Several women’s rights activists carried out a 12-day hunger strike in Cologne, Germany this September, in what was the last protest by Afghan women against the Taliban. The strike also spread to Norway and Pakistan. The activists demanded that the “apartheid “gender” that women suffer in Afghanistan and urged the international community to stop economic aid to the regime.
The Taliban have removed women from public life by issuing more than 50 decrees, and half of the Afghan population is now under house arrest.
The human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) affirms in a report that the treatment of women by the Taliban in Afghanistan constitutes a “crime against humanity” and should be prosecuted by 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 are suffering serious discrimination that could constitute gender-based persecution, considered a crime against humanity, and which could be called apartheid of genre. The authorities de facto “They seem to be governing using 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 ICC. On October 31, 2022, the court authorized the prosecutor to resume his investigation into the situation in Afghanistan.
Afghan women have time and again questioned the world’s silence in the face of the crimes committed by the Taliban against women. However, no country has reacted decisively to these brutalities.
Since August 15, 2021, when the Taliban regained power, millions of people in Afghanistan have been subjected to the group’s harsh rules and face a desperate situation. In the last two years, poverty has skyrocketed and many inhabitants of the country have been forced to sell their young children and their organs to avoid dying of hunger.
The Taliban, a group of insurrectionists who have waged war against the Afghan people for two decades, have time and again committed acts that constitute 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 ignored international humanitarian law and clearly violated several articles of the 1949 Geneva Conventions (designed to limit the barbarity of war), deliberately perpetrating attacks against civilians and religious, historical, hospital, educational, artistic and scientific centers. They have also taken 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 a reform of such an ideological system is neither possible nor probable. For this reason, the international community has the responsibility to refrain from any normalization of relations with repressive and authoritarian religious-tribal regimes that exercise state power by force and in an undemocratic manner, as well as to establish relations with the group in the framework of international law and modern international values.
Without the right to work or education
Under Taliban laws and decrees, women’s activities and social presence have been severely repressed. For more than two years, not only have women been prohibited from engaging in socio-political activities, but millions of them have also been deprived of the right to work and girls of the right to education.
Several brave Afghan women have repeatedly taken to the streets to protest against the group’s restrictive rules, chanting 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 funding and instruction from foreigners, and are now using it as propaganda.
The group has issued a decree punishing male members of families if women do not wear the hijab, the headscarf worn by Muslim women, a measure that will increase domestic violence to unprecedented levels. Since the fall of the previous Afghan government, this violence has increased dramatically, both at home and in society.
Two years of broken dreams
Nothing is more painful for Afghan women than seeing how two decades of sacrifice, suffering and struggle against a patriarchal and misogynistic society are lost. They express their concern when they speak of a future that may no longer exist, of years of wasted efforts and broken dreams.
Afghan women began their fight for their rights and social status at home and in the family and dared to extend it to schools, universities and the entire society. But all 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 thoughts had been declining over the years, but the return of the Taliban and their restrictive norms have made them prevalent again.
Afghanistan has witnessed mysterious murders of women over the past two years and bodies of several brutally murdered women have been discovered throughout the country.
The Afghan women have expressed their frustration at the situation, but everyone has forgotten about them. Afghan women have time and again questioned the world’s silence in the face of the crimes committed by the Taliban against women. However, so far no country has reacted decisively to these brutalities.
Women and ordinary Afghans express their dismay at the indifference of all the nations of the world in the face of the Taliban’s lack of plans and crimes, and their fear that the group will be recognized as the authority in Afghanistan.
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