Status: 08/15/2022 10:13 a.m
A year after the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, women continue to take to the streets to demand their rights. Little has changed in the situation: the Taliban have already achieved their goals in Kandahar province.
Two days before the anniversary of the Taliban’s seizure of power, more than 30 women took to the streets in Kabul this morning. They wanted to march in front of the Ministry of Education to demonstrate for seemingly banal rights: “For bread, work and freedom.” More than half of the people in Afghanistan are starving in the Taliban’s new Islamic Emirate, and many have lost their jobs. And after a few minutes, the demonstrators had to experience again that there is hardly any freedom for women.
Former Taliban fighters, who are now acting as police officers in Kabul, shot into the air for seconds. A cruel firework with which they want to demonstrate power. Panic breaks out. The Taliban arrest some women and also international journalists. They delete pictures and videos of the protest action from cell phones, keeping the women and media people in custody for several hours. Only in the evening do they release their prisoners.
“Bread, work, freedom!” demanded the women at a demonstration in Kabul, just before the Taliban opened fire on the crowd.
Image: AFP
Gender segregation – at the expense of women
Nobody was physically injured. But once again the rights of women and those of the media who wanted to report on it. A day later, Zainab, who was also at the protest, dared to give an interview: “When the Taliban took power a year ago, I lost everything: my identity, my freedom, my goals in life,” she says. “Many of my friends have fled abroad. But now we, who are still here, have to fight to be able to fulfill our dreams after all.”
Gender segregation in Taliban practice: women have to ride in the trunk of a taxi, a small boy sits in the passenger compartment.
Image: AFP
However, the dreams of the young women in Kabul do not match the ideas of the Islamists who seized power a year ago. Abdul Rahman Tayyebi says there are no human rights violations among the Taliban. He is the director of the Ministry for “Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice” in Kandahar province, which the Islamic Emirate installed to replace the former Women’s Ministry.
Are you concerned about the conditions in my home country? That’s your perspective, as a foreigner. But I live in this country and I want to design my house and my home in the way I see fit.
He is sitting on the sofa in his office, prayer beads in hand. Looking stubbornly straight ahead, he proudly announces that he has already implemented the instructions from the ministry in Kabul: “In our province, we have managed to ensure that men and women hardly ever meet each other outside of the house. Where women are, they are not allowed be men.” In practice, this means more: where men are, there are no women allowed.
Kandahar, heartland of the Taliban
In Kandahar, in the heartland of the Taliban, that was not a difficult task. In restaurants, families with women have to eat at the table behind curtains so that strangers cannot look at them. Since the Islamists came to power, the public parks have also been divided according to gender: Families are no longer allowed to picnic here or go for walks together. Almost the whole week only men are here among themselves – except on Wednesdays, then it’s women’s day.
The founder of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, was born in the province of Kandahar, where the Islamists first appeared in 1994. An arch-conservative, deeply religious region. Most women traditionally wear the burqa.
The most important decisions in the Islamic Emirate still come from Kandahar today. This is where the Shura meets, the Taliban’s highest decision-making body, which also decided on the new state structure in the Islamic Emirate last year.
Young women don’t want to give up
And shortly before the new school year started again in March in Afghanistan, hardliners are said to have voted against the girls being allowed to go to secondary school at a shura. But young women in other parts of the country, especially in the capital Kabul, do not want to bow to the Islamist guidelines.
For 20 years, almost their entire lives, they have experienced the freedoms of a republic that they no longer want to give up. “They won’t be able to stop us,” Zainab said at the secret meeting. “They’re afraid of us. Our protests are getting bigger, we’re not giving up. Afghan women are stronger than the Taliban.”
However, the women’s protest group in Kabul is a very small minority in the country. Even if the Taliban do not all speak with one voice, the hardliners have still had the last word since taking power.