Femicide under the Taliban regime
THE Taliban have disrespected women’s and girls’ rights to education, employment and freedom of movement since they took power in August 2021.
They have damaged the system of assistance and protection for people who fled family assault, imprisoned women and girls for minor violations of discriminatory laws and contributed to an increase in the number of children and forced and early marriage in Afghanistan.
Women and girls under Taliban Rule also describe the threats, arrests, detentions, torture and forcible abductions of women who peacefully protested against these repressive policies.
It is comparable to murder in slow motion. Women’s access to justice and human rights had been eliminated by the Taliban.
The courts and state’s attorney offices that handled cases of women’s rights violations had been shut down by the government.
Whether Afghan women and girls choose to work or speak out for women’s rights, the Taliban’s violations of their human rights are killing their lives.
The Taliban are in charge and have strict control over anything and everything. The brutal & suffocating repression attacks on Afghanistan’s female population are getting worse every day.
A female politician Mursal Nabizada who served as a legislator in Afghanistan was recently murdered in her home in Kabul, which is kind of a high-profile assassination of one of the few female lawmakers who remained in the country after the Western-backed regime fell and the Taliban gained power.
When she said that the Taliban would not impose the same harsh rules over society as they did during their first rule of Afghanistan in the late 1990s, she made the blunder of raising her voice for women in Kabul after the Taliban took over the government.
However, since then, the Taliban have gradually increased these restrictions, especially on women.
They have banned girls and women from getting an education past the sixth grade, excluded them from the majority of professions and required them to hide their faces outside.
It’s terrible and distressing. We want the world to know that she was assassinated in the dead of night, but the Taliban established their system of gender discrimination in broad daylight.
Millions of women and girls are deliberately restricted in their human rights by the Taliban and there will many like Mursal Nabizada who will be mistreated unfairly and then murdered.
The Taliban must be held responsible for their severe treatment of women and girls endangering the Afghan people, according to international Muslims, western communities and especially UN Security Council Resolution.
Therefore, we must all fight together to make the Taliban answerable for their treatment of women, particularly their targeted, discrimination, abduction and killing of women, especially female politicians, human rights advocates and journalists.
If today our government, other Muslim and western international organizations, the UN member states and the UN Security Council come together and make a stand for Afghan women’s rights to develop and implement a strong and planned policy that pressures the Taliban to make these changes.
If the international community does not take action on this pressing issue, it will fail women and girls in Afghanistan and jeopardize human rights worldwide.
—The writer is a social political analyst, based in Islamabad.
