A recent Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign Language film, “Osama” is reportedly a powerful film about a young Afghan girl who is forced to disguise herself as a young boy in order to work to feed the family. The story depicts life under the Taliban, where women who found themselves with no male relatives to support them faced starvation because women were not allowed in public without a male companion.
A story (Go to For U.S. Officials, ‘Osama’ a Must-See Film) on NPR’s morning edition Friday reported that the Bush administration wants to publicize the film. The president and Secretary of State Colin Powell both saw the film, which is the first to be produced in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. I was alerted to this story by a woman who was outraged. She had known of the treatment of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban rule, having read a story (I’m uncertain if this link is the story she was referring to) in Marie Claire magazine in March 1996.
But what outraged this woman was the quote attributed to Powell in the NPR story. “You’ll learn why President Bush is right about waging a war on terrorists until there are none of them,” Powell said, according to the report. This woman’s letter Download file is very powerful.
If you want more information about the plight of Afghan women, go to the site of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Be forewarned that the site has disturbing and violent video and photos.