Women’s organizations call for black-clad Kabul to go outside shouting “work, bread and freedom” on the first anniversary of the Taliban’s arrival in power
“They have not been able to go with us and will not be able to. We will continue to fight until we regain freedom.” These are the words of Shahla Arifi, who after two decades in the Ministry of Women is now coordinating ‘Women seeking justice’. This group, made up of more than 800 women, is part of a nationwide movement of Afghan activists standing up to the restrictions imposed by the emirate. Next Monday it will be one year since the Islamists took power and «as we call this day the ‘black day’, we will be dressed in black in a march. It won’t be the same day 15 because we know they’re very nervous about the date, but around the anniversary we’ll be back on the streets of Kabul,” Arifi says under his striped scarf. The slogan of this symbolic march is “work, bread and freedom”.
She is 41 years old, a mother of four and activism has cost her serious threats over the past 12 months. “They sent me pictures of one of my children and my husband to tell me that they are following in their footsteps and that I will either stop these activities or they will be killed,” she says, unable to contain her emotion. If nothing changes, he does not rule out the idea of temporarily emigrating to Iran this winter. What he is currently doing is regularly changing homes in Kabul and avoiding the Taliban checkpoints as much as possible.
The rights and freedoms that Afghan women have won over two decades have faded day by day under the emirate. Despite being in the midst of an economic and humanitarian crisis, women are the obsession with the new leaders. The Taliban insist they are not the same as they were in the first emirate in the late 1990s, but since their return they have banned women from sports, they have not included any of them in their government, they have closed their ministry and changed it to the promoting virtue and preventing vice, banning them from secondary education, keeping them from positions in ministries and public offices…
“Deep down they are afraid of us, which is why they are taking all these measures and there may be more in the coming months. They are worse than those of the late 1990s, they cannot fool anyone and it is time for the international community to act, because this country is once again becoming a terrorist nest,” warns Arifi, who longs for his 20 years of promotion sports among girls in the country as an official of the ministry.
To interview women targeted by the Taliban, a safe place must be found in Kabul. “We are being persecuted and we know they can come and get us at any moment,” explains Estorai Yazdanparast, another familiar face among activists in the capital, who now divides her life between Kabul and her native Badakhsan, in the north of the country. country. She has been involved in organizations and projects for the defense of women’s rights for 13 years, is also a businesswoman and stood in the last parliamentary elections for her province. She started her humanitarian work with organizations like Oxfam or USAID, but now she only has her fellow Afghans and she doesn’t hide her “disappointment with Europe and the United States, they have let us down, they have broken our hearts. ”
In summarizing this first year of the emirate, Yazdanparast is emphatic, saying: “I’ve been under a sort of house arrest for 12 months, my daughters can’t go to school, I can’t talk to the Afghan media and a Facebook post, that made pleasure of the physical appearance of a Taliban commander in which the author labeled me has cost me death threats ».
In these months, Islamists have also recommended that women wear the burqa – although you don’t see much of it in the center of Kabul – forbidden to travel more than 72 kilometers without the company of a male relative, who has been featured in television series or movies and talking. on the radio.
“The country is in ruins, unemployment is rising, people are desperate to emigrate and they have issued 27 women’s ordinances, now what?” asks Yazdanparast with tears in his eyes. He cries for his eldest daughter. She is 18 years old and a Taliban commander from her province has informed them that he wants to marry her. Because of this news, they left the country for a few weeks and went to neighboring Iran, but they have returned and fear that the commander will take her away by force.
“If I could I would leave this country like this, but I can’t. I owe it to my daughters and to the women, the future is at stake,” he says, wiping his eyes. The next big challenge is the ‘Black Day’, which Yazdanparast wants to participate in. “In Kabul they are a bit more tolerant towards us because there is the press and they want to take care of their image abroad, but in provinces like mine they do what they want, there there are no limits,” she says.
Afghanistan is now a prison for these women who have grown up for two decades working in fiction, supported by Americans and Europeans. On August 15, 2021, dreams ended and they came face to face with the reality of some Taliban who were obsessed with making them invisible. A year later they will be seen on the street with that black color as the darkness that has taken over their lives.
Source: La Verdad
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