United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

About half the women in the specialist burns hospital in Herat, Afghanistan, are “women who had deliberately doused themselves in petrol and set themselves alight,” the Financial Times of London reported Monday.[1] -- According to Marie Jose Brunel from HumaniTerra International, many of the women are seeking to escape from intolerable domestic situations, but “are ignorant of the full horrors of burning to death and the lingering end that awaits them, or have been misled by Iranian films, she says.” -- “[S]ome women’s organizations are reluctant to fund big publicity campaigns to raise awareness for fear that it will just give women ideas about how they can kill themselves,” wrote Jon Boone. -- FURTHER BACKGROUND: On this subject, see also articles (in French) in Elle (Sept. 20, 2007), Le Monde 2 (Aug. 25, 2007), and Libération (Sept. 19, 2007). -- The last of these articles claims that there are two such suicides a day in the Herat region, and that three quarters of the women die in agony within several weeks of their self-immolation. -- In 2007, Grasset published Marie José Brunel’s 300-page book on this subject, S’immoler à 20 ans (‘Self-immolation at the age of 20’)....

HERAT, Afghanistan -- The hospital that Amina had been checked into a few days before is, by Afghan standards, one of the best in the country, built with international money, staffed by foreign- trained doctors and kitted out with modern equipment. She could not hope for better treatment.

Dosed with drugs and swaddled in bandages, she had only a small portion of her face visible in the emergency ward she shared with four other patients. The blistered skin on her face merely hinted at the horrendous burns covering much of the rest of her body.

While in other parts of the specialist burns hospital in Herat there were a few men and a couple of children who had had nasty accidents, about half its patients were women who had deliberately doused themselves in petrol and set themselves alight.

Mohamad Harif Jalali, a doctor at the hospital, says when women are admitted with 80 or 90 per cent burns there is usually little doubt their wounds have been self-inflicted.

The hospital shies away from giving many details about how they came by their extensive injuries but the story told by Gulran, admitted four days earlier, is apparently typical.

Dr. Jalali says Gulran had been treated like a second-class citizen, unable to get on with a new woman who entered the household after her father took a second wife.

The modern burns facility is by some way the most impressive building in the Herat central hospital compound, boasting sterilised wards, Western-standard facilities and 34 beds. The operating theatre is kept busy by the constant demand for skin grafts. But as Marie Jose Brunez [sic -- actually Marie José Brunel, a 56-year-old nurse who has been working in Afghanistan since 2002] from HumaniTerra International, a French organization that helps to run the facility and train the Afghan doctors, points out, you have to have enough skin intact for the procedure to work.

“For women with the most severe burns there is little the hospital can do, other than making them comfortable with painkillers and waiting for them to die,” she says.

Many of the women are ignorant of the full horrors of burning to death and the lingering end that awaits them, or have been misled by Iranian films, she says.

Neighboring Iran exercises a powerful cultural grip over Herat. “Iranian movies that feature self-immolation are very popular here, they make it look easy. The girls think they just have to put petrol on themselves and it will all be over in a second,” Dr. Brunez says.

Other experts say self-immolation is favored because of the ready availability of flammable liquids in Afghan houses.

Either way, some women’s organizations are reluctant to fund big publicity campaigns to raise awareness for fear that it will just give women ideas about how they can kill themselves.

Reliable figures on self-immolation in Afghanistan are thin on the ground. In 2006 the United Nations Development Program said that 106 women had deliberately burnt themselves.

But Charlemagne Gomez, who wrote a report last year for the German women’s charity Medica Mondiale, says the real figure is likely to be much higher.

“We can only measure reported incidents of when women are admitted to hospital. But often the families will refuse to take them to hospital because they do not want to bring dishonor on the family. And of course if they die, no one will know about it; it will just be hushed up.”

Opinions are divided on the reason women in Herat are more likely than their counterparts in the south, or the capital Kabul, to take such a drastic step. One theory is that, compared with the rest of the country, women in the city enjoy a relatively high level of education and are more likely to resent forced married life.

But Ms. Gomez says it is in fact a countrywide problem and is merely better reported in Herat.

One pattern that has emerged with reasonable clarity from the available data is that most are young women between the ages of 16 and 19. They have not had to put up with years of abuse but have recently, and unwillingly, gone to live away from their family as part of an arranged marriage.

“It is not untypical to find a girl, an 18-year-old girl, who has become the second wife of an 80-year-old husband,” says Dr. Bunez. “What sort of a life is that? They get beaten by their husband [and] mistreated by the mother-in-law and they have no way to talk to their families.”