Before the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, on August 15, 2021, Amal was studying Law in Kabul, but her dream was to become “a great journalist.” Barely a month later, when the fundamentalists took away the right to education from girls over 12 years of age, this 24-year-old university student, who hides her real name, began to demonstrate in the street with other women. She then set up a clandestine school in her house. Seven months ago, she explains on WhatsApp, the Taliban broke into her home and threatened to kill her and her family. Then they whipped her. Amal sends some photos of her arms covered in bruises. This activist spent Thursday, 1,000 days after the Taliban’s ban on adolescent girls from studying, in total solitude, locked in the small room where she lives hidden and clandestine. Amal—who has scars on her leg from that beating—feels that the Afghan women are alone; that the international community “has done nothing” for them.
It refers to concrete facts, not words, of which the international community has been lavish in these almost three years. Not only have the Taliban not been forced to reverse a single one of their bans on women, but some countries neighboring Afghanistan, as well as Russia and, above all, China — which has officially accepted the fundamentalists’ ambassador — are taking steps towards the recognition of his Government. Even the UN has recently extended an invitation to what it defines as “de facto Afghan authorities” to participate in the third international conference on Afghanistan, which will be held in Doha (Qatar) on June 30 and July 1.
This call has scandalized the small groups of Afghan women who are protesting against what the United Nations experts themselves define as a “apartheidof genre”. These women fear that steps are being taken towards the normalization of the Taliban. The loneliness and confinement of Afghan women are such that these activists can only protest by taking photographs with their faces covered and holding banners in their hands inside their homes. Some, the most daring, sometimes venture into small street demonstrations that are repressed with great harshness.
On Thursday, the United Nations agency for children, Unicef, took advantage of the anniversary of the 1,000 days without secondary education for Afghan women to deplore another round figure: that of the 3,000 teaching hours that one and a half million young people in the country should have taken at that time and whose loss threatens its future autonomy. But that first volley, in September 2021, was followed by many others. Not only against education, but against the right to work of Afghan women, their ability to move freely and even to express themselves. The last of these attacks was announced precisely on Thursday, when an order from the supreme leader of the Taliban, Hibatullah Ajundzadá, limited the salary of all women in the country to a meager amount: 5,000 afghanis (about 65 euros). Regardless of your age, job position, experience and academic training.
In Afghanistan, there are no longer serving police officers, no judges, no deputies, no lawyers, hardly any civil servants, no journalists. The very long list of jobs prohibited to women also includes jobs in NGOs and UN agencies, with few exceptions in the health and educational fields, such as primary school teachers, a stage that girls can still complete. . Not so in secondary school or higher education. In December 2022, the Taliban banned Afghan women from studying at university. In April 2023, private academies where many girls studied languages or mathematics, among other disciplines, were closed, included in a list of subjects “not suitable” for women.
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Afghan women, and consequently their young children, are also prohibited from traveling without a male guardian and cannot enter children’s or natural parks. Neither in gyms, nor public bathrooms, nor even going on a picnic in the countryside.. The fundamentalists have closed hairdressers and beauty salons and have prohibited them from calling radio programs. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists reported in April that three journalists had been arrested for accepting calls from female listeners.
Between June 2023 and March 2024 alone, the “suffocating regime” that governs Afghanistan approved 52 regulations that violate the rights of women and girls in the country, describes a report by the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Afghanistan. , Richard Bennett.
At the end of March, Emir Ajundzadá announced on the country’s public radio and television another serious decision against Afghan women: the reinstatement of public flogging and stoning of women for adultery. Sahar Fetrat, an Afghan researcher at Human Rights Watch, then stated in statements to the newspaper Guardianthat the inaction of the international community explains that announcement. In his opinion, the Taliban have been testing their “draconian policies” one by one and seeing that no one “called them to account” have hardened what the report of the UN special rapporteur defines as a “systematic and widespread persecution” of the women and girls.
“We continue to hope that the international community will eventually match actions with words,” emphasizes that document, which recommends that the Taliban regime be denounced before the UN International Court of Justice for crimes against humanity due to “the systematic violations and widespread violations of fundamental rights” of Afghan women, “trapped” in a “system of oppression, repression and violence.”
The university student Amal cites a case that illustrates this cruelty against anyone who resists any of the prohibitions that weigh on women, especially the prohibition on them studying. “Some language academies in Kabul had recently tried to reopen,” says the young woman. The Taliban’s reaction was to close them immediately.
Zahra is the also false name of a 16-year-old teenager who was studying English in one of these centers, closed three weeks ago, explains her aunt, exiled in Belgium, by phone. The girl can’t even attend a sewing course she used to take because the teacher is so afraid of radicals that she has stopped teaching it. “Zahra is a very intelligent young woman who wanted to be a doctor,” says her aunt. Now, she “is very depressed.” Like many of her contemporaries, she points to the UN rapporteur’s report, which warns of the increase in “suicidal thoughts” among young Afghan women.
Without education or job prospects, the fate of many of these teenagers is cast. International organizations warn of the direct relationship between school dropouts, forced marriages and early motherhood – a risk factor for maternal and infant mortality – and the perpetuation of poverty. The children of many of these girls, upon whom the Taliban impose ignorance, will inherit their misery. The annual economic cost of the prohibition of Afghan women from working is about 934 million euros, 5% of the country’s GDP, calculates the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Indifferent, the fundamentalists continue trying to make true that saying of the Pashtun ethnic group that recommends that a woman only leave her house to go to the grave.
From her hiding place in Kabul, Amal deplores that the violation of women’s rights not only has not provoked intervention from the international community, but has become a blackmail tool for the Taliban to achieve “their political objectives.” The first, to be recognized as legitimate rulers of Afghanistan. Some voices, such as that of the Chinese Government, already defend that we must talk to them.
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