KABUL: Small groups of Afghan women on Friday staged rare demonstrations to mark International Women’s Day in private spaces, after a crackdown by Taliban authorities forced activists off the streets.
Since surging back to power in August 2021, Taliban authorities have imposed a strict interpretation of Islam, with women bearing the brunt of curbs the United Nations has labelled “gender apartheid.”
Women have been squeezed from public life, barred from traveling without a male relative and banned from certain jobs, secondary school and university, as well as from parks, fairs and gyms.
A handful of women in several provinces gathered to demand restrictions be lifted, according to activists from the Purple Saturdays group, which protests Taliban government curbs on women.
In northern Takhar province, images circulated by activists showed seven women holding papers obscuring their faces, reading “Rights, Justice, Freedom.”
“Our silence and fear is the biggest weapon of the Taliban,” a demonstrator whose face was covered said in a video.
In Balkh province, several women also held up signs saying, “Don’t give the Taliban a chance” in front of a banner reading “Save Afghanistan Women.”
On Thursday, around 20 women gathered at an office for an event organized by the Afghanistan Association of the Blind in northern Mazar-i-Sharif city.
“The gates of schools, universities and offices should be opened for all women,” said one attendee, who remained anonymous for security reasons, during the meeting.
“It is very painful that a woman has no value in our society today. She cannot use any of her rights.”
“Women make up half of human society as mothers, wives, sisters, daughters and teachers. The holy religion of Islam is not against women’s work and education,” another added.
Also on Thursday, the Independent Coalition of Afghanistan Women’s Protest Movement issued a statement demanding “immediate and serious action from the international community against the clear violation of human rights and obvious crimes the Taliban are committing against Afghan women.”
The UN mission in Afghanistan, UNAMA, on Friday urged the Taliban government to lift restrictions on women and girls, saying not doing so risked “further pushing the country into deeper poverty and isolation.”
“The space for Afghan women and girls continues to shrink at an alarming pace, and with it Afghanistan’s future prospects to escape a vicious cycle of war, poverty, and isolation,” said Alison Davidian, Special Representative for UN Women in Afghanistan, in a statement.
Taliban authorities have repeatedly dismissed such international criticism as propaganda.
On Friday, spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the Taliban government was committed to women’s rights within the framework of Islam, according to an interview with Tolo News.
Women have protested sporadically against rules handed down by the Taliban authorities, but often in small groups and indoors out of fear of reprisals, after several activists were detained for months.
On Friday, the UN Special Rapporteur for human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, called on the Taliban government “to immediately and unconditionally release all those who have been arbitrarily detained for defending human rights, especially the rights of women and girls.”
Street protests in Afghanistan have in the past been broken up by security forces firing guns into the air, including during a demonstration last summer after beauty salons were shut down.
Last March, about 20 women held a rare protest in the streets of Kabul for International Women’s Day.
Afghan women stage rare protests on International Women’s Day
https://arab.news/y897m
Afghan women stage rare protests on International Women’s Day
- A handful of women in several provinces gathered to demand restrictions be lifted
- In northern Takhar province, images circulated by activists showed seven women holding papers obscuring their faces, reading “Rights, Justice, Freedom”
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
