After the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 2021, the country has moved backwards. Women have lost a number of basic rights, and at the end of August the Taliban once again tightened their grip. It is now forbidden for women to sing, speak and show their faces in public. Even looking at men they are not related to is illegal. – Women are literally erased. They are seen as nothing, as second-class citizens, even lower than that, says politician Fawzia Koofi to news’s Nyhetsmorgen. She is a former vice-president of the national assembly in Afghanistan, and now works full-time as a traveling human rights activist. Koofi believes the Taliban would have lost if they had held elections. She says 17 million women are against the Taliban. Photo: Hanna Johre / Hanna Johre / news Koofi himself sat in on the negotiations with the Taliban when they took power three years ago. There she met leaders who presented a new Taliban in a modern world. – But over time they have gone back to where they were in 1996. The latest law is the nail in the coffin for women and human rights in Afghanistan. Increasing control The news agency AP has gained access to the 114-page document with new laws. They must “promote virtue and prevent vice” on 35 different points, AP writes. – It is unfortunate that the Taliban do it in the name of our religion. It has no link to our religion or culture. They use women as a bargaining chip in the struggle for power, says Koofi. This is the Taliban The ideology of the Taliban movement combines an extreme and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam with the age-old cultural code of Pashtunwali, named after the Pashtun ethnic group that forms the backbone of the Taliban. The word Taliban originally means student or seeker in the Pashtun language Pashto. The movement was formally established in 1994, but the foundation was laid in the Pakistani refugee camps where many Afghans fled during the Soviet invasion in 1979. After the Soviet Union’s defeat and withdrawal in 1989, warlords, who had fought the invasion with the support of, among others, the United States, began to turn their weapons against each other. The Taliban vowed to replace chaos with order. In 1996, they captured the capital, Kabul. The movement controlled large parts of the country until the US-led invasion in 2001. The Taliban’s exercise of power during that period was conservative, brutal and capricious. Music and other entertainment were banned, executions were carried out in public, and women’s freedom was severely curtailed. Women were refused to move outside the home without a male escort, and girls were denied schooling. On 15 August 2021, the Taliban re-entered the presidential palace in Kabul and took back power over the country. Source: NTB The law states, according to the news agency, that women must cover their faces in public to avoid being tempted or tempting others, and that a woman’s voice is seen as intimate. Therefore, they should not sing or read aloud in public. Scary ignorance On Thursday, the Nobel Peace Center is organizing a peace conference, in honor of recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize 2023 Narges Mohammadi. Koofi participates there. The conference will deal precisely with the decline in women’s rights and the importance of women in peace processes. Koofi describes the theme as a mixture of hope and despair. – While women are erased from all forms of social, political and economic rights, they still resist. They find ways and protest, inside or outside Afghanistan. Therefore, she believes it is important that everyone is aware of what is happening in their home country, also to protect our own rights. – My message to the world is that the injustice and discrimination in Afghanistan could have happened anywhere. We have seen this. If we are ignorant of what is happening in one part of the world, it can reach our borders. Published 05.09.2024, at 11.47
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– Women are erased – news Norway – Overview of news from different parts of the country
