Influential Afghan women's rights advocate says hope is lost

[The Straight Story]

Influential Afghan women's rights advocate says hope is lost

KABUL — Rangina Hamidi sat down with President Hamid Karzai inside his heavily guarded palace and waited for the question she knew would come.
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Her departure suggests the country, swirling in “360 degrees of chaos,” as she describes it, will struggle to find a new generation of leaders to confront the guns-and-graft ethos that afflicts Afghan politics and policy-making.

“I’ve lost all my hope,” said Hamidi, founder of Kandahar Treasure, a company that employs about 350 women who produce embroidered handicrafts. “You’d think that things should go forward in eight years. We’ve gone backward.”

Hamidi possesses qualities that would make her a natural choice to nurse Afghanistan’s nascent democracy toward maturity over the next three to four decades. Articulate, educated and worldly, she shares her late father’s sense of urgency for change and desire for the country to surmount its ethnic schisms.

But since her return, she has watched politicians and street-level power brokers in Kandahar, Kabul and elsewhere wield clout through extortion, threats and violence. Among many culprits — the Taliban, Pakistan, the U.S., ISAF, NATO, NGOs — she faults above all others the nation’s besieged president.

http://www.stripes.com/news/influential-afghan-women-s-rights-advocate-says-hope-is-lost-1.157428