Violence towards women rising, while practice of exchanging girls and women to settle family disputes continues
LONDON, Nov 24 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Afghanistan's women could see their rights bargained away in the country's peace talks with the Taliban unless they are included in negotiations, aid agency Oxfam warned on Monday.
It said peace would be unsustainable without women's involvement in the expected talks and that enormous gains in women's rights since the Taliban was ousted in 2001 would be lost.
The report follows the inauguration of Ashraf Ghani in September, Afghanistan's first new president in a decade, who appealed to the Taliban and other militants to join peace talks and put an end to more than a decade of violence.
Jorrit Kamminga, co-author of the Behind Closed Doors report, said the international community was not pushing strongly enough to involve women in peace talks.
"They should be fighting for women's rights, which have seen rollbacks in recent years," Kamminga told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.
"The international community used women's rights to justify their intervention in Afghanistan, and while there have been improvements in the past decade, there is not enough meaningful representation from women in taking the country forward."
The report said nine out of 70 members of Afghanistan's High Peace Council (HPC) were female, yet women were only present during two of 23 known peace talks held between the Taliban, Afghan government, and international community since 2005.
One female member, Gulali Noor Safi, told Oxfam that women within the HPC had been sidelined from major consultations and decision making, while Afghan Women's Network said their repeated requests to be involved in negotiations were ignored.
RISING VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
According to the report, almost 4 million girls are in education, the highest number in Afghanistan's history, laws have been established to protect women's rights, and there is a higher proportion of female Members of Parliament in Afghanistan than in the United Kingdom or United States.
Yet rising levels of violence towards women, the continued practice of baad, where girls and women are exchanged to settle family disputes, and increasingly conservative attitudes in rural areas suggested declining support for women's rights, Oxfam said.
Sima Samar, chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), told Reuters earlier this year that violent crime against women in Afghanistan had hit record levels and become increasingly brutal in 2013.
She attributed the increase to a culture of impunity and the departure of international troops and aid workers, leaving women more exposed to attack.
Oxfam's country director for Afghanistan, John Watt, said women's rights were fragile "from the villages where we work to the highest levels of government".
"With new peace talks just around the corner, it's time for the Afghan government and their Western allies to once again champion women's leading role in Afghanistan's future.
"They cannot fail them now and decide their future behind closed doors," Watt said in a statement.
(Reporting By Kieran Guilbert. Editing by Emma Batha)
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