An official reason for the decision was that special uniforms and facilities for girls’ secondary education within Sharia and Afghan culture are still being worked on. Activists call this nonsense. “They have had seven months to decide what kind of scarf the girls can wear over their heads,” Heather Barr of human rights group Human Rights Watch said in a statement. According to education activist Pashtana Durrani, there is more to it. “The uniform’s excuse is an attempt to hide internal disagreements,” she told The Guardian.
Indeed, the Taliban leaders do not agree among themselves. In several regions, local, more pragmatic leaders have already allowed secondary education for girls. There are also more diplomatic figures within the highest ranks, such as Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Ghani Baradar. But the past week has shown that the religious hard core, who simply don’t want girls in school, are now asserting their power.
Restrictions and lurid messages
This is not only apparent from girls’ education. It was also announced this week that parks are now segregated: four days a week they are only open to men and three days to women. Government employees were told they will no longer be allowed to enter the office without a beard and will lose their jobs if they don’t correct this. Airlines were instructed to actively comply with an earlier decision and to no longer allow women on flights without a male escort. And international broadcasters such as the BBC, Voice of America and Deutsche Welle were taken off Afghan television with their programs in local languages.
Afghan media has been struggling for some time. Human Rights Watch wrote a report about this earlier this month. The experience of journalists, especially outside the capital, runs counter to the Taliban’s promises of free and independent media. They are regularly arrested, mistreated and threatened so that they do not make a critical report of the government or even stop altogether.
More and more gruesome reports are also coming out, through human rights organizations or international journalists, who are still able to do their job. British journalist Charlie Faulkner, for example, investigated murders of women by the Taliban in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. “Anxious hospital workers say bodies, mostly of women, are regularly brought in by the Taliban, which they are not allowed to examine or register,” she wrote for The Times in late January.
Meanwhile, Western diplomats continued to hold talks with the Taliban about emergency aid, making promises about respecting human rights. For example, the UN decided to temporarily pay teachers’ salaries. Even now, the Taliban promise that keeping girls’ secondary schools closed is only temporary. But for the US, this may be a turning point in relations with the Taliban, a spokesman said after the decision. “We have canceled some of our appointments, including scheduled meetings in Doha around the Doha Forum.”
–
