Several women’s rights activists went on a twelve-day hunger strike in Cologne this September, the last protest by Afghan women against the Taliban. The strike also spread to Norway and Pakistan. The activists demanded recognition of the “gender apartheid” suffered by women in Afghanistan and called on the international community to stop financial support to the regime.
The Taliban have banned women from public life with more than 50 decrees, and half of the Afghan population is now under house arrest.
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The human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) reiterates in a report that the treatment of women by the Taliban in Afghanistan constitutes a “crime against humanity” and must be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court (ICC). This was also stated by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, who visited the country in April and May to present a report to the UN Human Rights Council in July. “Women and girls in Afghanistan face severe discrimination that amounts to gender-based persecution, is considered a crime against humanity and could be described as gender apartheid. “The de facto authorities appear to govern with systematic discrimination, with the intention of subjecting women and girls to total domination,” he said.
According to the HRW report, Afghanistan is a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. On October 31, 2022, the court authorized the prosecutor to resume his investigation into the situation in Afghanistan.
Afghan women have repeatedly challenged the world’s silence in the face of the Taliban’s crimes against women. However, no country has responded decisively to these brutalities.
Since the Taliban came to power on August 15, 2021, millions of people in Afghanistan have been subjected to the group’s strict rules and are in a desperate situation. In the last two years, poverty has skyrocketed and many of the country’s residents have been forced to sell their young children and their organs to avoid dying of hunger.
The Taliban, an insurgent group that has been waging war against the Afghan people for two decades, has repeatedly committed acts that are clear examples of crimes against humanity and war crimes. They have killed and tortured thousands of civilians and murdered journalists, judges, activists and policewomen. They have threatened and oppressed women and harassed political, ethnic, cultural and religious groups. They have disregarded international humanitarian law and clearly violated several articles of the 1949 Geneva Conventions (which were intended to limit the cruelty of war) by deliberately carrying out attacks on civilians and religious, historical, hospital, educational, artistic and scientific centers. They also took hostages.
The Taliban movement is based on Deobandi Islam (emerged in the 19th century and of Sufi origin) and on its own ethnic ideology, and they often justify their behavior and actions in the same intellectual-religious context. Expecting reform of such an ideological system is neither possible nor likely. For this reason, the responsibility of the international community is to refrain from any normalization of relations with repressive and authoritarian religious tribal regimes that exercise state power violently and in an undemocratic manner, and to build relations with this group within the framework of international law and modern international values.
Without the right to work or education
Taliban laws and decrees severely suppressed women’s activities and social presence. For more than two years, women have not only been banned from participating in socio-political activities, but millions of them have also been denied the right to work and girls the right to education.
Several brave Afghan women have repeatedly taken to the streets to protest the group’s restrictive rules and chant the slogan “Bread, Work and Freedom.” The Taliban have detained dozens of protesters in their homes, forced them to confess on video that they received money and instructions from foreigners, and are now using it as propaganda.
The group has issued a decree that penalizes male family members if women do not wear the hijab, the headscarf worn by Muslim women, a measure that has caused domestic violence to rise to unprecedented levels. Since the fall of the previous Afghan government, this violence has increased dramatically both within the country and in society.
Two years of broken dreams
Nothing is more painful for Afghan women than seeing two decades of sacrifice, suffering and struggle against a patriarchal and misogynistic society lost. They express concern when they talk about a future that may no longer exist, about years of wasted effort and shattered dreams.
Afghan women began their fight for their rights and social status at home and in the family and dared to expand it to schools, universities and society at large. But all of this ended overnight with the return of the Taliban. Afghanistan is one of the patriarchal countries where women have resisted and fought against many challenges throughout history.
Over the past 20 years, Afghan women have fought tirelessly to normalize their presence in society. Many traditional and misogynistic ideas had declined over the years, but the return of the Taliban and their restrictive norms have made them dominant again.
Mysterious murders of women have occurred in Afghanistan over the past two years, and bodies of several brutally murdered women have been discovered across the country.
Afghan women have expressed their frustration with the situation, but everyone has forgotten them. Afghan women have repeatedly challenged the world’s silence in the face of the Taliban’s crimes against women. However, so far no country has responded decisively to these brutalities.
Women and ordinary Afghans express their dismay at the indifference of all nations of the world to the Taliban’s haphazardness and crimes, and their fear that the group will be recognized as an authority in Afghanistan.
Zahra Joya is an award-winning Afghan journalist and founder of Rukhshana Media, a Persian and English-language media company she runs from exile and which has launched a fundraising campaign for Afghan women journalists.
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