Joan Smith: Why women lose out when men call the shots

'Women are the forgotten victims of war'

Women are the forgotten victims of war.

Women are the forgotten victims of war. In East Timor, wives of the resistance leaders were forced into prostitution by the Indonesian officers who occupied the territory for 25 years. In Bosnia, rape was used so systematically that the Hague tribunal, in a spectacular break with tradition, has recognised it as a war crime.

All too often, though, women who have suffered dreadful privations are ignored when the conflict is officially over; a Bosnian friend of mine, who runs an organisation set up to help rape victims during the war, now spends most of her time trying to assist women who have been beaten by their husbands, boyfriends and brothers. This is a rarely discussed side-effect of civil conflict, but economic catastrophe can bear down on women almost as heavily.

The pattern is repeated time and time again, yet the only people who seem to care are non-governmental organisations and a handful of feminists. Women's rights are consistently low on the international agenda, even though Western governments are not above using them for propaganda purposes. The Bush administration is dropping leaflets in Afghanistan which denounce the Taliban on precisely these grounds, while briefing journalists back home that women's rights will not be a major consideration in the post-war settlement. "We have other priorities," a senior official told the New York Times. "We have to be careful not to look like we are imposing our values on them." I'm sorry? Is he really claiming that it's OK to bomb foreigners but not to suggest that they should start treating women as human beings?

I'm sick of hearing the old excuse, "But we've always oppressed women in Afghanistan" or wherever. Women should have the same rights as men, no matter where they live. Yet the world leaders who decide these things balk at the idea, as though female emancipation – and human rights generally – are such outlandish demands that they can be granted only when everything else is in place. This is moral relativism of the worst sort, and the left is as guilty as the right. Mention the imprisonment of dissidents in Cuba and you will meet with furious assertions that Fidel Castro has provided jolly good hospitals; vaccination programmes first, freedom of speech later, is the squalid message.

A similar set of priorities is currently being proposed for Afghanistan, so the new report by Human Rights Watch on life under the Taliban is a timely reminder of why it isn't acceptable. It documents the surreal experience of a surgeon, Dr Amna Atmar. One of a handful of women doctors who are still allowed to practise in Afghanistan, Dr Atmar describes how she was harangued, in the middle of an operation, for failing to wear a veil. "The patient was lying there unconscious," she says, when a hospital administrator entered the operating theatre and complained that her hair was visible under her theatre cap. Dr Atmar had already made the first incision, but she had to endure threats and a 10-minute tirade about Islamic law over her patient's inert body before she could continue.

"Women's rights are human rights," my Bosnian friend insists. It is not difficult to grasp, yet the notion that they are an optional extra has become the default position. "Is this the future you want for your children and your women?" asks the American leaflet dropped on Kabul last week, next to a photograph of women being beaten by the Taliban. This gesture is an ominous sign of what we can expect when the war is over. If women's rights are again decided by men, they will be relegated to their customary place at the back of the queue.

I couldn't help being amused by Tony Blair's discomfiture when he was lectured by the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus. Mr Blair looked exceedingly glum, even though his aides tried to pass it off as a frank exchange of views. There is nothing to suggest the Prime Minister wants to hear other people's views, expressed frankly or otherwise, and he was clearly given very poor advice on this occasion.

More seriously, the misjudgement gave the high moral ground to the leader of a brutal regime. Syria is ruled by the Ba'ath party, an eccentric import of European fascism into the Middle East. Its only other success has been in Iraq, and their continued existence is a sad reflection on the absence of democracies in the region, a fact both dictators try to obscure by launching broadsides against Israel. In that sense, President Assad's outburst is further evidence of the disastrous consequences of the West's failure to get tough with Ariel Sharon. Until the US tells Sharon to withdraw to Israel's 1967 borders, visiting Western leaders will continue to be vulnerable to the kind of ambush the Syrian leader staged last week.

It was like stepping into flames, the novelist Nicholas Evans declared. The author of The Horse Whisperer told The Daily Telegraph he had suddenly realised that his new novel about men who are dropped by parachute to fight forest fires was a metaphor for his own experience. "You have to calculate whether there's going to be enough left of you by the time you get to the other side," he gasped.

Honestly, talk about making a drama out of a crisis. Mr Evans has not been under cover in Afghanistan or struggled through a burning building in search of survivors. He has left his spouse, as many people do, after a long marriage. If he has to be so self-aggrandising, perhaps he should stick to talking to animals.

An interesting fact about Iain Duncan Smith. No, really, let me finish. A Tory MP tells me that the new Conservative leader was occasionally greeted, when he was a junior army officer, as Iain Drunken Smith – not because he had imbibed too much, I hasten to add, but because he was a model of sobriety. Apparently Mr Duncan Smith didn't appreciate the joke. At least, I'd rather believe that than the awful possibility that he didn't get it.