The Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice of the Taliban regime in power in Kabul confirmed on Monday the implementation of a law prohibiting the media from broadcasting “images of living beings”. One more ban in this country where freedoms have been gradually waning for three years.
Published on 15/10/2024 09:59 Updated on 15/10/2024 10:08
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Afghan Deputy Minister for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Saeed Ahmad Shaheedkhel (center) speaks during a press conference in Kabul on August 14, 2023. (WAKIL KOHSAR / AFP)
In practice, this means that faces must gradually fade, and that the moral police will be responsible for ensuring the dissemination of photos and videos. “It’s just about giving advice and convincing people that these things should be avoided,” believes it reassures the government, which explains that it is starting to disseminate the instructions in the different provinces of the country. No arrests have been reported so far, but reporters in Ghazni province in the center of the country have, for example, been advised to “get used to filming less and taking photos from further away“Journalists, but also traders in Wardak, in the center of the country, were warned: “the law will apply to everyone“. It is therefore necessary to cross out the faces on advertisements or cover the heads of mannequins in store windows with plastic bags. Zealous agents of the ministry have even forced restaurateurs to hide the eyes of fish on restaurant menus…
<img class="cms-media-image lazyload" alt="The image of a censored fish on the menu of a restaurant, in Lashkar Gah, in Helmand province, Afghanistan (August 26, 2024) (WAKIL KOHSAR / AFP)” width=”720″ height=”405″ data-sizes=”auto” src=”https://www.francetvinfo.fr/pictures/ZU5zKZ2f3_p_qmBFeYQainxd4qA/0x53:1024×629/fit-in/720x/2024/10/15/talibans2-670e213ed0e6d127012365.jpg”/>
The image of a censored fish on the menu of a restaurant, in Lashkar Gah, in Helmand province, Afghanistan (August 26, 2024) (WAKIL KOHSAR / AFP)
Three years after the return to power of the Taliban in Kabul, a major step backwards is taking place with prohibitions, in particular by this law on the prevention of vice. At the end of August 2024, it was she who was already planning to silence all speech by women in public spaces, with a ban on singing or reading aloud. In three years, these are more than 70 decrees that deprived women of freedom, according to the European Council. The regime also boasts of 13,000 arrests in 2023 alone for “immoral acts”. A plunge into darkness that the international community seems to observe helplessly, busy with more urgent matters, and quite cynically accommodating to a new stability in the region, where attacks and trafficking have lost intensity. At what price? That of consumed freedoms, in a country where voices are silenced and faces fade under the yoke of fundamentalists, while more than a third of the Afghan population suffers from serious food difficulties.
