Campaign for Afghani women's rights gets EU support

The Irish Nobel Peace Prize winner, Ms Mairead Corrigan, and the EU Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs, Ms Emma Bonino, yesterday both lent their names to an international women's campaign in defence of Afghani women's rights.

The campaign launched by 50 prominent women yesterday - "A flower for the women of Kabul" - is aimed at ensuring an international focus and demonstrations on International Women's Day on March 8th over the attempts by the fundamentalist Taliban government in Kabul to drive women out of workplaces, hospitals, schools and universities and back into their homes.

At a press conference in Brussels, an Afghani doctor - heavily veiled to protect her anonymity - spoke of the dangers faced by women who were "effectively under house arrest" because of the brutal enforcement of rules prohibiting women from walking freely in the streets except when they are completely veiled and in the company of a close male relation.

She insisted that the Taliban regime was based on a profound misinterpretation of the Quran which requires the education of women as well as men.

Ms Bonino said the campaign was "not about religion, or culture, but the defence of the most fundamental of human rights" and had wide support among Muslim women.

Among the women supporting the appeal are the US activist, Ms Bella Abzug; the four EU women commissioners; the writer Nadine Gordimer; the Palestinian minister Ms Hanan Ashrawi; the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, Ms Louise Arbour; the Guatemalan Nobel Laureate Ms Rigoberta Menchu; the French human rights activist Ms Danielle Mitterrand, and 13 women ministers from around the EU and Africa. Campaign website: http://europa.int/womensday

Reuters reports from Kabul: Three rockets landed on two suburbs of Kabul yesterday, injuring at least one child. The child was injured by a Russian-built Frog-7 missile that hit open ground in Yakatoot, an eastern suburb close to Kabul airport, according to witnesses.

The witnesses said two more rockets landed in open ground in the south-west suburb of Dashti Barchi.

There was no immediate information about who fired the rockets, the first to land in the environs of the capital since last September. Previously, opposition forces fighting the Taliban government in Kabul and stationed only some 25 km to the north, have launched rockets.