A progress report on the first anniversary of Zan Times
By Zan Times team
A year ago – on August 8, 2022 – the Zan Times website (zantimes.com) went live, featuring the incredible work of a group of mostly women journalists working in Afghanistan and in exile who are reporting on human rights violations in Afghanistan.
It began with a sense of responsibility: to speak our truth and a commitment to reclaim our autonomy. We established Zan Times to share our story as a way to shape and define the future.
To date, we have published more than 90 in-depth and investigative reports, 200 news articles, 45 first-hand narratives, and more than 25 opinions and 15 interviews in both Dari-Farsi and English. Of those pieces, 70 percent were created by women, 20 percent by men, three percent by LGBTQI authors, and the rest were collaborations. During our first year, we spoke to 650 people in 24 provinces, including 430 women.
Investigating how Taliban policies have affected women’s lives have been at the core of our team’s reporting. Here is a few examples of our works:
In this August 2022 report, we looked at how women with disabilities, who were already at the margins of society, live their life under the Taliban regime. “I have no money to take [my daughter] to the doctor. I can’t even afford to get her formula or diapers. I have never been this helpless,” 26-year-old Anisa told us on a visit to her house.
We investigated how women protesters vanished in Mazar-e-Sharif in Balkh province after participating in women’s rights protests and how their bodies were later discovered. We spoke with women protesters who survived imprisonment as well as other witnesses who shared disturbing accounts of how the Taliban beat, abducted, tortured, imprisoned, and killed women for their roles in peaceful protests — and afterward suppressed information about the women’s fate and threatened their families in an effort to stop more from knowing of their repression.
We looked at the situation of women journalists under harsh Taliban rule by speaking with 32 women reporters in 12 provinces. They recount security threats, harassment, and constant fear while doing their jobs. Seventeen out of 32 women journalists lost their jobs after the Taliban took over; the other 15 had continued their work, despite facing gender discrimination, sexual harassment, security threats, pressure to abandon their jobs, unpaid work, lack of access to information, Taliban censorship, and the forced mandatory hijab rules. “Apart from me, 54 other women journalists work for free in Badakhshan; their economic situation is very dire, but this is the only way they can continue their work,” said Marwa Jalil*, a radio journalist with five years of experience.
In another story, we examined how Taliban restrictions have affected women health workers. We interviewed 23 female health workers in 10 provinces across Afghanistan. They all said that their ability to serve their patients is becoming increasingly difficult, including needing to have a mahram with them while working. Several female doctors say they are being forced to leave their jobs because they did not have a mahram deemed acceptable by the Taliban. Others are facing forced dismissal. The situation is expected to worsen as the Taliban have banned women from almost all areas of public life.
To understand the impact of the Taliban’s tightening restrictions on women’s employment, we interviewed 50 women across 16 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Some were single parents or the sole breadwinner in their families. All had been employed either by the government, NGOs, or private companies before the Taliban regained power. Half of them were forced to quit their jobs in August 2021. By December 2022, all had ceased working and were confined to their homes. They spoke of their despair at losing their careers and income, situations that often ignited their husband’s anger. Most women interviewed by Zan Times said that they were subjected to increasing physical and verbal abuse by their husbands since the Taliban takeover.
We investigated how aid is being distributed in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. We interviewed 42 sources, including local officials and employees of aid organizations, local residents, community elders, and civil and social activists in eight provinces. Our investigation revealed that a large share of humanitarian aid is being taken from those who need it most, or distributed based on a population’s political, ethnic, regional, and sectarian affiliations to the Taliban and their allies, including religious leaders. In effect, this aid has become a source of funding for the Taliban and its supporters. As well, people told us that the Taliban rely on coercion and intimidation to get them to hand over the aid, whether it is food or cash.
To shed light on the situation of nomadic women, we interviewed some of them, including Gulzarina*, who was married off at 11. When her first period came two years later, Gulzarina was terrified. She sought help from her sister-in-law who handed her a piece of cloth to use in place of a sanitary pad. “I was in a lot of pain, and I couldn’t talk to anyone about it because my sister-in-law said it was shameful, and only shameless women talk about their monthly cycle,” Gulzarina told Zan Times. Once her periods started, so did her pregnancies. She has given birth four times and had four miscarriages, alone, in the tent. “I always endured the pain alone, and when my baby was born, I would cut the umbilical cord myself and bury the bloody pieces of the placenta in the ground,” she said. During her last visit to the doctor, she was told that her uterus had become infected, the result of being unable to follow proper hygiene during menstruation and after childbirth.
We interviewed Artemis Akbary, a LGBTQ rights activist about the situation of the LGBTQ community in Afghanistan. He said that change “requires a collective effort. We don’t have that many LGBTQ activists, though this is not a reason to say that the LGBTQ community in Afghanistan is weak but rather we do not have a safe environment for them to feel safe and start their activities. This outreach is a collective effort: Feminists, human rights activists, journalists, and media must work hand-in-hand to make things go right.”
We published a narrative by Anousha*, a lesbian writer who lives in Afghanistan. She wrote: “I write because I want to be the voice of those who have always been marginalized. I write because I have witnessed events that are not narrated anywhere. This is my way of revealing what I have heard, seen, and lived. My aim is to convey the bitter taste of belonging to a minority whose interests and existence are not recognized by the dominant discourse. As a female homosexual living under a misogynist group, I consider it my duty to write about corners of society that have been intentionally left unexplored and turned into forbidden domains. I write because it is the only way out of mourning, oppression, and suppression.”
We shared the story of Gulali*, a transgender person who lives in Kabul. He told Zan Times: “No one understands me. No one knows about my problem. I’m always imprisoned. I go out covered with a chador. There is nowhere for me to experience freedom. There is no refuge. My father can no longer work. My brother has gone to Iran, and we have no news from him. My mother is sick. We have consumed all of the money I had saved during my work. I wish I was a woman so I could get married or a man so I could work. I wish the Taliban would let me work. I just wish I could get free from this misery sooner.”
Reporting, writing, and sharing these stories with our readers hasn’t been easy. We have struggled every step of the way: How to earn the trust of our readers and supporters? How to safeguard our colleagues and contributors in Afghanistan? And how to produce ethical, high quality journalism in a hostile environment with limited access to resources and funding?
Trust is the core of what we do at Zan Times. And this writing is a testament to our commitment to remain truthful with our readers and supporters. To earn trust, we began with mutual respect. We are committed to this principle with our colleagues within the organization, with our readers, and with our donors and supporters:
- We commit ourselves to respect and trust everyone in our team. If we cannot respect and trust each other, we cannot work together. Respect means treating each other with humanity and compassion. It means we work together even if we disagree on certain issues and hold different views and opinions.
- We uphold this principle with our readers/audiences by respecting their opinions of our work, as well as their feedback, and criticism of our work. We might not always agree with them, but we always respect them.
- One way we establish trust with our readers/audiences is by informing them of how we are funded and how we do our work. We give them the full picture of how Zan Times operates and let them judge us by what we do and not what we say. We uphold this principle with our donors and supporters by transparently reporting how we used their grant and donations.
How are we funded?
We started our work with personal savings and volunteer labour. But of course, a non-profit organization cannot survive on the personal savings of its volunteer team. To fund our work, we applied for grants. And so far, we are fortunate to have received grants from Internews that covers the cost of our reporting; a grant from Reporters Without Borders that support three editions of our monthly fact-checking newsletter; and a grant from the International Women’s Media Foundation to support a visual storytelling project.
Even though these grants make our journalism work possible, we still need support to cover the cost of the rest of our operation.
Security
The security and safety of our team is a paramount concern, and a constant struggle. Our team of mostly women journalists are working across Afghanistan, often remotely while using pen names to protect their identities. Being women journalists means our reporters in Afghanistan are at the intersection of two oppressions: the Taliban war on women and the Taliban war on media. Haunted by fear and coping with trauma, our colleagues continue to put their lives at risk to deliver their commitment to truth and keep the world informed. Sometimes they find themselves in seemingly impossible situations, where they have to report the suffering of women in their own villages, cities, and provinces without themselves being visible in public.
That is not all that we have to consider when making editorial decisions.
As a newsroom committed to upholding ethical and professional journalism, we often find ourselves having to make choices so as to tell a story without putting people’s lives at risk. As well, we need to better train our team to deal with trauma-informed journalism.
To address some of the issues we face, we have collaborated with several organisations on eight training to sharpen our team’s journalism skills and help us understand trauma and how it can affect them as journalists covering the crisis in Afghanistan.
Despite all the difficulties, we remain committed to reporting the truth of what is happening to the most marginalized peoples in Afghanistan. We continue to do our part in bringing forth the marginzed perspectives and diversity to the Afghanistan media landscape in our struggle for a better future.
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*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees and journalists in Afghanistan.
