Afghanistan, Asia

The practice of taking young boys to perform as dancers at private parties is known as bacha bazi (literally, “boy for play”) and is an Afghan tradition with very deep roots. Under Taliban rule, it was banned, but it has crept back and is now widespread, flourishing also in the cities, including the capital, Kabul, and a common feature of weddings, especially in the north. The bacha dancers are often abused children whose families have rejected them. Their “owners” or “masters” can be single or married men, who keep them in a form of sexual slavery, as concubines. The bachas are usually released at the age of 19, when they can get married and reclaim their status as “male”, though the stigma of having lived as a bacha is hard to overcome. The Afghan authorities and human rights groups are aware of the plight of bacha boys, but seem powerless

Gays Are Not the Only Targets of Persecution in Afghanistan. “It was the beginning of an Afghan love story that flouted dominant traditions of arranged marriages and close family scrutiny, a romance between two teenagers of different ethnicities that tested a village’s tolerance for more modern whims of the heart. The results were delivered with brutal speed. “This month, a group of men spotted the couple riding together in a car, yanked them into the road and began to interrogate the boy and girl. Why were they together? What right had they? An angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned to death or hanged. “When security forces swooped in and rescued the couple, the mob’s anger exploded. They overwhelmed the local police, set fire to cars and stormed a police station six miles from the center of Herat, raising questions about

Westhampton, MA – September 5, 2009 Richard Ammon – GlobalGayz.com Let the Taliban have Afghanistan! They want a place to rule with primitive Sharia law so let them have that poor wretched patch so they can suppress people and move back in time—and in the process destroy the poppy crops and stop the warlords from seducing young trophy boys. It is not America’s job to interfere with a foreign country’s own internal fate, for better or worse. (Afghanistan is a lot closer to Russia, China, India with their huge armies. Let them keep an eye on the Taliban.) Let the Taliban rule there. Just as we have let the lunacy happen in North Koreaand Iran and Zimbabwe and Gabon and Kenya and Kazakhstan and Burma… If Karzai can’t win honestly we should not support him. If we are looking to revenge 9-11 we have failed: more American’s have been killed

Introduction With the fall of the Taliban government and its inhumane restrictions on normal life (including homosexual favoritism), old sexual traditions have re-surfaced as Afghanistan rebuilds its shattered culture. Two recent news reports form the main body of this story, one from the ‘Los Angeles Times’ (April 2002) and the other from the ‘Washington Blade’ (December 2001). Two more similar stories about the recurrence of Pashtun homosexuality, from the New York Times (February 2002) and Times of London (January 2002), can be found in the Afghanistan News & Reports 2002-04 . “Homosexuality and Lesbianism have no place in Islam. This issue is clear from the primary source of Islam, The Holy Quran. No Muslim scholar, Imam or a leader of a Muslim community can alter this injunction. A person committing such an act is in violation of God’s Law and should seek repentance before God gives up on him or

Last fall (2004) I found myself in Afghanistan, a nation at the center of the upheaval and change roiling the world. There I found Afghan men skating along the edges of gay life.   I’ve had a curiosity about Afghanistan since childhood that began with the 1979 Soviet invasion. Breshnev-era images of tanks rolling over mountains and the brave Afghans defending their homeland on horseback have stayed with me my whole life. Yet, I also live in New York, whose history is now forever linked with Afghanistan. A few days after September 11, I was on a Ground Zero bucket brigade clean-up crew. Our task was clearing debris from a fire truck on what had been the West Side Highway. It was only for one day, and I only had the opportunity to be there because my brother-in-law is a police officer and got me access. Surrounded by the acres

Afghanistan is a culturally mixed nation, a crossroads between the East and the West, and has been an ancient focal point of trade and migration. It has an important geostrategical location, connecting South, Central and Southwest Asia. During its long history, the land has seen various invaders and conquerors, while on the other hand, local entities invaded the surrounding vast regions to form their own empires. Since the late 1970s Afghanistan has suffered continuous and brutal civil war, which included foreign interventions in the form of the 1979 Soviet invasion and the recent 2001 U.S.-led invasion that toppled the Taliban government. In late 2001 the United Nations Security Council authorized the creation of an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). This force is composed of NATO troops that are involved in assisting the government of President Hamid Karzai in establishing the writ of law as well as rebuilding key infrastructures in