They gave her a bulletproof vest. “If they shoot here, nothing will happen to me” – Aryana Sayeed turns to the camera, points to her chest and pulls the vest on before she makes her way to the TV studio. “Unless they shoot me in the head right now.” Sayeed, 36, is a singer, presenter, was a juror on “The Voice of Afghanistan”. Until August 15, 2021, when the Taliban came to power. Since then, women like her have disappeared from the public eye. Sayeed is one of the women from Afghanistan to whom the Munich artist and activist Nahid Shahalimi has now dedicated a book and a short film. She conducted video interviews, had photos and diary notes sent to her; some of the women were already on the run by then. But they don’t want to be silent.
“There are hundreds of women who have shaped this country in the past 20 years,” says Nahid Shahalimi on this snowy November morning as she sits in the office of her Munich publisher Elisabeth Sandmann. “Politicians, doctors, journalists and judges, artists, entrepreneurs, engineers. We must not allow their life’s work to be simply destroyed.” Hence this book, which was written a few weeks after the coup, entitled “We are still there”.
There is Fauzia Kofi, most recently a member of parliament. “In the first round of the candidacy, people talked about how I dressed, who I talked to, what my scarves looked like or whether I was wearing lipstick,” she says. In the end, she became Vice-President of Parliament. She introduced laws to protect women and negotiated with Taliban representatives in Doha. Now she is in exile.
Fauzia Kofi, 46, was one of four women in the 2020 peace negotiations with the Taliban in Doha.
There is Razia Barakzai, who studied political science. In the days after August 15, she called on women in Kabul to protest. She said goodbye to her family that morning, not knowing whether she would come back in the evening, and stood in front of the armed men with banners. She now lives hidden in an unknown place.
Fatimah Hossaini, photographer and journalist, was able to leave Afghanistan.
(Photo: oh)
There is the young journalist Fatimah Hossaini, who sent Shahalimi a photo diary of her last days in Kabul. On Saturday she met friends in a bar and made plans for the coming week – and when she woke up on Sunday, the Taliban were in the streets. Her future was burst like a soap bubble, her life threatened. Because she is a woman. Because she has a camera. She fought her way through the crowd to the airport and was able to leave on a French military plane. Her friends stayed behind. The horror is written on her face.
Since 2017, she has not been able to travel to her home country
It has been almost four months since the coup in Kabul, and the despair grows with each passing day. Nahid Shahalimi speaks quickly, keeps checking her cell phone, there are news from Kabul, Herat, Montreal and Washington. She was eleven years old when her mother fled Afghanistan with her in 1985, via Pakistan to Canada. She studied art and came to Munich 20 years ago, where her two daughters were born. But she never let go of Afghanistan. Since 2011 she has traveled to the country of her childhood again and again, often several times a year, conducting interviews, taking photos and filming. In 2017 her book “Where courage carries the soul. We courageous women in Afghanistan” was published. After that, she could no longer enter the country. Too dangerous.
But the many others who fought for a little more freedom every day, who put on bulletproof vests, endured the harassment, survived the attacks and just carried on the next day – “We must not leave all these women alone now,” says Shahalimi. “We are not victims. We do not need regrets, we need solidarity.”
And it’s not that they didn’t warn. Shahalimi picks up her smartphone and starts a film. Maryam Safi appears on March 8, 2018, in front of the United Nations Security Council in New York. There sits a woman with short hair and a jacket and warns in clear words against the advance of the Taliban in the countryside. Safi taught politics at the American University of Afghanistan, wrote empirical studies on the development of civil society, and negotiated with Taliban representatives himself. Before the UN, she reported on violence against women and children, and on the growing influence of the Haqqani network, a particularly radical wing of the fundamentalists.
Nahid Shahalimi, 48, fled Afghanistan with her mother when she was eleven. Today she lives in Munich.
(Photo: Isa Foltin / Getty Images)
Nahid Shahalimi was also there on that day in New York, as well as in Brussels, in Geneva, whenever the situation in Afghanistan came up. “But we fell on deaf ears.” Women were seen as a nuisance at the conferences. Instead, the Americans were already negotiating a peace process with the Taliban. “And what did it lead to? There is no peace process without women.”
The 48-year-old looks briefly out of the window, where thick snowflakes are drifting by. “So many ‘experts’ have been talking about us and our country. For years. But they get first-hand expertise from us.”
“We don’t have to learn from the West what self-determination and feminism mean”
There was a quota for women in the Afghan parliament; the proportion of women MPs was almost as high as in the German Bundestag: almost 30 percent. Committed politicians were regularly seen on television. Journalists shot reports about the progress in the country. “But images of bombs and tanks, of bearded men and veiled women were repeated in foreign media,” says Shahalimi. Sometimes during the course of this conversation, tears fill her eyes.
Negotiations are now being resumed in Doha. “And again there are white men sitting in golden five-star hotels and talking to other men who were recently among the most wanted terrorists. But it’s also about our bodies, our freedom, our lives.” The Taliban are dependent on international recognition, “so force them to accept a few women at the table.” It is not about bringing a western lifestyle to Afghanistan. Many Afghan women did not want to take off their headscarves. “Why should it? Democracy doesn’t mean giving up one’s cultural identity. We don’t have to learn from the West what self-determination and feminism mean.”
She pauses for a moment and then suddenly says: “But it’s not just about Afghanistan. Look at Poland, Hungary, Texas, Turkey. We’re moving backwards.” The Paris mayor was sued for employing too many women. Shahalimi gives a short laugh. “That would raise a lot of money if all their predecessors were sued for hiring only men.”
Your network grows. And they will be at the door again at the next Afghanistan podiums. But they will no longer just allow themselves to be marginalized. “Perhaps women are now being forced back into the dark, hidden from view, their talents withheld from their country and their communities; but what they already know can no longer be erased,” writes Margaret Atwood in the foreword to Shahalimi’s book.