On March 8, 2022, the streets of Kabul are full of armed men. They will not tolerate women’s day demonstrations. A women’s congregation meets secretly in a bar. You let the journalist film you with your face uncovered. They know the Taliban intelligence services are watching them. “I do this for my three little sisters so they won’t be subjugated,” says one. “If we hide in our houses, they win.” It takes courage.
Many countries contest the title of worst place to live in the world; For women there is no doubt: it is Afghanistan. The only one that bans the education of girls from 12 years old. The woman there must be invisible, covered from head to toe, including her face. You cannot travel unless accompanied by a male family member. Almost everyone who worked lost their job. Many are forced into marriage, adults or girls. Arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances occur. Torture is common and goes unpunished.
This woman’s invisibility helped Ramita Navai, a British reporter of Iranian origin, between November 2021, three months after the hasty withdrawal of the last US soldiers, and March 2022, when the Taliban had consolidated their forces to tour the country on two visits capture the failed state. He wanted to see if what they said was true, that the regime had softened in search of international recognition. The answer is a clear no and is told in the documentary Afghanistan is not a country for women (in Movistar Plus+).
When she first visited in November, the former Women’s Ministry had already been renamed Virtue and Vice Prevention, but feminist graffiti was on the white wall. There was still room for some kind of protest, like that of the fired women officers. In March, on that wall was just a big poster advising how to wear the burqa.
Demonstration in defense of women’s rights in front of the presidential palace in Kabul in September 2021. STRINGER (Portal)
The journalist traverses Kabul and peripheral cities like Herat, where repression is even more ruthless. He knows women jailed for months for “immorality” with no judicial intervention, official records, or communication to their families. Even, and this seems to indicate that this dictatorship is still chaotic and sloppy, he goes in search of a missing young woman in one of the detention camps and finds her. Several of them say they were tortured with electric shocks from taser guns. The reporter also collects testimonies about girls who were forced to marry the Taliban, with the consent of their families, taken out of prison or kidnapped outright. He knows of victims of sexist violence who face imprisonment if they report it.
And, most valuable, Navai manages to get closer to resistance, that of women showing their faces in front of the camera (other interviewees demanded that their faces be pixelated) and refusing to give up. The fact that they surprisingly organize demonstrations is quickly put down. And that they have a network of safe houses to hide the persecuted women and their families while they find a way to get them out of the country. Before leaving, the journalist interviews a spokesman for the Taliban government and tells him everything she saw. And he replies, without flinching or looking her in the face, that nothing he says is true. The reporter, like the viewer, will do well to believe more of what she saw with her own eyes.
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