[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 63 (Monday, May 18, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5023-S5025]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   SENATE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION 97--EXPRESSING THE SENSE OF CONGRESS 
CONCERNING THE HUMAN RIGHTS AND HUMANITARIAN SITUATION FACING THE WOMEN 
                        AND GIRLS OF AFGHANISTAN

  Mrs. FEINSTEIN (for herself, Mr. Brownback, Mr. Dodd, and Ms. 
Landrieu) submitted the following concurrent resolution; which was 
referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations:

[[Page S5024]]

                            S. Con. Res. 97

       Whereas the legacy of the war in Afghanistan has had a 
     devastating impact on the civilian population, and a 
     particularly negative impact on the rights and security of 
     women and girls;
       Whereas the current environment is one in which the rights 
     of women and girls are routinely violated, leading the 
     Department of State in its 1997 Country Report on Human 
     Rights, released January 30, 1998, to conclude that women are 
     beaten for violating increasingly restrictive Taliban dress 
     codes, which require women to be covered from head to toe, 
     women are strictly prohibited from working outside the home, 
     women and girls are denied the right to an education, women 
     are forbidden from appearing outside the home unless 
     accompanied by a male family member, and beatings and death 
     result from a failure to observe these restrictions;
       Whereas the Secretary of State stated, in November 1997 at 
     the Nasir Bagh Refugee Camp in Pakistan, that if a society is 
     to move forward, women and girls must have access to schools 
     and health care, be able to participate in the economy, and 
     be protected from physical exploitation and abuse;
       Whereas Afghanistan recognizes international human rights 
     conventions such as the Convention on the Prevention and 
     Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the International 
     Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Covenant on the 
     Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All 
     Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the International 
     Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which 
     espouses respect for basic human rights of all individuals 
     without regard to race, religion, ethnicity, or gender;
       Whereas the use of rape as an instrument of war is 
     considered a grave breach of the Geneva Convention and a 
     crime against humanity;
       Whereas people who commit grave breaches of the Geneva 
     Convention are to be apprehended and subject to trial;
       Whereas there is significant credible evidence that warring 
     parties, factions, and powers in Afghanistan are responsible 
     for numerous human rights violations, including the 
     systematic rape of women and girls;
       Whereas in recent years Afghan maternal mortality rates 
     have increased dramatically, and the level of women's health 
     care has declined significantly;
       Whereas there has been a marked upswing in human rights 
     violations against women and girls since the Taliban 
     coalition seized Kabul in 1996, including Taliban edicts 
     denying women and girls the right to an education, 
     employment, access to adequate health care, and direct access 
     to humanitarian aid; and
       Whereas peace and security in Afghanistan are conducive to 
     the full restoration of all human rights and fundamental 
     freedom, the voluntary repatriation of refugees to their 
     homeland in safety and dignity, the clearance of mine fields, 
     and the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Afghanistan: 
     Now, therefore, be it
       Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives 
     concurring), That Congress--
       (1) deplores the continued human rights violations by all 
     parties, factions, and powers in Afghanistan;
       (2) condemns targeted discrimination against women and 
     girls and expresses deep concern regarding the prohibitions 
     on employment and education;
       (3) strongly condemns the use of rape or other forms of 
     systematic gender discrimination by any party, faction, or 
     power in Afghanistan as an instrument of war;
       (4) calls on all parties, factions, and powers in 
     Afghanistan to respect international norms and standards of 
     human rights;
       (5) calls on all Afghan parties to bring an end without 
     delay to--
       (A) discrimination on the basis of gender; and
       (B) deprivation of human rights of women;
       (6) calls on all Afghan parties in particular to take 
     measures to ensure--
       (A) the effective participation of women in civil, 
     economic, political, and social life throughout the country;
       (B) respect for the right of women to work;
       (C) the right of women and girls to an education without 
     discrimination, reopening schools to women and girls at all 
     levels of education;
       (D) respect for the right of women to physical security;
       (E) those responsible for physical attacks on women are 
     brought to justice;
       (F) respect for freedom of movement of women and their 
     effective access to health care; and
       (G) equal access of women to health facilities;
       (7) supports the work of nongovernmental organizations 
     advocating respect for human rights in Afghanistan and an 
     improvement in the status of women and their access to 
     humanitarian and development assistance and programs;
       (8) calls on the international community to provide, on a 
     nondiscriminatory basis, adequate humanitarian assistance to 
     the people of Afghanistan and Afghan refugees in neighboring 
     countries pending their voluntary repatriation, and requests 
     all parties in Afghanistan to lift the restrictions imposed 
     on international aid and to cease any action which may 
     prevent or impede the delivery of humanitarian assistance;
       (9) welcomes the appointment of Ambassador Lakhbar Brahimi 
     as special envoy of the United Nations Secretary General for 
     Afghanistan, and encourages United Nations efforts to produce 
     a durable peace in Afghanistan consistent with the goal of a 
     broad-based national government respectful of human rights; 
     and
       (10) calls on all warring parties, factions, and powers to 
     participate with Ambassador Brahimi in an intra-Afghan 
     dialogue regarding the peace process.

     SEC. 2. ADDITIONAL ACTION BY PRESIDENT.

       It is the sense of Congress that the President and 
     Secretary of State should--
       (1) work with the United Nations High Commissioner for 
     Refugees to--
       (A) guarantee the safety of, and provide development 
     assistance for, Afghan women's groups in Pakistan and 
     Afghanistan;
       (B) increase support for refugee programs in Pakistan 
     providing assistance to Afghan women and children with an 
     emphasis on health, education, and income-generating 
     programs; and
       (C) explore options for the resettlement in western 
     countries of those Afghan women, particularly war widows and 
     their families, who are under threat or who fear for their 
     safety or the safety of their families;
       (2) establish an Afghanistan Women's Initiative, based on 
     the successful model of the Bosnian Women's Initiative and 
     the Rwandan Women's Initiative, that is targeted at Afghan 
     women's groups, in order to--
       (A) assist Afghan women in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 
     local capacity building;
       (B) provide humanitarian and development services to the 
     women and the families most in need; and
       (C) promote women's economic security;
       (3) make a policy determination that--
       (A) recognition of any government in Afghanistan by the 
     United States depends on the human rights policies towards 
     women adopted by that government;
       (B) the United States should not recognize any government 
     which systematically maltreats women; and
       (C) any nonemergency economic or development assistance 
     will be based on respect for human rights; and
       (4) call for the creation of--
       (A) a commission to establish an international record of 
     the criminal culpability of any individual or party in 
     Afghanistan employing rape or other crime against humanity 
     considered a grave breach of the Geneva Convention as an 
     instrument of war; and
       (B) an ad hoc international criminal tribunal by the United 
     Nations for the purposes of indicting, prosecuting, and 
     imprisoning any individual responsible for crimes against 
     humanity in Afghanistan.

     SEC. 3. REPORT.

       It is the sense of Congress that the Secretary of State 
     should submit a report to Congress not later than 6 months 
     after the date of the adoption of this resolution regarding 
     actions that have been taken to implement this resolution.

  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I rise today to submit a resolution 
expressing concern over the continuing deterioration of the rights of 
women and girls in Afghanistan, and calling on the administration to 
increase its efforts to provide humanitarian assistance and to protect 
the human rights of Afghan women.
  I am joined in this resolution by Senators Brownback, Dodd, and 
Landrieu.
  Mr. President, every day the women of Afghanistan are excluded from 
the international community's prevailing vision of human rights, and 
continue to lack basic legal rights, access to education, and access to 
economic opportunity. Indeed, perhaps nowhere in the world today is 
there a clearer test of our commitment to the cause of women's rights 
than Afghanistan.
  In March of this year I convened a meeting with leading Non-
Governmental organizations, the Administration, and Afghan women 
themselves to discuss the situation in Afghanistan and what options are 
available to the international community to make the lives of 
Afghanistan's women better.
  Among those participating were representatives of the Department of 
State, the International Commission of the Red Cross, Save the 
Children, the Women's Commission on Refugee Women and Children, Women 
in Refugee Development, and the Women's Alliance for Peace and Human 
Rights in Afghanistan, among others.
  We discussed the legacy of close to twenty years of war and bloodshed 
which has torn apart Afghanistan: More than 1 million people have died, 
and much of the capital of Kabul lies in ruins.
  There are more than 50,000 war widows in Kabul alone, many dependent 
on international humanitarian assistance for their very survival. The 
ICRC, for example, distributes food to some 15,000 widows in Kabul.
  According to Theresa Loar, the State Department's Senior Coordinator 
for Women's Issues, in the 1980s a growing number of Afghan women 
worked outside the home. There were female lawyers, judges, doctors, 
and teachers.

[[Page S5025]]

 This trend was reversed in 1992 and now, under the Taliban, ``women 
and girls became, and remain today, virtually invisible.''
  Education is a major concern, where edicts prevent girls from 
attending school and receiving an education. A small, low-profile, 
``home school'' movement has started, with an estimated 6,500 girls and 
boys attending classes in Kabul. These home schools, however, are no 
substitute for access to a real education.
  On September 6, 1997 the Taliban government issued a statement 
demanding that admission of female patients to hospitals cease 
immediately, and that all female medical staff stop working. After 
negotiations with the ICRC the Taliban government reconsidered, but 
women still face great difficulties in getting access to medical care.
  Many Non-Governmental Organizations are doing work which I can 
describe as nothing short of heroic to provide medical and humanitarian 
assistance under the most adverse of circumstances. But they are faced 
with numerous constraints, from difficulties in collecting data and 
verifying beneficiary cards, to laws and practices which prevent the 
distribution of assistance or services directly to the women in need.
  The U.S. State Department's 1997 human rights report states: ``Women 
were beaten for violating increasingly restrictive Taliban dress codes, 
which require women to be covered from head to toe. Women were strictly 
prohibited from working outside the home, and women and girls were 
denied the right to an education. Women were forbidden from appearing 
outside the home unless accompanied by a male family member. Beatings 
and death resulted from a failure to observe these restrictions.''

  The women of Afghanistan, who have seen their families destroyed by 
war, are now having their economic life and their fundamental human 
rights stripped away, and an already war-torn and war-weary Afghanistan 
has been pushed to the brink of disaster.
  Fully half of Afghanistan's population cannot work for a living or be 
educated. Fully half the population of Afghanistan are being 
systematically denied their basic human rights. We must act to stop 
these injustices and to bring peace to Afghanistan.
  Ambassador Richardson's recent initiative, which led to the 
unprecedented peace talks between representatives of the Taliban and 
the Northern Alliance in Islamabad last month and an agreement to set 
up a 40-member Ulema commission to find a solution for the civil 
conflict, represents perhaps the best opportunity for a comprehensive 
peace in Afghanistan in over a generation.
  The ultimate outcome of these discussions are still in doubt, 
however, and, movement at the peace talks has been accompanied by 
reports of new fighting in the fields, with both sides reportedly 
acquiring new weapons.
  I believe we must give our full support to these peace talks. But I 
also believe that we must be prepared for continued violence in 
Afghanistan, and for the situation faced by Afghanistan's women to get 
worse before it gets better. As we await the outcome of these peace 
talks--and there is no quick or apparent solution in sight--we must 
continue to work to alleviate the plight of Afghanistan's women.
  The resolution I submit today calls on the administration to create 
an Afghan Women's Initiative, along the lines of the successful Bosnian 
and Rwandan Women's Initiatives which the administration has created in 
the past two years. Those initiatives have assisted the victims of 
those wars by promoting the reintegration of women into the economy 
with an emphasis on capacity-building, training programs, legal 
assistance, and support for microenterprise projects, as well as 
refugee reintegration and protection.
  I believe that the successes of those two programs can serve as a 
model for a similar initiative for the women of Afghanistan, as well as 
the numerous Afghan women in refugee camps in Pakistan. The women of 
Afghanistan could greatly benefit from such a women's initiative, and I 
look forward to working with the administration to design and implement 
such a program.
  Second, this resolution calls for the international community to 
investigate charges of rape and abuse as instruments of the now almost 
decade-long civil war which has torn Afghanistan apart, and, if 
credible evidence exists, to convene a war crimes tribunal to prosecute 
the perpetrators.
  Credible charges have been made about the systematic use of rape by 
several of the factions and parties involved in this struggle, and I 
believe that these charges must be investigated and, if true, must lead 
to indictments and trials.
  Finally, I believe that the United States must be clear in stating 
that we will not recognize any government in Afghanistan unless it is 
broad-based, respective of all Afghans, and respects international 
norms of behavior in human rights, including the rights of women and 
girls. As we continue to work for peace in Afghanistan, this resolution 
calls for an unequivocal statement of administration policy on this 
point.
  The United States, with our history of commitment to women's rights 
and equality, must redouble its efforts to place respect for women's 
rights at the top of the international community's agenda in 
Afghanistan, and I urge my colleagues to support this resolution.
  This resolution, essentially, asks the President and the Secretary of 
State to work with the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees to 
guarantee the safety of and provide development assistance for Afghan 
women in Pakistan, as well as Afghanistan, and to increase support for 
various refugee programs, to explore options for resettlement, and to 
establish in Afghanistan a women's initiative which is based on the 
successful model of the Bosnian women's initiative and the Rwandan 
women's initiative that are targeted toward Afghani women's groups.

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