By ROBERT MACKEY
On the eve of an international conference in Afghanistan, the country’s only female governor told Britain’s Channel 4 News that Afghan women should not have to sacrifice their rights as part of any peace agreement with the Taliban.
Habiba Sorabi, the governor of the Bamiyan province — where the Taliban terrorized Shiite members of the Hazara minority during their rule, and destroyed ancient Buddhist monuments — rejected a suggestion from a minister in the national government that women would have to “be sacrificed” in return for a deal with the fundamentalist insurgents. Speaking in English to a crew from Channel 4 News, Ms. Sorabi said:
Why are they not doing the sacrifice? Always we women should do the sacrifice? Always women during the war and during the conflict, for a long period in Afghanistan, women sacrificed. So this is enough I think.
Ms. Sorabi was not invited to the conference in Kabul, the Afghan capital, on Tuesday.
Last year, conservative Shiite clerics, courted by President Hamid Karzai, pushed for changes to Afghanistan’s family laws to severely restrict women’s rights.
Source: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/female-afghan-governor-fears-taliban-deal