Yesterday, the Taliban authorities announced new restrictions for Afghan women, publishing a recommendation on behalf of the ministry for the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice, confirmed to the media by ministry spokesman Sadeq Akif Muhajir: taxi drivers can accept women on board the their vehicle only if they are wearing an Islamic veil and all women intending to travel distances greater than 70 kilometers must be accompanied by a close male family member. The indications were then disseminated in a booklet inviting drivers to grow a beard, stop work for prayer and refrain from playing music inside the vehicle.
The note comes just a few weeks after the ministry’s request to Afghan television stations to stop soap operas featuring women. In the same days the Taliban had destroyed every residue of female image in public advertisements, the few that remained with the faces not erased by the black paint.
Since taking power in Afghanistan last August, the Taliban have quickly restricted public spaces for women, as well as access to education. In most of the country, women have not been able to return to work as well as most secondary schools for girls have remained closed. Urged by foreign governments, by United Nations agencies, by numerous humanitarian organizations, the officials of the new government of Kabul keep repeating that the fate of women will not be the same as in the second half of the nineties, at the time of the first emirate, and that they will be granted a form of education and even post-graduate specializations. The times, however, remain vague. Meanwhile, international aid, which represented 40% of GDP and financed 80% of the Afghan budget, is frozen and the country, which depended almost entirely on those funds, is starving. Money is the lever that the international community tries to use to obtain the defense of civil rights, respect for the freedoms of women and minorities.
The money will be released, we read between the lines of the lukewarm negotiations, if the new government in Kabul proves to be different from the past and the status of women is, increasingly clearly, the main obstacle that separates the Taliban government from the international recognition it has. need.
It is no coincidence that the Taliban issued a “decree on women’s rights” at the beginning of December, in an attempt to be moderate and gain some confidence. The law governs marriage, states that girls should not be forced to marry, and regulates the right to property, arguing that widows are entitled to a share of their husbands’ assets. However, the decree does not mention access to education and work. Higher Education Minister Abdul Baqi Haqqani said that the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan is not against the education of women but against the “co-education of boys and girls in the same place”, and argued that the government is “working to build an Islamic environment in which women can study but it could take some time “.
It might take some time, but he didn’t mention how long.
Times remain vague on this too. The smokiness of the declarations led Afghan activists and groups of experts to harshly criticize the norms enacted so far, read as a sign of Taliban ambiguity, as the face that God’s students want to show to the international community, far from the real one.
The rights that the Taliban claim to defend are already enshrined in Islamic law, and the rules governing marriages apply only in the abstract, because even if marriage with a child under fifteen would be considered illegal, it is commonly practiced especially in rural areas. of Afghanistan, even more so after the end of the conflict, the withdrawal of foreign troops and the freezing of funds, because millions of families are in desperate conditions due to the worsening of the economic crisis.
Afghanistan seems to be, four months after the fall of Kabul, the terrain of a game without winners: while Western governments want to defend the rights of Afghan citizens and put pressure on the urgency of the Kabul government for money, from other the Taliban want international legitimacy and are adaptable to changes.
This game has continued to be played for months on the skin of millions of people, especially women, who are going through the harsh Afghan winter as the country sinks into the economic crisis, with a famine that looms and threatens to starve millions of people.
A game without winners, with only losers, which is also the lens with which to observe a country that has profoundly uneven characteristics. In some areas where education has long played an important role in women’s empowerment, such as in the commercial cities of Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz, the Taliban have allowed middle and high school girls to return to the classroom as long as they are covered. with a burqa. A decision that would show that Afghanistan is no longer the country ruled by the Taliban between 1996 and 2001, but the data tell another story, because less than half of the students have returned to school.
Many families are frightened by the uncertainty of restrictions, applied unevenly, more firmly in the South, and with greater concessions in the North, and there are still many who prefer their daughters at home for fear of retaliation, many think that allowing for young women to sit on the benches is not the same as offering them a decent level of education. Many think that it is not necessary to study girls, what would they do with a high school certificate, a degree in a country where the opportunities to work for women are disappearing?
Last week the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) published the Socio-economic Perspectives for Afghanistan for the two-year period 2021-22, the report highlights how the restrictions imposed on women’s work are aggravating the country’s economic shock.
Since August, only public employees working in the health and education sectors have been allowed to return to work and, without female employment, Afghanistan’s gross domestic product risks further reducing by 3 to 5%, i.e. a loss. of wealth estimated between 600 million and one billion dollars.
Veiled women, women canceled from advertisements, illiterate women. Women used as pawns in a negotiation played on their destinies. However betrayed. Even if they went back to school, even if they were allowed to go back to work, could Afghan women still call themselves defenses?
Hard to imagine thinking that the Taliban, while showing the accommodating side to the West, canceled the ministry for women’s affairs, eliminated all institutions that promoted women’s rights and canceled the law on the elimination of violence that protected them from abuse and from forced marriage, that is, they abolished all the mechanisms that protected them in a few months.
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