UN tells its Afghan staff to stay home after Taliban ban on female workers
By Mahtab Safi and Freshta Ghani
Marzia* had been working as an aid worker for the United Nations in Afghanistan for four years. On the evening of April 4, 2023, she was still in her office in one of the country’s central provinces when the UN confirmed the latest Taliban edict: forbidding local women employees from working for the international organization. (Marzia asked that her province not be named, for security reasons.)
Her boss told her and other female colleagues that they should immediately stop working and go home. “We noticed that some Taliban came to our office and then our work stopped,” Marzia tells Zan Times. “When all the women left the office, the Taliban delegation was still congregating at the gate of the office, smiling at us and saying, ‘You will stay at home after this.’” Marzia is one of 600 Afghan women who work for the UN, the international agency stated.
After hearing the news of the ban on women’s work at the UN office, Marzia paled became very worried. She is the sole breadwinner of a family of 11 people. She needed her US$450 salary to pay her family’s expenses, including $200 each month to pay for medical treatments and drugs for her father, who has heart disease and diabetes, as well as her mother, who also has diabetes. They require serious care and their medicine is very expensive, Marzia explains.
If she loses her job, she will not be able to buy food for her family or for her parents. “I’m not the only one in this situation,” says Marzia. “There is another friend of mine who has four children, and her husband is an addict. She left the office crying and said, ‘If I lose my job, my children will die of hunger.’
Marzia says they were initially asked to stay at home for two days while the organization’s officials spoke with the Taliban. Now, the UN has ordered their male and female national employees not to return to their jobs until further notice, “with only limited and calibrated exceptions made for critical tasks.” That order will be in place until at least May 5, as the UN “conduct the necessary consultations, make required operational adjustments, and accelerate contingency planning for all possible outcomes,” the organization said in a statement on April 11. This means that 3,300 Afghan workers are unable to help a population increasingly dependent on aid.
Afghan employees in other United Nation offices are in the same limbo as Marzia. Zarghuna* works for the UN in Kandahar province. Like Marzia, she and her colleagues were told to go home when the Taliban ban was announced. “We were off for two days, so that the UN headquarters could talk to the Taliban about our work. They said that maybe the order given to the Nangarhar office will be canceled in these two days, or it will be applied to all provinces,” Zarghuna tells Zan Times.
Their state of uncertainty reminds her of what happened in December 2022 when the Taliban issued a previous decree, which prohibited women from working for non-governmental organizations. She knew colleagues who worked for those NGOs under contract. They too were sent home and stayed there as the Taliban refused to reconsider their decision.
One of those NGO workers, Shamail*, says that she has been at home since December. The 40-year-old was a field worker in the children’s health and education department, says that she has not been in a good mental state for several months and she does not know how long this situation will continue. “They failed to get the Taliban’s consent for our return,” Shamail says.
She does a bit of work, including some from her home or secretly outside her house. It’s a far cry from her work in the past, when she and her colleagues used to visit children and women, listen to their problems, and provide them with educational and health services. “We enquired about the problems of families, sick children and pregnant and lactating women in distant areas. We distributed aid to them, but now no one visits them and we heard that these children and women are facing many problems,” Shamail says.
The impact of the Taliban banning women from working for the UN and NGOs will be far reaching, says Farahnaz*, who works with an aid organization supported by the United Nations. In addition to echoing the concerns of Shamail, she worries that there will be no one to distribute aid to poor people if the work of women in the United Nations is stopped.
According to the UN Women, “Afghanistan is in a humanitarian crisis with 28.3 million people—two thirds of the population—needing humanitarian assistance to survive. Almost a quarter of households in Afghanistan are female-headed.” The impact is particularly severe on the female population. “The removal of skilled women aid workers decreases women and girls’ access to critical life-saving services, and it increases their risks when they have to seek assistance from men instead,” explained executive director of UN Women.
“The United Nations in Afghanistan condemns in the strongest terms a decision by the Taliban de facto authorities to prohibit Afghan women from working for the UN in Afghanistan,” stated the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). “The ban is unlawful under international law and cannot be accepted by the United Nations. It constitutes an unparalleled violation of women’s rights, a flagrant breach of humanitarian principles, and a breach of international rules on the privileges and immunities of the United Nations, including those extended to all UN personnel.”
“In the history of the United Nations, no other regime has ever tried to ban women from working for the organization just because they are women. This decision represents an assault against women, the fundamental principles of the UN, and on international law,” said Roza Otunbayeva, the UN secretary-general’s special representative for Afghanistan.
Yet, this decision banning local women from working for the UN isn’t the first time the Taliban have imposed restrictions on the international agency. In September 2022, the Taliban arrested three female employees of the United Nations on the charges of “improper hijab/not wearing a burqa” in front of their office in Kandahar. Otunbayeva is talking to senior Taliban officials in order to express the UN’s objection to their decision and to demand the immediate cancellation of the order.
Few are optimistic that the UN “operational review” will produce good news for female UN workers, such as Zarghuna and Marzia, or the millions of women and girls who rely on their efforts. In January, Amina Mohammed, deputy secretary-general of the UN and its highest ranking woman, travelled to Kabul with other senior officials in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the Taliban to reverse its NGO order which affected aid delivery to 11.6 million women and girls in Afghanistan. Three months later, the Taliban announced its edict against women working for the UN.
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees.
Matin Mehrab, Mehsa Elham, Atia FarAzar, and Sana Atef also contributed to this report.
