“We are becoming extinct!” Afghan’s women’s rights activists raise global appeal for help.
A report that I cowrote along with Aekta Kapoor on a webinar organized by SAPAN in collaboration with Tasveer on gender aparteihd in Afghanistan. The report was originally published on eShe magazine.
https://eshe.in/2023/10/02/afghan-women-rights-activists/
Nekzad, who is founder of Center for the Protection of Afghan Women Journalists in Afghanistan, was among other journalists and women’s rights activists speaking at a recent webinar organised by Southasia Peace Action Network, in collaboration with Tasveer, on the topic of gender apartheid in Afghanistan.
She and other speakers shared the challenges that Afghan women have faced in the past couple of decades as the Taliban gradually gained back power and eventually took over Afghanistan after the US withdrew its forces in August 2021. “The international community has closed their eyes to the women inside Afghanistan,” Nekzad asserted.
But these women’s rights activists are not ready to give up. “Thinking that Afghanistan will not have a future is not acceptable for me,” stated Mahbouba Seraj, veteran Afghan journalist, radio broadcaster, educationist and nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize 2023.
“I am 75 years old; I will not live to see the changes we are fighting for, but you will and I want you to be steadfast and continue the struggle and raising the voices of the Afghan people,” Seraj exhorted other activists.”
“We are becoming extinct. We don’t exist anymore. The women of Afghanistan are disappearing every single day from the face of Afghan society,” she said with emotion.
The erasure of women
The Taliban’s 2021 resurgence has intensified concerns about gender apartheid in the country. “Adapted from the international law on racial apartheid, the term ‘gender apartheid’ emphasises that discrimination has been made the system of governance itself, such that the aim of government and public policy is to discriminate,” says a fact sheet co-authored by Karima Bennoune, former UN Special Rapporteur on cultural rights and professor of international law and human rights at University of Michigan.
“Gender apartheid is an erasure of the humanity of women. The apartheid framework highlights the duty of the international community and of other states to take concerted, effective action to terminate the practice,” the writers state.
Various international feminist organisations have appealed for governments worldwide to treat the Taliban’s oppression of women “as a severe, institutionalised violation of human rights and as an international crime”.
A statement by the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan endorses this view. “The Taliban’s large-scale systematic violations of women’s and girls’ fundamental rights in Afghanistan … [constitute] gender persecution and an institutionalised framework of gender apartheid,” it asserts.
The evidence is stark and disquieting. Since 2021, the Taliban have issued over 100 edicts stripping Afghan women and girls of their most basic human rights and opportunities – from restricting their movement outside the home, to diktats on clothing, education and occupation.
In over a dozen provinces, girls above age 10 are no longer allowed to pursue education. Women in certain provinces are banned from attending universities, visiting restaurants, medical clinics, graveyards, parks, gyms, and even the UNESCO World Heritage site, Band-e-Amir national park.
Unemployment, forced marriage, suicide
Wazhma Frogh, an Afghan women rights activist and peacebuilder who moderated the webinar, explained that things had begun to change for the better in Afghanistan in the past decade. “The media industry was flourishing but the Taliban’s arrival collapsed everything,” she said.
“Millions of struggling women and girls in Afghanistan dream that maybe tomorrow they will be able to go to school. Even inside the four walls of the home, they find ways to learn something that enables them to keep the hope alive,” added Frogh.
Kreshma Fakhri, an Afghan journalist, radio producer and volunteer manager at Zan Times, a women-led media organisation that focuses on human rights’ issues in Afghanistan, said almost 80 percent of women journalists were forced to leave their jobs after the Taliban takeover. Of those who remain, she said, 55 percent of female reporters are working without compensation.
Fakhri shared that, in order to work with the media, women are made to sign an agreement with officials from the Taliban-controlled Information and Culture Directorate, which strictly prohibits them from publishing, producing or writing any news or report that opposes or criticises the Taliban.
There has a been a huge spike in cases of child marriage as desperate parents marry off their young daughters, dooming them to further enslavement. Fakhri quoted a local report from Badakhshan, Afghanistan, indicating that 86 girls were forcibly married from just a single high school. Another report suggested alarming rates of suicide among women in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover.
Indeed, their lives are bleak at present. Women can no longer be issued driving licences. According to various reports, Afghan female staff are barred from working at the UN, women’s divorce rights have been diluted, beauty salons and karate clubs for girls have been forced to close, dental clinics run by women shut down, and female flight attendants fired.
Sanctions punish ordinary Afghans
But while expressing regret that the diaspora and international communities “see Afghanistan as a ‘conflict’ and not as a whole”, Seraj also cautioned against sanctions and embargoes that would effectively destroy Afghanistan, a nation of 40 million people, though the aim may be to punish the Taliban or reduce their power. “Don’t take away the food and medications and other opportunities from the people, because we will die,” she stated.
Bringing in the international perspective, Kathy Gannon, multiple award-winning Canadian journalist who covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for four decades, said that the international community must take responsibility and accountability for hiding the truth of what was happening in Afghanistan.
“It is unfair to punish Afghanistan by enforcing sanctions and taking their money away. The money that belongs to Afghanistan is being held by the US,” she added.
Gannon emphasised that there has to be room for discussion and engagement on how the world can help those in Afghanistan. For that, the international community must be present in the country. “And that engagement doesn’t mean your acceptance of Taliban, it means your support for the people of Afghanistan,” she said.
Gannon, who authored the book I is for Infidel: From Holy War, to Holy Terror, 18 Years Inside Afghanistan (2005), also added her view as an observer: “It has never been about Afghans or Afghanistan. It’s been about politics, about what the West wants or needs, what Pakistan or the region wants or needs, but never about the Afghans. And that has not changed.”
Many steps back for girls’ education
Educated Afghan girls – whether in Afghanistan or abroad – despair for the future of their peers.
Sola Mahfouz, a researcher at Tufts University, US, and co-author of Defiant Dreams: The Journey of an Afghan Girl Who Risked Everything for Education (2023), recalled that in 2002 when schools reopened after years of war, she was among the first girls in her neighbourhood to enrol. When the Taliban rose to power again in 2007 making their presence felt in cities and towns and threatening girls’ education, Sola eventually stopped going to school.
Despite constant disruptions and turmoil, she taught herself English at home through the internet, appeared for the SAT exam, and went to the US for college.
Sunita, a Kabul-based education consultant and women’s rights activist, who did not share her real name for fear of reprisal by the Taliban, explained that women workers in the government sector, including the finance ministry, had to face the most challenges, including giving up their jobs to male members of their families. The only occupations still open to Afghan women are primary school teachers, public health workers, and those in roles like cooking and cleaning.
“It’s unfortunate and ironic that, now, women’s organisations are dominated by men,” she remarked.
She also shared that female medical students who were scheduled to take exams were not allowed to do so. As a result, they are left without a degree or qualification despite years of study, making it impossible for them to pursue work in hospitals. According to some reports, girls are even barred from travelling to other countries with a study visa.
Despite the barriers, these women activists say they will persist in demanding justice until the end. “We need to have a strategy and action plan; we need to act in unity to ensure that the international community accepts the crimes of Taliban as gender apartheid,” states Nekzad.
She warns, “If that does not happen, this is like a virus that can spread to other countries.”
