Written by: Afsheen
After seizing power, the Taliban de facto regime instituted a system of gender apartheid, mainly placing the women of Afghanistan under house arrest. The Taliban deprived women of their human rights, including the right to work, their visibility, access to education, and healthcare, as well as restricted their mobility.
I am highlighting some here:
1. Women are denied education: Female students from secondary schools are banned to go to school. They are isolated, and traumatized! Even though female university students continue to study, their classrooms are segregated based on sex and Islamic dress (defined by Taliban) is mandatory. They are not allowed to talk to any men and their voices should not be heard by men who are not related to them.
2. Women are prohibited from working: Women are banished from the workforce. They have been told to stay home. This order leaves thousands of women out of employment. Women who are the only breadwinners of their families are begging on the streets for the survival of their families and children. Only women doctors are allowed to work but under the circumstances of gender segregation and a special Islamic dress code! Those women who resisted, demonstrated, and raised their voices against the Taliban, continue to be detained, tortured, disappeared, threatened with death, or killed.
3. Gender segregation denies women rights: Gender segregation is not only enforced in educational institutes and workplaces but also in public parks. Visiting public parks are programmed with three days for women and four days for men. That means that families cannot visit public parks together.
4. Women are prohibited from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a male member of the family (either father, brother, or husband). A female friend of mine who lives in Afghanistan said that she has lost her identity and now she lives like an object with no control over her life.
5. Women are also not allowed to travel alone from their cities or country without any male (family members) companion.
6. Women and girls are not allowed to be examined by male physicians.
7. Women lack legal protections against violence: According to Samira Hamidi a women’s rights activist from Afghanistan: ” Two female legal experts confirmed to her that there are no laws, legal systems, attorney offices, lawyers & judges to support women who need justice including the women who are the survivor of violence. With no legal systems in place, we will witness more domestic violence with no prevention.”
8. My body, not my choice but Talib’s choice: Since Saturday 8th of May, the Taliban imposed the harshest restrictions on Afghanistan’s women, ordering them to wear head-to-toe clothing in public. This decree calls for women to show their eyes only. A slew of punishments is announced if the dress code is not followed: first any working woman who violates this dress code, will be fired. In the second step, the male “guardian” of the woman will be summoned and could even be imprisoned if this dress code is not followed. From the very beginning of the Taliban’s rule, women were banned from wearing attractive brightly colored clothes (such colors are sexually attractive according to Taliban’s dogma), and high heel shoes, which would produce sound while walking (according to Taliban, man must not hear a woman’s footsteps). The bodies of women in Afghanistan are controlled by the Taliban and suffer from fundamentalism, violence, and misogyny. The bodies of women are believed by some people to exist only to satisfy men’s desire and lust, therefore, should not be decorated and revealed but to be hidden or covered.
The most painful part is the silence of the international community watching the Taliban burying Afghanistan’s women’s dreams and aspirations beneath so many brutal fundamentalist decrees which ban them from their fundamental human rights. Despite spending millions by the international community on women’s rights issues in Afghanistan for twenty years, the Taliban have ensured the failure of efforts and attempts of the international community. Taliban is a terrorist group that has no value for humans let alone human and women’s rights. Taliban are not going to change, and they will never change, even though the international community gives them international political platforms.
Let’s remember that the Taliban cannot repeat today what they did twenty years ago with the women of Afghanistan. We, the women of Afghanistan, will continue to stand, resist, fight and rise against the Taliban’s violence and fundamentalism. They cannot suppress, silence, and stop us! This is a reminder to both Taliban and the international community!