The Prison of the Veil.(Taliban rules over Afghan women)(Brief Article)

She timidly cries out to a passing foreigner on a Kabul street: "Sir, I am not a beggar." Her face is hidden beneath a burqa, the head-to-toe shroud all Afghan women must wear in public. Even an accidental flash of ankle can get them beaten or thrown in jail by the religious police. Talking to strange men is likewise forbidden--but the ruling Taliban has given the alms-seeker no choice."I was a schoolteacher," she pleads. "I need money for bread."

After the extremist group seized the capital in 1996, one of its first official acts was to ban most women from working outside the home. The order was heartless: more than 20 years of bloodshed have left Kabul with 40,000 war widows--not to mention the thousands of other women whose husbands were permanently disabled in the fighting or have fled the country. Now thousands of former doctors, teachers and other women depend on charity to keep themselves and their families from starving.

No other country subjects women to such systematic cruelty, human- rights activists say. Afghan refugee camps in Iran and parts of rural Pakistan come close, says Catherine Bertini, executive director of the World Food Program, but Afghanistan is No. 1. "Poor women have a very difficult time everywhere," Bertini adds. "But there's nowhere that's worse than Afghanistan." Abigail Spring, a fellow WFP official, agrees: "I don't know anywhere else where it's government policy for women not to have rights."

Violent crime ran wild until the Taliban took over. But many women say the Islamic group's brand of law and order is even worse. "They [the Taliban] are barbaric and mentally sick," says a former teacher who seldom dares to leave her house now. "I felt much better even in the days when there was total chaos and rockets rained over the city." Human Rights Watch says women, particularly members of religious and ethnic minorities, have been raped or sold as slaves by Taliban commanders. Recently another ...