Afghan marriage law stirs protests

KABUL (AP) — The women shouted: “Equal rights and human rights!” A few feet away, men hollered back: “Death to you dogs!” and “Death to the slaves of the Christians!” Then some men picked up small stones and pelted the women.

More than 100 protesters — mostly young women — demonstrated Wednesday against an Afghan law they say legalizes marital rape.

But some 800 men and women staged a counterprotest and shouted down the group’s megaphone-led chants with insults and accusations that they were puppets of the Christian West. Female police held hands to create a protective barrier between the groups.

The law, quietly signed last month, says a husband can demand sex with his wife every four days unless she is ill or would be harmed by intercourse. It also regulates when and for what reasons a wife may leave her home alone.

Though it would apply only to the country’s Shiites — 10 percent to 20 percent of Afghanistan’s 30 million people — many fear it marks a return to Taliban-style oppression of women. The Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, required women to wear all-covering burqas and banned them from leaving home without a male relative.

Governments and rights groups around the world have condemned the legislation, and President Barack Obama has labeled it “abhorrent.” Afghan President Hamid Karzai has remanded the law to the Justice Department for review and put enforcement on hold.

A host of Afghan intellectuals, politicians and even a number of Cabinet ministers have come out against the law. But they faced quick criticism from conservative Muslim clerics and their followers, as Wednesday’s protests showed.

“You are a dog! You are not a Shiite woman!” one man shouted to a young woman in a head scarf holding a banner that said “We don’t want Taliban law.” The woman did not shout back at the man standing a foot in front of her, but replied: “This is my land and my people.”

Others were not so quiet.

“The holy book doesn’t say to keep women in the house like a jail!” shouted 18-year-old Faroq Yosouf.

But having chosen a risky spot to hold their protest — in front of the mosque of the main backer of the legislation — the demonstrators were outnumbered by those who supported the law.

The counterprotest even appeared to include more women. A few hundred Shiite women marched behind banners to the mosque to meet the men.

“We don’t want foreigners interfering in our lives. They are the enemy of Afghanistan,” said 24-year-old Mariam Sajadi, one of the many counterprotesters who blamed the anger over the law on meddling by foreigners.

Sajadi is engaged to be married, and said she plans to ask her husband’s permission to leave the house as put forth in the law. She said other controversial articles — such as one giving a husband the right to demand sex from his wife every four days — have been misinterpreted by Westerners who are anti-Islam.

On the other side of the shouting, Mehri Rezai, 32, urged her countrymen to reject the law.

“This law treats women as if we were sheep,” she said.