Internal Links – Patriarchy

Internal Links – Patriarchy

ISLAMABAD - To mark the National Women Day, civil society activists on Wednesday held a consultative meeting with special focus to stimulate public to think about the institution and practice of dowry and recognising the progress of women in the struggle for peace, equality and development. Women across Pakistan commemorate February 12 as Pakistan Women Day in remembrance of the state’s brutality against them in Lahore in 1983 to protest against the Law of Evidence, which reduces the status of a woman witness to half that of a male witness. Realising the fact that empowerment, access to equal rights and emancipation are yet only distant dreams for a vast majority of women, the civil society activists organised diverse programmes in order to recognise the achievements of Pakistani women without any discrimination on ethnic, linguistic, cultural, economic or political basis. In this connection, Society for Advancement of Community, Health, Education and Training (SACHET) organised a dialogue, which also was attended by senior development practitioners from public-private sectors and media. On the occasion, two posters and Fight Against Dowry (FAD) Planner 2009 was launched that showed the challenging the elitist consensus on dowry issues. The posters and Planner 2009 also revealed that primarily target the Pakistani intellectuals, majority of whom in their various worldly capacities have repeatedly demonstrated a strong elitism and elitist consensus that in turn is one of the many subtle faces of patriarchy, on the issues of dowry.

Internal Link – Slavery

The marriages of opium brides amount to slavery
Starita 8 (Laura, Philanthropy Action, Apr. 7, 2008, http://www.philanthropyaction.com/nc/grim_news_from_afghanistan)IM

Thus, when the lender returns for his product at the end of the growing season the farmer has no opium, opening the possibility that the lender will ask for the farmer’s daughter for his son or nephew, or even for himself. The fate of these “opium brides” is horrible. Few women in rural Afghanistan have a choice in who they marry. Some of the matches made in this way are no worse or better than other marriages, but some amount to nothing short of slavery. More than ninety percent of the world’s illegal heroin originates in Afghanistan. The heroin trade contributes to a growing drug abuse problem in Central Asia and around the world, and funds the Taliban-sponsored instability in the country. For those reasons and a host of others, eradicating poppy cultivation is, and should be, a front-line priority of US and Western policy in central Asia. Yet the US government has handled that effort with a remarkable amount of short-sightedness. Initiatives to provide Afghan farmers with alternatives to poppies have gone from non-existent, to illogically targeted to large landowners. US programs do not broadly support alternative livelihoods for farmers, nor do they provide access to markets for the goods those farmers produce—as shown in Sarah Chayes’ December, 2007 article in The Atlantic. Ms. Chayes is the founder of a company that provides such alternative livelihoods and market access, yet has given up on funding from official aid sources because of the insurmountable obstacles put in her path by US aid agencies.

These opium dowries are tantamount to slavery
Morrissey 08 (Ed, writer for Hot Air, 3/31, http://hotair.com/archives/2008/03/31/opium-brides-slavery-for-afghan-women/)IM

The poppy-eradication effort in Afghanistan will upset a very delicate economic situation, and it has to do with the complete lack of infrastructure in the war-torn country. American agriculture excels because of the many systems we have built to support it — storage, transportation, compensation, and so on. We can have produce to market in hours, and we can rotate crops and grow crops that quickly perish because we have storage systems that keep it all fresh for sale. Afghanistan has none of that. They don’t have any significant refrigeration systems, and most farmers are too poor to own their own. Roads and trucks are uncommon. Even if the farmers grew vegetables in place of poppies, they couldn’t reliably get it to market in any condition for sale — and in the winter, they could not store any excess. They would starve before the next planting season. Poppies, on the other hand, allow farmers to almost grow cash. The opium doesn’t spoil, and a good harvest acts just like cash in the bank. Farmers squirrel it away and just bring kilos to market for quick returns when needed. Opium makes the most economic sense while Afghanistan remains infrastructurally backward. Unfortunately, the eradication policies and war have created debt issues for farmers. They have sold their future crops at discounts to lenders who claim not to charge interest, as Islam requires, but who in reality have created vigorish akin to something at which a Mafia shylock might blush. When the crops fail, they get their pound of flesh — or more literally, about 100 pounds of it. This is nothing less than slavery. Families have bartered for dowries in many cultures, including those in the West, but this goes beyond that. If we want the people of Afghanistan to find stability and prosperity without opium, we have to begin by halting the slave trade and addressing the infrastructure issues of that nation.

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