For Islam, life is a gift from God that only he can take away. Whoever commits suicide faces an eternal hell. For Arzo, a 15-year-old Afghan, that hell must have been preferable to living in the Afghanistan of the Taliban. This teenager, whose story was revealed by CNN, ingested acid from a car battery in 2023. She survived, but now she has to be fed with a gastric tube. Confined to their homes and subjected to terrible abuse, increasing numbers of Afghan women are turning to rat poisons, cleaning products, fertilizers or a rope to hang themselves, according to human rights organizations, to escape fundamentalists. In Afghanistan, there are no statistics on suicide, but a recent report by the UN special rapporteur for Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, warned of the extent of suicidal ideation among Afghan women and described their ordeal as “a apartheid “gender”. The same organisation, the United Nations, which published this document, has called for the third summit in Doha (Qatar) on Afghanistan this Sunday and Monday. The Taliban are invited. Afghan women are not. The violations of their human rights are not on the agenda.
This is the first time that the Taliban will attend a meeting of the so-called Doha process. In February, when the second summit was held, they had already been invited but declined to attend because the United Nations refused to meet demands that its own Secretary General, António Guterres, called “unacceptable.” The radicals then reiterated that the rights of their “sisters” – as they call Afghan women – were an “internal” matter and that they should be the only interlocutors of the international community in Afghanistan.
Local organizations such as the Independent Coalition of Afghan Women’s Protest Movements, and international ones such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Malala Fund [fundado por la activista Malala Yousafzai]believe that what was unacceptable in February is no longer so. In light of this precedent, these groups believe that the exclusion of Afghan women from the third meeting in Doha is due to the fact that the UN has finally given in to the Taliban’s conditions for attending the summit.
Even its spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, who heads its delegation in Doha, confirmed this Saturday in a press conference that, on this occasion, the group’s demands for Doha III had been “accepted.” The office of the spokesman for the UN secretary general has not responded to this newspaper’s questions about the reason for this change.
Before the Taliban took power in 2021, teenager Arzo wanted to be a doctor. On June 21, a week after 1,000 days of the ban on all Afghan girls over 12 years of age imposed by the radicals from studying, the top UN official in Afghanistan, Roza Otunbayeva, head of the Assistance Mission of the United Nations in Afghanistan (UNAMA), had confirmed the exclusion of women from the meeting by specifying that they would be consulted a day later, an announcement that led numerous Afghan organizations to launch a campaign on social networks asking the United Nations to reverse that decision.
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“The main meetings are set for June 30 and July 1, and women are invited for the 2nd, a deliberate act of lack of demand. [sobre los derechos de] Afghan women and their important contributions to Afghanistan’s future. The UN must hold the Taliban accountable for their crimes against women and girls, not the other way around,” said Sahar Fetrat, women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), in an email.
According to Otunbayeva, Fetrat emphasizes, “no one dictated conditions to the United Nations regarding the Doha meeting.” However, “it is evident that women’s participation and their rights have been excluded from the meeting and its agenda in an effort to bring the Taliban to the table.”
At his press conference, the Taliban spokesman said that the agenda for Doha III would focus on “economic issues and anti-drug efforts.” The UN representative in Afghanistan had alluded precisely to these issues, which, according to the HRW researcher, give priority to “private business, banking and the fight against narcotics and on which women will not be present to give their opinion.”
Otunbayeva tried to downplay the controversy by arguing that, when it comes to drug trafficking in Afghanistan, “30% of addicts are women.” She also defended the importance of “engaging in direct dialogue with the Taliban” in order to be able to tell them that “women should be at that table.” [Doha III]”.
These discussions about Afghans, but without Afghans, are one of the reasons why this expert believes that the UN “is managing the Doha process in a patriarchal way.” Afghan women, she adds, “don’t like the United Nations making deals with their oppressors, excluding them from important decisions about their own country.” In November, the UN had conditioned progress towards recognition of the Taliban Executive on improving the situation of women. In his report, Rapporteur Bennett recommends ending the impunity of the country’s current rulers.
Crossroads
The Doha process was an initiative of the UN Secretary General in order to define an international strategy to deal with fundamentalists. Its first meeting took place on May 1 and 2, 2023, and the special envoys for Afghanistan of the States in the region participated; international donors; USA, Russia and the European Union. Peace talks with the Taliban had previously taken place in Doha in 2019, in which the peace agreement was signed by which international troops withdrew from the country, which precipitated the return of the fundamentalists to power.
Since then, the United Nations has been faced with the dilemma of being consistent and cutting all ties with the Taliban, which it believes could result in a veto on the work of international organizations on whose aid more than half of Afghans depend — the most vulnerable, women and children — or moving towards the legitimization of a violent, misogynistic group that tramples on human rights, in the hope that they will moderate.
Only Nicaragua has established diplomatic relations with the Taliban government. China has done so in practice by accepting its ambassador in Beijing. With the UN invitation to Doha III, Laila Bassim of the Independent Coalition of Afghan Women’s Protest Movements points out via WhatsApp from Kabul, they are being “whitewashed and countries in the region are being encouraged to recognise them”.
The prospect of these former guerrillas becoming moderate is illusory, says Bassim, a 24-year-old activist who has been threatened with death by the Taliban. She explains that the fundamentalists are an “ideological” group that “does not believe in negotiation and only accepts its own law.”
Sahar Halaimzai, director of the Malala Fund’s Afghanistan Initiative, agrees. “We must not allow [los talibanes] use their cooperation as leverage to silence debates about their extreme violations [de derechos humanos]. And he points out that, far from moderating, they “have redoubled their oppressive and brutal decrees” against Afghan women. In March, they announced the reintroduction of public flogging and stoning of women for adultery.
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