Women’s emancipation & Western values

PRESIDENT Pervez Musharraf has assured women folk of Pakistan that more legislation to curb anti-women practices in the society was on the cards. While addressing a gathering of women drawn from all walks of life at Islamabad on Tuesday. President Musharraf announced a number of measures designed to give women their due share in national life. He once again defended the recently passed legislation aimed at removing lacunae in the Hudood laws and dubbed its opponents as hypocrites who stayed away from the National Assembly when it was being adopted. He assured the women that no legislation would be passed against the Islamic injunctions Islam. He stressed, attached highest respect to the dignity of women and rightly claimed that the present Government had given them much higher representation than ever before in elective bodies including the Assemblies and the Senate.
On account of physical superiority, man has oppressed and abused the weaker sex since times immemorial. With the growing awareness of their rights, women even in the West managed to emancipate themselves from the stranglehold of the male members of the society. However, in Western society where the women stand liberated they have failed to achieve the position of honour which Islam has granted them. They are being treated as equal to men in all respects in terms of their rights and duties. The protection which Islam provides them is missing in the Western society. Accordingly, the women particularly divorced mothers are a pitiable lot. They are subjected to all types of deprivation. In the Western society, a single mother has to go through hell in raising children. The women who live as partners for years with or without the sacred bond of marriage are quite often kicked out of their homes and made victims of domestic violence at the hands of their heartless male partners. The Western woman is indeed a victim of the v injustices of a society in which religion and morality are fast losing their value.
However, in a society where abject poverty exists or where due to pervasive illiteracy, anti-women practices such as Karokari, Wani, Swara, marriage with the Holy Quran or forced marriages of minor girls with men of older age group etc are common, the woman finds herself at the mercy of men. It surely goes to the credit of women rights groups who have toiled hard and long for elimination of anti-women customs and practices. This Government deserves to be commended for having supported their struggle. However, a lot is yet to be achieved. While emancipation of women should be our target, we should also make sure that our women get same place of dignity and protection which Islam has taught. Western concept of women’s freedom should not be copied.
The Government in its zeal to curb anti-women practices should not lose sight of Islamic teachings which are abiding and a panacea for all social ills.
 

Medals for failure

THE massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995 is a crime which ranks with the worst depravities in modern Europe, with the Nazi destruction of whole communities like Lidice in Czechoslovakia or the 20,000 captured Polish Army officers slaughtered at Katyn by the Russians. It demonstrated with sickening clarity the prevailing general failure of the international community to confront Serb brutality with resolution and courage.
It therefore beggars belief that members of the Dutch battalion who surrendered to the Serb militias of Vladko Mladic, without firing a shot, should have just been given medals for their service in the town. This was one of the biggest humiliations ever suffered by the Dutch military. Many of the 600 soldiers involved still feel revulsion for their officers who caved in to Serb threats. There is equal disgust for the fact that some of the force was told to help the Serbs separate the men and boys from the women and children, after Mladic had calmed the fearful populace by promising the males were being taken to prison camps.
There is no denying that the Dutch commander Col. Thom Karremans found himself in an extremely difficult position. He had been surrounded for five days by much larger Serb forces in a town crowded with maybe 30,000 people, many of them refugees from surrounding villages. He had limited supplies and ammunition and had no strong defensive points. The day before he surrendered, 30 of his men had been captured without a fight by Serb forces. When he called the French NATO commander Gen. Janvier, asking for immediate air support, he was told it could not be provided. When two bombs were finally dropped on the Serbs, they threatened to execute their hostages and kill refugees.
Nevertheless, had Karremans taken a strong position from the start, 8,000 Bosnian Muslims might still be alive today. The Serbs might have halted their advance or they might have attacked. But once the Dutch started taking casualties, NATO would have responded vigorously. Soldiers are wounded and sometimes they die. It is what they do. For 30 Dutch troops to have allowed themselves to be captured and disarmed without a fight was unforgivable. For Karremans to allow the fate of these men to influence his judgment on the fate of the 30,000 Bosnians he was supposed to be protecting, was a cardinal dereliction of duty. Five years later, after a damning report, the entire Dutch government resigned.
The insignia awarded, eleven years after the Srebrenica atrocity, to all 850 members of the Dutch Battalion who served in Bosnia is in general recognition of their service throughout the campaign. Yet it is entirely appropriate that Bosnians, especially relatives of the dead of Srebrenica, should be outraged at the insensitive decision to make these awards at all. The abject failure to carry out their duty and protect helpless civilians is something many Dutchmen may be trying to forget. For those who suffered so terribly as a consequence of the Dutch surrender, there is no forgetting and probably no forgiving either.

—Arab News