An Uneasy Peace (Page 2)

For the first time in its history, Afghanistan has a ministry of women's affairs, but Minister Sima Samar, three months into her six-month tenure, already feels she is being marginalized, even by Karzai. She has also received a number of death threats, and not long ago, one of her private clinics in Bamiyan was targeted and the staff massacred. Samar, a 45-year-old physician, is now talking about resigning, possibly before her term ends. "She's not being taken seriously by her own government. Very few of the men in the interim administration believe there should be a women's ministry," says a senior UN official. "These are not for the most part liberal, progressive men; many of them have similar attitudes to the Taliban."

In conversations with visitors, Samar frequently relates how, toward the end of a wide-ranging meeting with US Secretary of State Colin Powell, she passed a note to Karzai reminding him that he hadn't once mentioned women's issues. "I wanted Powell to know we are serious about women's issues. But we are not," she said. On International Women's Day, March 8, she was asked to write Karzai's speech for him. Samar was decidedly unhappy when he eviscerated it, cutting it by 50 percent.

Samar, who is given to wearing jeans or pants and leaving her head uncovered, has other problems, too. Despite crowds of women who daily clog the entrance to the ministry looking for assistance, thus far she has received no operating funds. The ministry building is still under renovation; it was full of bomb rubble when it was assigned to her and lacked a roof, windows and many doors. Afghanistan's land-line phone system is as devastated as the rest of the country's infrastructure. Samar has no Internet access and can't afford to use her satellite phone. At the end of March the ministry had received only $64,000 for building repairs and renovation, and $30,000 from a foundation for a school uniform project.

The Afghan Interim Authority Fund, set up after the Bonn Agreement established the interim administration, channels funding from twenty-five donor countries, including the United States, and is intended to meet urgent needs. The UN Development Program, which manages the fund, says $50 million is required; $37 million has been pledged, but only $26 million has been received, and much of that still sits in New York. "The running cost of the government was not included in this amount," says Julia Taft, who heads the fund. With the Afghan economy in tatters and the treasury all but empty, omitting day-to-day operating expenses would appear to be a colossal oversight.

In addition to the shortfall in donor funding, one of the biggest difficulties, says Taft, is getting the money into Afghanistan. "We've had to resort to flying in planeloads of cash because the banks aren't functioning, and we couldn't wire it. This, of course, is a major security issue."

"When we have no money, how can we work, or pay staff?" asks Samar's deputy minister, Shafiqa Yargin, a former magazine editor. "There is much we want to do, but all we hear is that the countries who have promised us money have not given it."

Slamming the international aid bureaucracy for being "way too slow" for the needs of the country, Eve Ensler, the Vagina Monologues playwright, brought in bundles of banknotes and satellite phones for the women's ministry on a recent trip to Kabul. "Since Sima Samar has no money to pay her phone bill, V-Day will do it," says Ensler, the founder of V-Day, an organization aimed at stopping violence against women and girls.

Some of the responsibility rests with the finance ministry in Kabul, through which all incoming funds are distributed. "If the ministry doesn't like you, they can be very slow, or simply not give it," said one insider. Sohaila Sidiq, the minister of health and the other woman in the Cabinet, is having an easier time than Samar, according to Shafiqa Habibi, a prominent journalist in Kabul and former director of the Afghan Women's Journalists Association, because the ministry of health is more established and has the support of the World Health Organization and other international bodies. And whereas healthcare is universally accepted in Afghanistan, women's rights are not.

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