No lack of issues for women

www.theage.com.au Sunday 9 March 2003, 10:05AM

Hundreds of thousands of women all over the globe turned out to remind the world that they are still far from equal citizens, with a looming war in Iraq adding extra anger to many of their protests.

Events to mark International Women's Day ranged from traditional marches in many cities and towns to a rare conference in the Afghan capital Kabul, an exhibition of dolls representing women's professions in Singapore, an austere ceremony in the North Korean capital Pyongyang and a high-profile protest over violence against young women in France's poor suburbs.

Many of the marches played up the problem of violence against women, and some of them suffered violence, as in famine-hit Zimbabwe, where police beat protesters, some of them with babies on their backs, and arrested others in the city of Bulawayo.

There was also trouble in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, where firecrackers caused a stampede at a women's march, leaving one person dead and several injured.

A particularly poignant protest in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka focussed on the horrific problems of acid attacks against women, with a number of victims of the practice, often carried out by unrequited lovers, taking part.    advertisement       advertisement

In Russia, where International Women's Day was made into a major event by the former Soviet authorities and is often marked by gifts of flowers from men, protesters pointed to the prevalence of conjugal violence, which kills more women than a major war.

A non-governmental organisation said some 14,000 women were killed by their partners each year in the country -- as many people as died in all of the 10-year Russian war in Afghanistan.

Violence was also high on the agenda in France, where rapes and other attacks on young women in tough suburbs have recently been in the news.

A campaign sparked by the murder of a woman in a Paris suburb, who was set on fire by her boyfriend in October last year, led to a prominent theme in this year's protests, announcing that young women were "neither whores nor submissive".

In Poland women protested against the restrictions placed on abortion since the fall of communism, burning a copy of the country's law at a rally in Warsaw.

In Afghanistan, 3,000 women attended a conference in the capital Kabul, although President Hamid Karzai failed to show up as planned. Afghan women also got their first radio station, broadcasting mostly educational programmes.

In neighbouring Iran some 300 women took part in the first Women's Day march since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

In Argentina protests focused on the widespread hunger and misery since the country's economy fell apart, and in neighbouring Brazil, also struggling against widespread poverty, President Luiz Ignacio Lula de Silva asked his compatriots to do more to enhance the status of women.

Long after the first marches began in Asia and Oceania, protesters were still rallying in much of the Americas.

Several of the protests in the United States were due to have an anti-war tinge, with women rallying near the White House in Washington and others in San Francisco planning to project a huge anti-war symbol onto the city's Golden Gate Bridge.