Women: From Everything to Nothing
Written by Hussain Haidari
Published Thursday, April 18th, 2024
When the Taliban took power, women in Afghanistan became the main victims of their cruel and discriminatory decisions. Over the past few years, the Taliban has imposed further restrictions on women’s participation in all aspects of society and enacted harsh punishment, including kidnapping and torture, against anyone who refuses to comply. In the first days of their coming to power, the Taliban imposed severe restrictions on the economic, social, and political activities of women. They took away women’s rights at different stages and through different decrees. On May 21, 2022, the Taliban asked Afghan women TV presenters to cover their faces when appearing on TV. Likewise, on May 7, 2022, the Taliban asked women to wear a burqa in public. Wearing a burqa for women became mandatory in Afghanistan after two decades without such restrictions. The Taliban warned women that if they do not comply with this order, their men will be imprisoned for up to three days. On May 3, 2022, the Taliban ordered driving schools in Herat province not to teach women how to drive.
Following the Taliban’s discriminatory decisions, middle and high school girls were banned from going to school on March 22, 2022. The Taliban claim that a comprehensive and Islamic plan is needed to re-open girls’ schools, meanwhile, they continue to dismantle any formal education systems that include girls and women. Depriving girls from school in Afghanistan has been met with continued internal and international protests, which for the most part have been repressed or ignored by the Taliban. Girls in Afghanistan are still denied from going to school in 2024. On February 3, 2022, the Taliban asked public and private universities to separate boys’ and girls’ classes. The implementation of this plan put a costly administrative burden on universities as they scrambled to reorganize their class structure. In some cases, the Taliban asked the universities that the teachers of female students should be women and not men. On September 8, 2021, the Taliban decreed women’s sports unnecessary. Based on this decision, women were practically banned from team sports at the college and professional level.
On September 19, 2021, the Taliban group asked female employees to stay at home and not come to work. Most of the employees of the government offices were deprived of workers following this decision. According to the statistics made public by the National Statistics and Information Administration of Ashraf Ghani’s government, 24% of civil service employees were women. A quarterly report of this department, which was published on March 8, 2020, shows that the number of government employees reached 412 thousand people, of which 101 thousand and 216 were women.
According to these statistics, the highest number of women were employed in the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and the lowest in the Ministry of Independent Commissions. Although most of the women worked in the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, the Taliban dissolved this ministry one month after coming to power and replaced it with the ministry of “commanding good and forbidding evil.” Unlike the previous ministry that worked to defend women’s rights, this ministry has implemented numerous limitations on women’s social, political, and economic lives.. With these decisions, the Taliban removed women from different parts of life. The Taliban announced their cabinet on September 7, 2021. There was not even one woman in the cabinet of this group.
During the republic, there were at least four female ministers in the cabinet. The Taliban’s decisions, which are a clear violation of human rights, faced widespread protests by a number of women inside Afghanistan. A number of spontaneous organizations supporting women’s rights in Afghanistan took to the streets and asked international organizations to stand against these inhumane decisions of the Taliban. Despite the widespread protests of women in Afghanistan, no international organization has worked effectively in this direction, but the Taliban arrested and imprisoned a number of protesting women. A number of active women are still in Taliban prisons.