An organization led by Malibu resident Mavis Leno seeks to help Afghan women, who are in danger of losing the rights they have gained under the country’s new democratic government due to a resurgent Taliban presence.
By Melonie Magruder / Special to The Malibu Times
One day in 1997, Malibu resident Mavis Leno attended a luncheon. A person sitting at her table represented the Feminist Majority Foundation, an organization that promotes social, political and economic equality for women worldwide. The person asked Leno if she had heard about the plight of the women in Afghanistan. And Mavis Leno’s career as chair of the FMF’s Campaign to Help Afghan women and girls was launched.
“Like most of the rest of the Western World, I was completely unaware of what the Taliban was doing there,” Leno said at a recent luncheon hosted by the Woodland Hills Rotary Club. “I didn’t even know if their regime was any different from anything in the past.”
She quickly found that it was.
By the early 1990s, Afghanistan’s war with the Soviet Union had decimated a generation. The Afghan people were exhausted and their country ripe for civil war. Out of the conflict between the tribal warlords and the Mujahideen arose a new, religiously conservative militia, which brought a measure of civil order to the country, but imposed a draconian and violent suppression of women’s rights.
“In 1994, there were women in Afghanistan who worked as university professors and doctors; professional, educated women,” Leno said. “Most of these women had to work to support their families. Their husbands and sons had been killed in the decade-long war with the Soviets.”
But when the Taliban seized power, it closed all schools for girls and forbade women to work outside the home.
“Here you had women staffing clinics who were literally told to lay down their instruments, put on a burqa and go home,” Leno said. “If they were the sole breadwinners with no male children, they were given special permission to beg in the streets. But they could not work. And they were forbidden to educate their girl children.”
With most of the working force’s productivity cut off, the country grew even more impoverished. Leno said the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam “flies in the face of the teachings in the Koran, which states that ‘Every person, high born or low born, commits a sin if he refuses education offered to him.'”
Most of the outside world was unaware of the Afghan women’s plight, and the Taliban deprived the entire country of any means of communication or information gathering. Computers and radios were banned; weapons were confiscated to prevent any populist uprising.
“I was reminded of something that happened to my father,” Leno said. “When he was a young man, he worked in the mines. One day, when he was working alone, there was a cave in. But, because he only worked part-time, he wasn’t sure if anyone would even know to come rescue him. That’s how I think the Afghan women must have felt.”
Leno quickly decided to lend whatever help she could to publicize the disenfranchisement of a country’s entire female population, but found that her experience with mainstream media and public fundraising was limited. However, her celebrity moxie had been honed by years of living with her husband, Jay Leno of “The Tonight Show. “
“I was feeling like a complete failure,” Leno laughed. “How could I get the mainstream press to cover this story?”
So, she took her famous husband in hand, scheduled a press conference for every NBC affiliate in the country and announced that the Leno family was donating $100,000 to the Feminist Majority Foundation for the cause of the Afghan women. Instead of the “serious” press, her story was picked up by E-Channel, People and all the tabloids. “In this way, we reached millions of American people we might not have ever reached,” Leno said.
The Feminist Majority Foundation’s first victory in the fight for Afghan civil rights occurred when Leno confronted UNOCAL’s CEO, who was then negotiating the rights to build an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. “How could UNOCAL justify handing $100 million to the Taliban when they were destroying Afghan society?” she asked.
While the CEO’s response was less than hospitable, Leno’s remarks galvanized the stockholders. The pipeline proposal was withdrawn and American citizens started to contact Congress and the State Department. The resulting publicity resulted in scholarships being developed for Afghan women, “face time” with President Clinton and growing international isolation of the Taliban regime.
Then came 9/11.
The U.S. response to Al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center routed the Taliban and helped the Afghan people establish a shaky democracy. Afghan women voted in their first election and even ran for office. They began to staff clinics and offices again. And Afghan girls returned to school
But once President Hamid Karzai’s new administration was sworn in, U.S. forces almost completely withdrew southward to Iraq and the lack of adequate security, funding or strategic aid to Afghanistan saw the newly spun societal fabric begin to unravel. “We were overjoyed when the Taliban was defeated,” Leno said. “We feel instrumental in making sure that restored human rights for women were a non-negotiable part of the new constitution. But the Taliban didn’t evaporate.”
With America engaged elsewhere militarily, the Taliban had time and means to re-form in the mountains separating Pakistan and Afghanistan, almost certainly aided by a militia still loyal to Bin Laden.
“The new Taliban are Saudis or Yemenis or Pakistanis,” Leno said. “And they are ready to reassert their power in Afghanistan.”
The growing Taliban influence has triggered insidious attacks on progress. The Feminist Majority Foundation has chronicled attacks on civilians and girls’ schools that have been bombed. In all cases, the attackers left literature, blatantly threatening the lives of anyone who dare oppose them.
Their methods, apparently, are effective. Many Afghan families are hiding in their homes, with women refusing to work and afraid to send their daughters to school. Leno is greatly alarmed at this turn of the tide.
“If we don’t help the Afghan people now, while their democracy is struggling, we will be back there in 10 years, fighting the same battles we just fought. And all these people dead, all this war, will have been for nothing.”
Leno said she sees aid to Afghanistan not only as a moral imperative, but also as a vital investment in America’s future security in the Middle East.
“They are a weak country, surrounded by large, powerful countries: Iran, Pakistan, India, China-all with nuclear capabilities. Afghanistan wants our democracy. We can help build them into a strong and forceful ally.”
Leno urges concerned citizens to speak up to their elected representatives, as well as directly to the White House. “The 21st century is a crucial moment for us as a civilization,” Leno said, “We have the capability to destroy the world as we know it, so every effort to help and educate this country will benefit us in the end.”
More information on this subject can be obtained at the Web site, www.feminist.org.