Restrictions on women’s rights have expanded in
Afghanistan since U.S. forces withdrew from the country five
years ago, ceding control to the Taliban in the process.
Afghan women are banned from attending schools and gyms,
books written by women are removed from libraries, doctors
and nurses are unable to practice, and child marriage rates
have increased. Wives have been rendered legally subordinate
to their husbands, and women are required to stay silent in
public. “Women and girls of Afghanistan are suffering the
most darkest situation in the world,” says Negina Yari, an
Afghan women’s rights activist living in exile in Germany,
who discusses the impacts of what some advocacy groups are
characterizing as “gender apartheid,” as well as the
effects of regional diplomatic normalization on the
Taliban’s political influence.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript.
Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN
SHAIKH: In Afghanistan, this month marks five years
since the Taliban returned to power and the U.S. withdrew
forces. Since retaking control in August 2021, the Taliban
have stripped away the rights of women and girls, with
UNESCO reporting some 2.5 million girls are now barred from
secondary and higher education. The United Nations warns
more than half of women’s organizations still working in
Afghanistan could cease operations within the next year due
to funding problems.
Human rights organizations
describe the Taliban’s sweeping restrictions as a
systematic erasure of women and girls from public life, with
some characterizing the system as gender apartheid. The
restrictions extend even beyond schools and workplaces.
Under the Taliban, Afghan women are banned from outdoor
parks, among other spaces, and books written by women have
been removed from libraries. Women venturing beyond the home
must be accompanied by a male guardian, and so-called
morality laws curtail their rights to speak, sing or recite
out loud in public.
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AMY GOODMAN:
Women have also been stripped of their protections against
domestic violence, rendered legally subordinate to their
husbands, and forced to remain in unwanted marriages. The
rollback of women’s rights, coupled with deepening
poverty, has also led to a surge of child marriages in
Afghanistan.
This is the permanent representative of
Denmark to the United Nations, Christina Markus
Lassen.
CHRISTINA MARKUS LASSEN: The
Taliban’s systematic repression of women and girls has
become a defining feature of the current system. Afghanistan
remains the only country in the world where girls are banned
from secondary and higher education. The grave abuse of the
right to education is also having far-reaching consequences
for Afghanistan’s economic development and provision of
essential public services.
NERMEEN
SHAIKH: That was the Danish representative at the
United Nations.
Malala Yousafzai, winner of the 2014
Nobel Peace Prize, is also speaking out on the fifth
anniversary of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. In 2012,
she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman who boarded her
school bus in Mingora in the southwest of Pakistan.
Yousafzai survived serious wounds and now continues to
campaign around the world for girls’ education. This is
Yousafzai.
MALALA YOUSAFZAI: Five
years ago, women were doctors, engineers, athletes and
artists. Now they are banned from university, from work,
even from going to public parks. Girls who once raced to
school in the morning are now confined to their homes,
banned from education. The Taliban have enforced a system of
segregation and domination, a gender apartheid, on millions
of women and girls.
And today, the Taliban are
celebrating. But while they are marching in military parades
and firing weapons, Afghan women are organizing. They are
building a movement and working with governments, from
Mexico to Spain to South Africa, to ensure justice for women
and girls in Afghanistan. Today, I want the Taliban to know
that they have nothing to celebrate, because we will hold
them accountable for their crimes, and we will make sure
gender apartheid will not be tolerated anywhere in the
world.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Malala
Yousafzai, winner of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.
Well,
for more, we’re joined by Negina Yari. She is a peace
activist, longtime women’s rights defender from
Afghanistan. She’s the executive director of Window for
Hope organization, forced to leave Afghanistan in 2022, just
months after the Taliban takeover five years ago, has been
organizing aid campaigns from exile in Germany. She also
serves on the board of the Nobel Women’s Initiative, which
Nermeen is also on the board of.
Negini Yari, welcome
to Democracy Now! Thanks so much for being with us.
It’s been five years since the Taliban retook power in
Afghanistan. Talk about what’s happened, particularly to
the women, half the population of Afghanistan, women and
girls.
NEGINA YARI: As-salamu
alaykum. Hi, everyone. Good morning. Thank you so much
for inviting me and giving this opportunity to share the
messages and also the reality of today’s women in
Afghanistan.
It’s really hard to say that it’s
almost five years. It is not only five years, to say it in a
number. It is the five years that the women of Afghanistan
are banned to attend a school, to attend a secondary
education, to attend a university, to become nurses, to
become doctors, to become a lawyer. In the last five years,
almost more than hundred orders are directly came from the
emir of the Taliban, from Kandahar, and more than 25 of
those orders are targeted women and girls in Afghanistan.
And it started from the orders to ban rights to education,
rights to work, rights to sport, rights to attend a gym,
rights to social movements, and even in some of the
provinces women are banned to attend the male doctors. While
the education is banned, no one is allowed to attend the
university. And then they are putting ban on women to visit
the male doctors, and especially the male dentists, and
including the civil society and media space, which is very
shrinking.
In Kandahar recently, the voice of women
are banned, and they are not allowed to speak in the radio
and not allowed to show their faces in the television, as
well. Not limited to that, but also in the bigger city, a
female who are working at the media and the television, they
have to put face masks, and they are not allowed to appear
their full faces.
And it also comes to the social
movements of the women, as well. You know that in couple of
weeks ago, the Taliban and the morality law forces, they
have went to the street in Herat and also in Kabul, and they
detained more than hundred of women from the streets. They
bring the excuse that it’s because of the hijab, which is
not the reality, which is not the truth. But it’s all
coming again to bargaining the rights of women in a
country.
And they see that how the international
community attention are shifted from Afghanistan. That’s
why they are pressurizing more on women. And unfortunately,
today, Afghanistan and women and girls of Afghanistan are
suffering the most darkest situation in the
world.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Negina, as
you said, you know, women are prevented from — women and
girls are prevented from seeing male doctors, and now women
and girls are prevented from getting an education. So, at a
certain point, if this continues, women and girls will
simply have no access to medicine. So, if you could talk
about that, and also, overall, what the condition is, given
funding cuts and spiraling poverty in Afghanistan, what is
happening to the health conditions of women and
girls?
NEGINA YARI: So, thank you,
Nermeen, for the question.
Honestly, the situation of
the health crisis in Afghanistan is getting increased, and
especially it was started from the climate change, you know,
which is happening in the country, with the recent
earthquake in Herat and then in Paktia and Kunar and
Nuristan provinces. Most of the women who were needed to
visit the clinics, but, unfortunately, in those four
districts, the female nurses were not allowed to travel
without mahram. And in most of the project,
especially the health project, which was funded by
international organization, due to cut of funding, they were
not allowed even to support everyone’s male cost. That’s
why even the female nurses were not able to visit those in
most of those provinces that the women were affected by the
earthquake and also by the floods.
And recently, one
of the organizations, which is named DROPS, they also
conducted a survey with more than thousands of women in
Afghanistan. They mentioned that not only limited to the
nurses, the lack of access, but it is also a big percentage
of lack of access to the female doctors, as well, because it
has different causes and different results. And recently, we
noticed that a big number of female nurses have been
graduated and even big number of female doctors have
graduated from university, but the Taliban are not allowing
them to attend their final examination and to get their
certificate.
So, it is — it’s a very shrinking
situations, and it’s not limited to the health situations.
It comes from the medical services, but it’s also the
mental health crisis, as well. So, women and girls right now
in Afghanistan are facing a crisis of the mental health, as
well, because the psychosocial support in Afghanistan, the
pressure which exists, and including every ban that the
Taliban are implementing at different city level, it all
causes the mental health situation of women in Afghanistan,
as well.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Negina,
you mentioned the term mahram, so just to clarify
what that means, it’s effectively that women must have a
mahram accompanying them in public. That’s someone
whom they’re permanently barred from marriage through
blood ties, legal marriage or breastfeeding.
So, I
wanted to now ask you about the broader historical context
in which the Taliban came to power, starting with the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 and then the U.S.
backing of the Afghan resistance, the mujahideen. How did
the Taliban come out of that history?
NEGINA
YARI: So, overall, it’s a — it’s a very
geopolitical history [inaudible] to Afghanistan and very
relevant to the counternarcotics and also to the security of
the geopolitical situation of Afghanistan. But, overall,
what we can say, that the Taliban is a political and armed
group, and they hold the extremist and jihadist
belief.
During last two decades of democratic regime
in Afghanistan, the Taliban was — fought with the NATO and
U.S. Army in Afghanistan, and they were also killed more
than 56,000 of Afghan civilian, as well, and including the
special forces of republic government, as well. So, but it
was continued — like, this fight and war was continued
’til 2019 to ’18, and then the Doha process and the Doha
talks was started. It was continued ’til 2000 — almost
2021, but the agreement was signed in 2020. In February
2020, the Doha agreement was signed, and the Taliban take
over in August 2021.
But still, the process was not
very clear to the people of Afghanistan, because no one know
and no one had access to the information that, really, in
which purpose or in which kind of government the Taliban are
coming and taking over Afghanistan. Even as I was a civil
society activist, I was in Afghanistan. We did a lot of
campaign for women participation in Doha process or in peace
talks, and even we didn’t have this information that,
really, how Taliban will get the power in Afghanistan. It
goes to be a share power; it goes to be hundred power to the
Taliban.
But now what Taliban is claiming, that we
have been fighting more than two decades in Afghanistan, and
now we take over, and we have all the power. And that’s
why, with the support of regional countries, they are
becoming more powerful, and especially why recently —
it’s almost not recently, but more than years — that the
China and Russia has recognized them and give them the
political accreditations. That’s why they are feeling more
powerful at the regional level, and they are starting
building diplomatic relationship with some of regional
countries and, beyond that, to the European countries, as
well. They send the diplomats to the Norway, to the
Germany.
So, this is how this time the Taliban are
coming and thinking for a long-term strategy. They are
thinking more to build a diplomatic and more sustained
political relationship beyond the regional countries, as
well, because the first regime was — depended only on the
regional countries, and it was a different political
relationship, because it came — it started after the
mujahideen and civil war in Afghanistan. But this time,
everything is very well structured and very well systemized
in Afghanistan, because it is after the republic time. Like,
it’s a system that handed over to a group, and they are
running it. And they are — well know that because the
international community attention is also — like, the
foreign policy is not anymore Afghanistan
—
AMY GOODMAN: Negina — Negina,
in 2024, the Taliban approved a wide-ranging law that forced
women to totally cover in public and remain silent in
public. This is a woman living in Afghanistan who concealed
her identity as she recorded herself singing, quote, “You
have silenced my voice until further notice. You’ve
imprisoned me in my home for the crime of being a
woman.”
AFGHAN WOMAN: [translated]
[singing] You placed the stamp of silence on my mouth until
further notice. You will not provide me with water and bread
until further notice. You’ve imprisoned me inside the
house for the crime of being a woman.
NERMEEN
SHAIKH: So, Negina, finally, as we wrap up, if you
could say — you know, the U.S. were in Afghanistan, the
U.S. forces, for 20 years. The Taliban survived those 20
years. Explain how the Taliban were supported at that time.
And by whom? What countries?
NEGINA
YARI: So, during last two decades, the Taliban were
supported from different regional groups and also from
different political armed groups. We know that when the
Taliban take over, the first country that came and welcomed
them was Pakistan. And most of the Taliban leaders have
already invested, and they had big businesses in Pakistan.
And they were trained on the madrasa system, which was exist
across the border of Afghanistan, the military madrasa. And
some of them already get this support from parliamentary
member of the Pakistan government, as well.
So, this
is how the regional countries was well involved and were
supported them during last two decades, and including the
Russia, as well. They were also involved. They were also
built this diplomatic relationship, even during the Doha
talks. The Taliban diplomats was invited from Doha and also
from Pakistan several times to visit the Russian diplomats
in Russia.
So, it shows that how they already built
this relationship. They were allowed to travel to these
countries to sit in the table, to talk about the future of
Afghanistan, to talk about the Taliban takeover and to
already get this commitment from the regional countries, and
including Iran, as well, because the Taliban had a very
close diplomatic relationship even during the republic time
of Afghanistan with Iran, as well. And they would travel
several times to Iran, as well. Like, during last two
decades of the republic government in Afghanistan, the
Taliban was already built this relationship across the
regional countries and beyond that. And they thought that
for sustainable political process in Afghanistan for their
self —
AMY GOODMAN: Negina, we have
to go, but I want to thank you so much for being with us.
Negina Yari, peace activist, longtime women’s rights
defender from Afghanistan, executive director of the Window
for Hope organization, fled Afghanistan in 2022 soon after
they took over five years ago, organizing aid campaigns from
exile in Germany.
Coming up, we hear from the first
person jailed in the U.S. for protesting AI, then Connor
Leahy of the group ControlAI. And we will speak with another
guest, James Muldoon, author of two books: Love
Machines, investigating how people form relationships
with AI, and Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor
Powering A.I. Back in 20 seconds.
AMY
GOODMAN: “Mazel” by Emel Mathlouthi in our
Democracy Now! studio.
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