Kabul: The Activist: Stirrings of a Woman's Movement

The veils came off last Tuesday. Two hundred women had assembled outside the Kabul apartment of Soraya Parlika, Afghanistan's most prominent woman activist, and--in one motion--they all lifted their burkas. "It was a very emotional moment," says Parlika. "After years the women of Afghanistan came out in the open. Under the Taliban we all wore burkas and did not know each other. Now we all know each other's faces."

Parlika, 57, headed the Afghan Red Crescent before the mujahedin took over Kabul in 1992. She has emerged as the leader of a small but growing underground women's movement. She had initially planned on Tuesday to lead a march of unveiled women to the U.N. compound in Kabul to demand that women be included in any future government, but the police told her they could not guarantee security--even in post-Taliban Kabul.

Parlika is undeterred. "We intend to contact the government," she says. "The demonstration was the first move to get them to notice. We want women to take part in every conference and every session of the new government."

Since Tuesday, Parlika's apartment, on the third floor of a bullet-scarred Soviet-style complex, has become a gathering point for women from all over the city. They chat excitedly about expanding opportunities for women in the new era and are planning an even larger demonstration in the coming week. But despite the symbolic baring of their faces at the demonstration, most still arrive and leave wearing burkas. "The burka is not the main problem of women," says Parlika. "First women should find work and improve their economic situation."

Parlika is used to challenging the status quo. She was imprisoned and tortured in 1979 for organizing a women's movement opposed to President Hafizullah Amin. During the Taliban years she organized a network of secret schools for girls in private apartments across the city.

"We were running hundreds of courses--English, Dari, math, tailoring, computers, weaving, music. You would be surprised at how many 11-year-old girls there are who can speak perfect English," she says with a grin. Parents paid about $1 a month for each course, and the students carried the books for their classes hidden under their burkas.

To be sure, the women gathering around Parlika represent Kabul's well-educated elite; many are teachers or doctors. But already her activities have attracted the attention of the U.N., which is urging the various Afghan factions to include women in their delegations to the upcoming peace talks.

After five years of forced invisibility, Parlika knows she is making some of the more conservative male leaders in Afghanistan uneasy. But so much the better, she thinks. "I just want to tell the world that women should be able to speak out about their own problems." And she is determined to make Afghans--and the world--listen.

--By Terry McCarthy/Kabul