Print Essay: A Silenced Generation
The children of Afghanistan, after 20 years of continuous warfare and prior to any U.S. bombing, had only a 75 percent chance of seeing their fifth birthday. The infant mortality rate is 163 deaths per 1,000 births—the highest in the world. Life expectancy for women and men is between 43 and 44 years old, and only 29 percent of the population has access to health care, 12 percent to safe water. In December 1998 UNICEF reported that “the country's educational system was in a state of total collapse with nine in ten girls and two in three boys not enrolled in school.” Two-thirds of children interviewed by UNICEF had witnessed someone killed by a rocket, or had seen scattered corpses or body parts. More than 70 percent had lost a family member; the familial clan structure itself had been destroyed through warfare.
Before the Taliban regime, many Afghan women led professional lives, exercising their rights to education, religion and choice. The regime’s oppression extended outward but did not seize the more rural village areas of the country, where women still worked and girls went to school. In 1997, the Taliban issued regulations banning women from wearingmake-up or making noises with their shoes. Women were forced to wear the head-to-toe burkha, and sometimes had acid thrown at their faces by the Taliban and civilian followers if they did not.
< back | next >
Two Afghan Children
Image attained from the BBC online.