Over a year has passed since the Taliban extremist group took over the Afghan capital of Kabul in September of 1996 and made women prisoners in their homes. Despite international outrage at the treatment of Afghan women, the situation for women has worsened. Women in the southern two-thirds of Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban continue to be prohibited from working, and girls from going to school. In addition, the Taliban recently decreed that women cannot be treated at the same hospitals as men. According to TIME magazine, the only hospital available for women in Kabul is a crumbling building with no running water and no operating room. Foreign aid agencies cannot keep up with the growing need for food by women and children, because the women cannot work to support themselves.

Women are forbidden to leave their homes without being accompanied by a close male relative, and even when they do leave their homes they must be covered head-to-toe with a burqa. Women are shot, beaten and killed for disobeying these rules. At a House of Representatives briefing on the situation of women in Afghanistan, Momina Qaiyomi, an Afghan nurse who lived under Taliban rule, testified that when the Taliban took over Jalalabad, where she lived, "they closed and put big locks on schools and hospitals." She saw a veiled woman and her husband being beaten with metal cables by the Taliban because a bit of the woman's feet were showing. She saw the Taliban killing women and men by slitting their throats and then laughing as they poured hot fat into the cuts and the bodies jumped in what they called the "dance of death."

Feminist Majority rallies in front of the Afghanistan and Pakistan embassies in July came to the attention of the Northern Alliance, the Afghan faction that controls the northern third of the country. A representative of the Northern Alliance, Dr. Abdullah, came to visit the Feminist Majority to meet women's organizations. According to Afghan refugee Sima Wali, who heads Refugee Women in Development and who attended the meeting, "It is unprecedented that a high official of an Afghan faction would meet with U.S. women's and human rights groups." Wali stressed that while women in the Northern Alliance-controlled areas are able to work and girls are able to go to school, "we must make sure that all factions include women in the peace process, and in devising policies that affect them and their families." Just two weeks after the Feminist Majority's embassy protests, the United States government closed the Afghanistan embassy.

The Taliban seem immune to international outrage. They arrested and detained the highest-ranking European Union representative to visit Afghanistan in the past year, Emma Bonino, as well as CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour, as they and others made a video in a women's hospital, despite the fact that the European Union has pledged $40 million in emergency aid to Afghanistan. Their immunity is bolstered by the fact that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, two U.S. allies, are reportedly heavily funding and supporting them.

The United States has said it will not recognize the Taliban, and the U.S. Senate has passed a resolution condemning the Taliban's discrimination against women and girls. The resolution asks President Clinton to continue monitoring human rights in Afghanistan; to call for an end to discrimination and harassment of women and girls; to call upon Pakistan to influence the Taliban to cease human rights violations and discrimination against women and girls; and to call upon all nations to cease providing financial and military assistance to the Taliban and any other Afghan group that abuses human rights. A similar resolution has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY). €

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