AFGHANISTAN: The only female candidate in Afghanistan's presidential election is unhappy about the changes implemented in the country thus far, writes Kathy Sheridan in Kabul
Afghanistan's only woman candidate is a media magnet. The word is that she is accessible but that her campaign is chaotic. This is a grievous understatement.
Some of the world's most brutish television crews come to grips with Jalal's bewildering array of election workers, hangers-on, local students, professional women dropping by for a chat, and tribal elders here to suss her out, in the unlikely surroundings of a grim, Soviet-era apartment block in a Kabul suburb.
"Welcome to Dr Moussada Jalal's election office," says a notice in English outside the door. Inside they take your name and you sit. And sit. Some 90 minutes after the appointed time, we are shown into her office, a small living room with a desk, sofa and armchair. Jalal sits behind the desk, closely veiled and verbose, addressing four, grave, elderly men. They haven't a chance.
A soundbite, Afghan style, lasts for about 15 minutes. Jalal is the master. By the finish, they're grabbing any brief pause in the machine gun delivery to murmur a resigned "Bale, bale", meaning "for sure, for sure". But they seem to be impressed.
"Whether you are elected President or not," says one gravely, "you are the president to us, because we will not recognize a president who is elected out of money."
Unusually for Afghan women, she has no trouble looking a man in the eye and smiling. She affects surprise - in near perfect English - when asked about this.
"I am hearing this for the first time. From childhood, from my education in university, becoming a medical doctor, and a teacher in the faculty of medicine, I am each day the same as a man. I didn't know if I was man or woman. Only in the Taliban time, I feel I was discriminated against. When I hear no more women teachers in the university and I should go home...that moment, I realized I am a woman."
Now she is running for president and rarely strays from the well trodden paths of her rivals: corruption in government, tackling the warlords, creating jobs.
"We know this election is not fair and that there is a lot of money in the process. There are money questions, money suspiciousness because of unfairness. One of the candidates [Hamid Karzai, the outgoing president] is making his campaign in a helicopter. Me, I am walking. I have no car. But there is a candidate in the sky with a helicopter. I am going to the beggars, to the jobless, to the woman bakeries, to the people on the streets asking for support. But another [Karzai] is making the campaign with the ambassador of the most powerful country in the world.
"People have eyes", she shrugs, "they can see what is happening, they saw them on the campaign together."
She is scathing about Mr Karzai and his achievements with the transitional government. "No fundamental changes have taken place. Civil and administrative reform have not taken place. There is no parliament, no independent judicial power. Work is not being given to the workman and reconstruction has not taken place. There is corruption in government, all the way through - a lot of bribing."
She maintains that the power that should have been transferred to civil society has been given to the warlords - and that that is how Karzai has got his votes.
Her work as a doctor and for a time with the UN , designing and implementing employment programmes, convinced her that she could be a vote winner.
"I like to be helpful , giving jobs through agencies, not disadvantaging anyone. That was my character. So I was thinking that I can receive more votes than these candidates".
So far, she has not chosen to raise the issue of women's rights. Asked to say what distinguishes her from her rivals, she stresses her independence, her detachment from "any military force, party or organisation. I can have a representative government because my hands are clean", she says. Pause. "For sure I can do it", she repeats emphatically.
She bridles at the suggestion that she is not as radical or daring on women's issues as Mr Latif Pedram, the rival who got into a spot of trouble for advocating divorce for women. She says that she raised the women's rights at the emergency loya jirga just after the "international community" entered Afghanistan and basically she wants women to be equal to men in every aspect of life in Afghanistan, up there with the leadership, designing and implementing strategy.
Meanwhile, she says, there has been no fundamental change for women during the transitional government. "Yes they can work moving within the security area, but it was the same before the Taliban."
Given that she is a mother, a paediatrician and the sole female candidate in a deeply conservative society where the premises of one women's organization has been attacked nine times, one might expect that women's groups would be chanting her name. In fact, there is a strange silence.
One long-suffering group dismisses her as a "fundamentalist... She is against Karzai, against democracy and she once belonged to Jamiyet-e-Islam but you won't hear her tell people that because she doesn't want them to know it. She knows she will not be elected president. This is just to raise her profile and that of the other fundamentalists. They all talk about women's rights and democracy but it means nothing. The objective of all the fundamentalists is to get as many as possible into parliament in the spring".
Meanwhile, Jalal is back to one of her favourite topics - Mr Karzai and his security guard and his carousing with the monied Americans. She boasts that she can travel without security and people welcome her with flowers instead of rockets. "I am going to the houses of the people. They like me". Furthermore, if the elections were "truly free and fair and without any dictating or interference of any kind and the result of the election was the pure free will of the people of Afghanistan, I guarantee, I will win."
But she is getting her excuses in early. "The future of Afghanistan is being determined by financial power, military power, governmental power, media power... I don't have these powers. At all. And therefore I am not the winner of the election".