James Opie.
Two basic streams of carpet designs can be identified in Afghanistan in the past several centuries. One is an urban design tradition of finely and precisely organized patterns, produced by professional carpet designers on the equivalent of graph paper. Given that weavings of this sort were produced in urban areas, this can be thought of as a “city†design tradition. Designs in such rugs are more formal, echoing Persian design influences.
Tribal designs represent a second and largely independent stream. Motives and patterns differ from tribe to tribe, depending very much on the traditions of the various groups and, to a lesser extent, on the inventiveness of the individual weavers. This second design stream of “tribal†rugs is the dominant one in Afghan weaving. An amalgam of the two streams can be found in certain workshop rugs that produced larger rugs with traditional tribal designs.