Determination defined: remembering an Afghan pioneer
By Morwari Zafar
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - 11:51 AM
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Portrait of Massouma Esmatey-Wardak (left), UNESCO Conference, Paris, France, 1959
"I was trouble," my grandmother said with amused satisfaction as she recounted tales of growing up in Afghanistan. "Right from the start, I gave the boys hell."
At first, the "boys" were cousins in Kandahar whom she harassed mercilessly, at the risk of a beating by her parents; then it was the men in the government whom she lobbied as the president of the Afghan Women's Council (AWC) and Minister of Education, and later it would be a group of Islamic fundamentalists whom she defied -- at the risk of death.
Massouma Esmatey-Wardak was not an exception, but an example of the freedom countenanced by women in Afghanistan. In 1959, at the advent of social reforms by Prime Minister Daud Khan under King Zahir's rule, she was among a small group of women who adopted the ban on mandatory veiling in public. Maintaining that Islam and honor were not contingent on women's seclusion, she advocated for women's rights and served on the Constitutional Advisory Committee that drafted the progressive 1964 Afghan Constitution, which enfranchised women and gave them access to education and employment. In 1965, her election to the lower house of the Afghan Parliament from the conservative province of Kandahar surprised the nation and further revolutionized the role of women. She was not the token female candidate, but rather the product of a popular vote to elect an educated and competent representative. Championing sweeping reforms that galvanized social and economic development, she became known for her steadfast commitment to women's rights, in face of societal pressures, as well as her pragmatic and frighteningly-tough character.
Massouma at a UNESCO Conference, Paris, France, 1991
As president of the AWC from 1987-1990, she made bold strides in gender equality that would characterize her leadership. Her accomplishments included income generation opportunities for women, the strengthening of women-focused civil service organizations, equal pay with men, and workplace childcare; improvements designed to integrate females, who had long been traditionally marginalized, into the public and professional sphere. She also worked to change child custody regulations that granted the father and his agnates de facto custody based upon Islamic law. By the end of her tenure at AWC, membership had expanded to 150,000 women in almost every province.
In the wake of her successes at the helm of AWC, President Najibullah Ahmadzai appointed Massouma as Minister of Education in 1990, though she was not a part of his contentious political party. Her appointment at a post formerly held by her husband, who supported her, was part and parcel of the political reformations in the country at that time. Under the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA), the country was progressing socially in a way that seemed incongruous with Islam. And more than ever, Massouma was determined to secure access to education and promote literacy for women. The efforts were condemned by most Mujahideen leaders, who perceived the developments as a communist endeavor destined to obliterate Islam from the country's core values, and promote sexual anarchy. [[PAGEBREAK]]
Women's rights disintegrated in the chaos of the civil war -- and the brain drain that ensued with the exodus of educated Afghans. My family left in 1990 at the cusp of the conflict, but my grandmother stayed until 1992 to hand over the Ministry of Education (MoE) to its new leader. After the Soviet withdrawal, President Najibullah agreed to transfer power to the Mujahideen in an effort brokered by the United Nations. Headed by President Mojadeddi, the former Jihadists took key ministerial positions in the new Islamic Afghan Government. The MoE was entrusted to Mohammad Yunus Khalis, a now-notorious commander and contemporary of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who led his own Islamic party, Hezb-e-Islami Khalis. My grandmother recalled the day she met him and his staff in her office; she in her tailored skirt suit, and he and his men in the traditional shalwar kameez, ridden with lice and spitting snuff under the carpets. Her key and the future of women's education rested in Khalis' hand.
For three months, Massouma lived alone in an apartment in Kabul with factional fighters fighting above her. She witnessed the atrocities that galvanized a period of depraved lawlessness during the civil war, as young girls jumped out of windows to escape rampant sexual assault by the fighters. Some sought her out in anger and were turned away by a former staffer, who remained loyal even as the threats to her life intensified. It was eventually through him that she sent word to Hamid Karzai, then the deputy minister of foreign affairs. He assured her security and safe passage, and issued her a passport out of Afghanistan. But it was no longer a country she recognized.
The Taliban dealt the final blow to the social development and women's rights of my grandmother's generation. The current Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan maintains a sketchy record of human and women's rights, and yet 50 years ago, even women in some rural areas had access to education and healthcare. Neither my grandmother nor my grandfather was born to wealthy families with vast social capital. They came from modest families that understood the value of education -- especially for women -- as a part of Islam, not divorced from it.
Born in 1930 in Kabul, Massouma was encouraged by her parents, who were teachers, to excel in her studies, which she managed to do even as the caretaker of her six siblings when her mother fell ill. At 17 she became a teacher herself and enrolled in college to study social sciences. Her performance earned her a scholarship to study education administration at a teaching college in Illinois. Together with her husband, who would complete his master's degree in physics at Georgetown University, she came to America in 1957 and returned to Afghanistan in 1959 with high hopes of modernizing the country.
Massouma holds hands with the president of the Women's Federation of Czechoslovakia, Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1988
Like most displaced immigrants, my grandmother was far removed from whom she once used to be when she died in 2007. The headstone that crowns her with a simple epitaph is a reflection of her unwavering strength today, and renders the irony of her demise from Parkinson's a particularly cruel one. An even greater dishonor to Massouma's memory would be if the achievements of powerful pioneers, like her, were stricken from the current discourse of social change in Afghanistan. They are a testament to the power and potential of Afghan women -- and that cannot be buried nor forgotten.
EXPLORE:AFPAK, AFPAK POSTER 11, AFGHANISTAN, FREEDOM, HISTORY, HUMAN RIGHTS, LAW, POLITICS, TALIBAN, WOMEN 
Who is the elegant woman sitting next to Massouma and how come Morwari Zafar neglected to identify her.
All Afghan women that put up with polygamous husbands and cruel in laws were pioneers whether they were urban and educated or rural and uneducated.
Those women were the unknown soldiers that paved the way for the likes of Massouma Wardak.
She was a great Afghan Woman who shined in the Democracy decade in Afghanistan. Afghanistan needs women like Masooma Wardak and her granddaughter Morwari Zafar , not women who attack accomplishments by others, just because their own relatives or tribes are not in it. Afghanistan needs men and women who beilive in unity and respect and cooperation to build a future democratic nation along with all other nations of the world.
I wonder if the elegant woman sitting next to Massouma Wardak was Sardar Daud Khan's wife. I wish somebody could identify her.
@ MahmuGhaznavi
Nobody is talking about anyone's relatives or tribes or discounting anyone's accomplishments. By the way, I am not a woman or a member of one of the minority ethnic groups of Afghanistan. I am Pashtun and I happen to hail from Kandahar, Wardak's home province.
@Morwari Zafar
You say: ".....the country was progressing socially in a way that seemed incongruous with Islam."
I am sure you are aware that Islam is not against education of women. You need ot high light this fact.
The culture keeps education from its women folk of certain is incongruous with Islam.
Oligopoly falls between two extreme market structures, perfect competition and monopoly. Oligopoly occurs when a few firms dominate the market for a good or service. This implies that when there are a small number of competing firms, their marketing decisions exhibit strong mutual interdependence. By mutual interdependence we mean that a firm's action say of setting the price has a noticeable effect on its rival firms and they are likely to react in the some way. Each firm considers the possible reaction of rivals to its price and product development decisions.
Stigler Hads defined oligopoly:
"As that market situation in which a firm bases its market policy in part on the expected behavior of a few close rival firms".
In the words of Jackson:
"Oligopoly is an industry structure characterized by a few firms producing all or most of the output of some good that may or may not be differentiated".
The term 'a few firms' covers two to ten firms dominating the entire market for a good. If there are only two firms in the market, the oligopoly is called Duopoly.
The analysis of duopoly raises all those problems which are confronted while explaining oligopoly with more than two rival firms. Many industries including cement, steel, automobiles, mobile phones, cigrates, beverages etc.; are oligopolistic.
Oligopolies may be homogeneous or differentiated. If firms in an oligopolistic industry produce standardized products like petroleum product, aluminum, rubber products, the industry is said to be producing under oligopolistic conditions. On the other hand, if the firms are producing goods, which are close substitutes for each other, then differentiate oligopoly is said to prevail. Mutual interdependence is greater when products are identical and it is lesser when goods are differentiated.
Explanation of Price and Output Determination Under Oligopoly:
There is not a single theory which satisfactorily explains the pricing and output decisions under duopoly. The reasons are:
(i) The number of firms, dominating the market vary. Sometimes there are only two or three firms which dominate the entire market (Tight oligopoly). At another time there may be 7 to 10 firms which capture 80% of the market (loose oligopoly).
(ii) The goods produced under oligopoly may or may not be standardized.
(iii) The firms under oligopoly sometime cooperate with each other in the fixing of price and output of goods. At another time, they prefer to act independently.
(iv) There are situations also where barriers to entry are very strong in oligopoly and at another time, they are quite loose.
(v) A firm under oligopoly cannot predict with certainly the reaction of the rival firms, if it increases or decreases the prices and output of its goods. Keeping in view the wide range of diversity of market situations, a number of models have been developed explaining the behavior of the oligopolistic firms.
Causes of Oligopoly:
The main reasons which give rise to oligopoly are as follows:
(i) Economies of scale: If the productive capacity of a few firms is large and are able to capture a greater percentage of the total available demand for the product in the market, there will then be a small number of firms in an Industry. The firms in the industry with heavy investment, using improved technology and reaping economies of scale in production, sales, promotion, etc., will compete and stay in the market. The firms using outdated machinery and old techniques of production will not be able to compete with the low unit costs producing firms and eventually wipe out from the industry. Oligopoly is, thus, promoted due to the economies of scale.
(ii) Barriers to entry: In many oligopolies, the new firms cannot enter the industry as the big firms have ownership of patents or control over the essential raw material used in the production of an output. The heavy expenditure on advertising by the oligopolistic industries may also be a financial barrier for the new firms to enter the industry.
(iii) Merger: If the few firms in the industry smell the danger of entry of new firms, they then immediately merge and formulate a joint policy in the pricing and production of the products.
The joint action of a few big firms discourage the entry of new firms into the industry.
(iv) Mutual interdependence: As the number of firms is small in an
oligopolistic industry, therefore, they keep a strict watch of the price charged by rival firms in the industry. The firm generally avoid price war and try to create conditions of mutual interdependence.
Characteristics of Oligopoly:
The main characteristics of oligopoly are as follows:
(i) Small number of firms: Oligopoly is a market structure characterized by a few firms. These handful of firms dominate the industry to set prices.
{ii} Interdependence: All firms in an industry are mostly interdependent. Any action on the part of one firm with respect to output, quality product differentiation can cause a reaction on the part of other firms.
(iii) Realization of profit: Oligopolists firms are often thought to realize economic profits. Whenever there are profits, there is incentive for entry of new firms. The existing firms then try to obstruct entry of new firms into the industry.
(iv) Strategic game: In an oligopolistic market structure, the entrepreneurs of the firms are like generals in a war. They attempt to predict the reactions of rival firms. It is a strategy game which they play.
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Following the Yalta conference at the end of WWII, Russia began to install communist governments in the countries of Europe. The United States took opposition to this stance, saying that those countries should be allowed to govern themselves. No military actions were taken by the United States to oppose these actions by the Soviet Union, however. The term "Cold War" was actually coined by Herbert Bayard Swope in a speech he wrote in 1947(I believe that was the year he wrote the speech). Our involvement in two world wars in the first half of this century had made the United States more insular, by which I mean we became less embroiled in large scale wars like WWI and WWII, although by no means did we keep out of conflicts altogether..
"Is rio orange war always comparateur forfait inevitable ?"
MaximB
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