http://www.msnbc.com/news/963189.asp?0dm=W29IN
Attacks beset Afghan girls’ schools
Officials say sabotage intended to undermine progress
Boys study in a tent in a school in Afghanistan's rural Logar province. Schools have flourished since the fall of the Taliban regime, a hardline Islamic militia that opposed non-Islamic education.
By Pamela Constable
THE WASHINGTON POST
ZAHIDABAD, Afghanistan, Sept. 8 — It was little more than a shed attached to a village mosque. It had no chairs, and no desks. But for the 50 young girls who had studied there since April, the two-room school in this pastoral pocket of Logar province was all that stood between a lifetime of ignorance and a glimmer of knowledge.
NOW THE doors have been padlocked, the teacher says he is too scared to return, and the former students are back to their customary chores — pumping water at the village well, weeding onion fields and carrying loads of animal fodder on their heads.
That may be exactly what the unknown assailants had in mind when they broke into the shed late at night 10 days ago, doused the classrooms with fuel and set them afire, leaving behind leaflets in the Dari dialect of Afghanistan warning that girls should not go to school and that teachers should not teach them.
“When I was walking home today, the little girls followed me and asked when they could go back to school. But I am not ready to teach them again because I am afraid for my own safety,” confided Fazel Ahmed, 39, the school’s only teacher. “I’m very upset. These students will make the future of our community and our country.”
The attack was followed two days later by the midnight burning of three tents used as classrooms outside another school in Logar province. According to officials of UNICEF, which is helping to revive the country’s long-neglected education system, there have been 18 incidents of school sabotage nationwide in the past 18 months, often accompanied by similar warnings.
The assailants could be from the Taliban, the former Islamic government that opposed girls’ education as morally corrupting, and whose armed supporters recently have been regrouping. Or they could be from other conservative Islamic groups who once fought the Taliban but are now plotting a political comeback as guardians of religious purity.
Whoever they are, said school officials in Logar and education experts in Kabul, the capital, their goal is clearly to undermine Afghanistan’s successful emergence into the modern world after 25 years of military conflict and religious repression that paralyzed its development in every sphere — particularly the emancipation of women.
‘PEOPLE DO NOT SEEM ... INTIMIDATED’
And yet everyone involved in Afghan education — from village elders to foreign charities — insists that such tactics cannot slow the extraordinarily swift and widespread revival of girls’ education that has taken place since the Taliban was defeated and replaced by a U.S.-backed government under President Hamid Karzai in December 2001.
“We have 4.2 million children in 7,000 schools now, and a 37 percent increase in the number of girls in school since last year,” said Sharad Sapra, the UNICEF director for Afghanistan. The increase amounts to 400,000 more girls in school this year. “There is concern that these sporadic incidents should not become a wave, but almost everyone wants their daughters to go to school, and overall, people do not seem to be intimidated.”
Indeed, the second Logar province school to be attacked, a primary school in the village of Mogul Khel where girls and boys study in separate shifts and separate areas, has already achieved national fame because of its immediate resistance to the threat. Karzai, speaking at a news conference in Kabul today with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, noted proudly that almost all students and teachers there had returned to class the day after the attack.
On Saturday, classes were in full, noisy swing, if in hastily improvised settings. Groups of boys recited their multiplication tables in unison, sitting on the playground next to the metal skeletons of the canvas classroom tents that were burned last Tuesday night. Groups of girls huddled on straw mats in the front lobby, reading their Pashto dialect lessons from a portable blackboard.
“We do not know who these saboteurs are, but our school is the cradle of education in Logar, and we will defend it,” said Mahmoud Ayub Saber, 50, the principal, who returned home last year after waiting out the Taliban era in Pakistan.
“If some girls were occasionally absent before this happened,” he said, “their parents are saying from now on none of their daughters will miss a single day.”
Girls attend class at an elementary school in Mogul Khel, Afghanistan, on Saturday, four days after vigilantes attacked the school, burning down three tents used as classrooms.
Education Ministry officials in Kabul said they are determined to ensure the success of girls’ education, but they acknowledged that they have limited resources to physically protect schools, and they noted with alarm that a rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism is challenging the modernizing policies of the Karzai government.
Ashrak Hossaini, the deputy minister of education, noted that opposition to girls’ education, as well as to women’s participation in work and public life, was a hallmark of the Taliban worldview, and that it remains a volatile issue for Islamic conservatives who oppose Karzai’s policies.
“Our society is going through many changes, and there are fundamentalists who want to resist this change,” Hossaini said. “We are trying to move to a modern and civilized stage, and girls’ schools are attacked because they represent this movement. We must not only provide physical protection, but also prepare the people mentally for these changes.”
WIDESPREAD SUPPORT
Indeed, while there seems to be near-universal public support for girls’ elementary school education, the idea of female study beyond sixth grade is far more controversial, particularly in traditional, rural areas steeped in social and gender taboos that existed long before the Taliban took power in 1996.
Even in Logar province, a relatively prosperous and progressive agricultural region just south of Kabul, parents and teachers who strongly support girls’ primary education take a far more cautious, and even dismissive, approach to secondary-level study for them.
While there are hundreds of schools in the area that teach boys and girls up to sixth grade, there are very few higher-level schools for girls. Coeducation is out of the question in conservative Afghan society, and most parents do not want their adolescent daughters attending even an all-female high school if is it not in or close to their village.
“In our district, there is no opportunity for girls to go beyond the fifth class. After that, most of them get married and have no need to continue their educations,” said Saber, the Mogul Khel principal. He said that education officials in Kabul had ordered a girls’ high school to be built in Logar, but that community elders opposed it because students would be required to travel some distance from their homes.
‘Unless the government brings us more security, we cannot let our daughters go back there.’
— SHAH AGHA
Zahidabad resident Officials at UNICEF said they are approaching such issues pragmatically, stressing the importance of getting girls into school at a young age so they will be exposed to basic knowledge and social interactions, while leaving the more controversial issue of female higher education for the future.
By turning schools into social service centers where people receive vaccinations, register births and even pump well water, Sapra said, the idea of education can become an integral part of village life. But in villages such as Zahidabad, where the two-room girls’ school was built last spring, the most serious obstacle to education today is fear.
“We are all afraid of these bad people. We are Muslims, and we fear for the honor of our daughters,” said Shah Agha, 50, a water and power department worker in Zahidabad whose 12-year-old daughter attended the village school until last week.
“We were very happy when this school opened, but one morning we went to pray and we found it was all burned,” he said. “Unless the government brings us more security, we cannot let our daughters go back there.”
