Women barely feature in Hollywoodgate, the chilling and remarkable documentary on the Taliban currently showing in selected cinemas. Three years after their fighters marched back into Kabul in August 2021, this absence tells its own story of systematic marginalisation and subjugation.
The Taliban’s war against girls and women has intensified. Deprived of education, work and even the opportunity to walk in parks or visit public baths, half of Afghanistan’s population live especially shrunken and fearful lives. The Taliban’s rule is not merely a cruel and humiliating blow to their rights and dignity, but an existential threat. In a May report, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, quoted one woman: “I was the breadwinner and now [I] have no job, no income and my children are asking for food, I have no choice but to consider suicide.”
The Taliban have already murdered lawyers, activists, students, police and other women, as well as subjecting them to torture and abuse. Concerns that they will resume public stonings persist. But there are many other ways to take women’s lives. Remove their livelihoods and they (and their children) starve. Force them into dependency on abusive men, with no escape, and they will be killed. Reduce access to healthcare and they die preventable deaths. Snatch away all hope and some will conclude that there is no way to go on.
Men and boys suffer too from the disappearance of household income, or the avoidable deaths of wives and mothers. Some are treated brutally by the Taliban for resisting the mistreatment of women or failing to police the conduct of female relatives. The punishments for failure to comply with Taliban instructions “are often arbitrary, severe and disproportionate”, the UN mission in Afghanistan noted in July.
In his May report, Mr Bennett noted that the collective impact is not only profound but mounting: “With each generation, there will be fewer women with educational backgrounds enabling them to take up roles outside the home … Afghanistan [is] losing more than its future health-care workers, with the concomitant risks to women and girls. The Taliban’s institutionalized gender oppression is depriving Afghanistan of its future women engineers, journalists, lawyers, biologists, politicians and poets.” Online education programmes are a limited and wholly insufficient substitute for proper schooling, but nonetheless need better international support. Mr Bennett has also called for gender apartheid to be criminalised under international law. He should be heard.
It is all the more grim, then, that Afghanistan’s women and girls should not only be coerced by the Taliban, but let down by those who promised support. In the third round of UN talks on Afghanistan in Doha this summer, women’s and other human rights were off the agenda, and women and other civil society representatives were excluded from the table, to the fury of rights groups, campaigners, Mr Bennett and the UN’s own women’s rights committee. Fawzia Koofi, a former deputy speaker of the Afghan parliament and peace negotiator, wrote of women’s “despair, shock and disappointment”. The decision emboldened the Taliban, with their chief spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid lecturing the west on the need to “remove the obstacles hindering the development of relations”.
The international community does not face a choice between pursuing mutually exclusive aims of women’s rights and humanitarian needs, as some have suggested. Far from it: the two are intimately connected. Banning women from working in most roles in aid agencies means that many others cannot access help due to gender segregation. Afghan women demand representation when their country’s future is discussed. They must be heeded.
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