In the garden of a hotel on the outskirts of Tirana, Albania, a group of Afghan women are singing, arms raised or slung around each other’s shoulders. Some are crying as they embrace friends or former colleagues they have not seen since the Taliban swept to power in August 2021 and began systematically stripping away the rights and freedoms of 14 million Afghan women and girls.
Watching them is Fawzia Koofi, the former Afghan MP now living in exile in the UK, who has worked for more than two years to bring over 130 Afghan women together for the All Afghan Women summit in Tirana.
For most of the that time, Koofi and her co-organisers at Women for Afghanistan struggled to find the summit a home, with successive governments refusing to play host.
“It was really important to us to try to find a Muslim-majority country close to Afghanistan to host this summit and it was very disappointing that so many refused to do so,” says Koofi. Turkey and the UAE were among governments who either refused to host the summit or simply did not respond to Koofi’s request.
The summit is an attempt to allow Afghan women to get their voices back into international conversations about the future of their homeland and the fight for women’s rights.
The past few months has seen a slow creep of normalisation begin to define countries’ diplomatic relations with the Taliban, with women’s voices largely absent from the conversation.
“If women’s voices are not heard, then their rights will not be respected,” says Koofi. “There is strength in numbers and we are here to find unity and speak with one voice.”
With the Taliban firmly entrenched in power, the potential of this summit to change things may seem limited, but the importance of this event to those attending is clear, as an act of defiance and a form of collective therapy.
In Afghanistan, where women’s voices have now been banned from being heard in public and dancing and singing in public are also prohibited, the women gathered in the garden singing folk songs and dancing could have faced terrible consequences, says Koofi.
“When I saw these women sitting together, laughing, crying and singing I said to my daughter, this is why we have done this,” she says. “There has been so much loss and trauma we have all gone through alone, and now we are coming together to fight for what we have all lost.”
Most of the women at the Albania summit are living in exile in countries across the world and have come from Germany, Canada, the UK or US to attend.
Others have travelled from inside Afghanistan; a dangerous and complicated journey with no guarantee of a safe return to their families. Some planning to attend did not make it at all, pulled off flights in Pakistan or stopped at borders en route
“In our country we now live like prisoners,” says one woman who had come from Afghanistan, a journey that took her nearly two days. “Our daughters are suffering the most as they do not remember the last time the Taliban were here. This is why we have taken the risk to come.”
Another woman still living in Afghanistan who was prevented from boarding a plane to Albania but who eventually made it to the summit, says that her life has become dominated by fear and paranoia.
“Every day you leave the house you have to think, ‘Is this safe, is this worth the risk?’” she says. “Inside the house, your mind begins to become your enemy. I had to come here even though I don’t know if I will be arrested when I return because otherwise what hope is there that things will change? We need to tell the world what they are doing to us.”
The aim of the conference is to publish a united declaration that will set out how the women want the international community to react to the Taliban’s assault on their rights.
There is a lot of work to do. There are deep divisions within the women over the best way to engage with the Taliban, some calling for their complete diplomatic isolation until they backtrack on their repression of women’s rights, others saying that there needs to be conditional engagement in order for any progress to be made. At points on the first day the room erupts into argument and protest.
Yet Koofi says the women are united in their wish to return their country to democracy.
“We are showing that … Afghan women will never stop fighting,” she says.
The Afghan singer Elaha Soroor has also travelled to Albania with a protest song, which she hopes will become a rallying cry for Afghanistan’s women and inspire them to continue to resist oppression.
When she performs it on the first day of the conference, the women in the room spring to their feet, taking up the chorus and singing back its words demanding the basic rights that have been taken away from them.
“Education, work, freedom,” they sing in unison, filling the room with their voices. “Bread, work, freedom.”
