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Afghanistan has “jihadi parliament that disagrees with human rights”
by Scott Gilbreath ~ April 24th, 2009
In an interview published in Macleans, Hossain Ali Ramoz, executive director of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission, insists that most Afghan Shia Muslims do not support the controversial law obligating a wife to “fulfill the sexual desires of her husband”.
Afghanistan’s Shias, most of whom belong to the Hazara ethnic group, are typically among the most religiously moderate of Afghans. Hazara women appear in public with their faces uncovered. They are disproportionately represented, he notes, in national singing competitions.
The problem is their religious leaders, he says. “They are mostly trained in Iran, so they have a different thought. I separate what they think from what the people think. This law was decided among some mullahs and ulemas [senior Islamic scholars], not the people.”
Ramoz says that during the years of Taliban rule and the civil war before that, many Shia clerics studied in Iran’s holy city of Qom. Following the overthrow of the Taliban—which had brutally persecuted and on occasion massacred Afghan Shias—these clerics returned and took up positions on religious councils or in the Afghan parliament. From there they played a powerful role in drafting the controversial legislation, which Ramoz says is actually not popular with most Shias.
“We have a very conservative and very jihadi parliament that in a sense disagrees with human rights and democracy,” he says. “In Afghanistan, unfortunately, the relationship between MPs and their constituents is not as accountable and transparent as in the West.”
So, Iran’s influence on the actions of Afghan parliamentarians far outweighs that of the Afghan people? That does not bode well for the future of democracy in Afghanistan.
Following domestic and international protests, the law is under review.
h/t: The Canada-Afghanistan Blog
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April 25th, 2009 at 06:47 PM
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