‘We will not surrender to oppression’: Women’s chants heard again in Kabul
A group of women took to the streets of Kabul to protest the Taliban regime on the morning of Wednesday, September 11. This was the first street demonstration since the Taliban introduced their new oppressive decree against women, which bans their faces and voices from public spaces.
In videos sent to Zan Times from a source within the protest movement, a group of women in the Dasht-e-Barchi area of Kabul can be seen marching and chanting “Education, Work, Freedom” and “Down with the Taliban.”
The suffocating atmosphere of fear and repression generated by the Taliban regime has made organizing protests extremely difficult. One of the protest participants tells Zan Times, “We staged this protest, despite we were extremely worried and fearful. Every time we heard a vehicle behind us, we thought the Taliban are here to arrest us.”
The Taliban took away her job and life, explained this 26-year-old protester, who had studied economics. “To not think about prison and embolden myself, I tried to think about Afghan women, about how their situation worsens every day, and how the Taliban impose harsher laws on them,” she adds.
She explains that the protest was organized by the Movement of Women for Historical Change, a group committed to continuing the struggle against the Taliban: “We will continue our struggle and will not surrender to oppression or prison.”
Another participant sent a written message to Zan Times: “Today went well, but unfortunately, there were few participants. Everyone was terrified that Taliban agents might be lurking in the streets.”
Roqia Saee, a women’s rights activist who was twice arrested and imprisoned after street protests in Kabul, is now working with an exile group is in contact with the organizers. In an interview with Zan Times, she explains how they tried to organize the protest in a way that would avoid arrests: “Five people were assigned to monitor for any sign of the Taliban, 15 women participated in the protest, and one person recorded the video.”
She adds that they had been preparing for the protest for several days, but acknowledged that they still faced challenges: “We spent about three days looking around for someone to print slogans and banners. No one was willing to help. They said they were afraid and couldn’t take the risk. On the third day, we finally found someone who agreed to print just the slogans.”
On the same day as the protest in Kabul, 120 Afghan women in Albania began a three-day conference to draw up a “roadmap for Afghanistan’s future.”
In the opening session, one of the conference organizers, Fawzia Koofi, who was a member of the Afghan Parliament, said that the event was intended to provide a space for shaping “the vision for women in Afghanistan’s future.”
Some of the women who had marched in protest to the Taliban in Afghanistan participated in this conference. They stood up and chanted, “Recognizing the Taliban is a betrayal of women,” and “Recognize Afghanistan is a gender apartheid” during a speech by Rina Amiri, the U.S. special envoy for women and human rights in Afghanistan. “When we heard that Ms. Amiri would be attending, we raised our voices to demand that gender apartheid to be recognized,” explains Masouda Kohistani, one of the women protesters.
She adds that their main demand is for the world to cut off international aid to Afghanistan, as they believe that these funds indirectly support the Taliban: “Most of this aid goes toward strengthening and expanding terrorism. We’ve seen that the Taliban do not distribute the aid to those in need, but instead, they channel it to their base, using it to build religious schools and centres that produce terrorists.”
Over the past three years, the Taliban have effectively shuttered women and girls within their own homes. The Taliban closed schools for girls above grade six; barred girls and women from universities, offices, markets, baths, gyms, parks, and travel; and now have even banned women’s voices from being heard in public.
What women are enduring under the Taliban regime is blatant oppression and an unprecedented level of gender discrimination, which has been described as “crime against humanity.” Unfortunately, the international community and the United Nations, which are preoccupied with other political priorities, have chosen to tolerate and appease the Taliban and turn a blind eye to their crimes and gender apartheid.
