In the past 15 months or so, life has changed unrecognisably for Afghanistan’s women and girls. Speak to secondary school pupils, their parents and education activists, and you will hear just how devastating the impact of the Taliban’s school closures have been. It is hard to fathom the depth of the darkness that has emerged as a consequence of this action.
Girls are dealing with the psychological fallout of being cut off from their classmates and social networks. Many are struggling with severe depression. Since secondary schools were closed, child marriage has increased dramatically. Suicide rates among women and girls have been steadily rising since the Taliban’s return to power.… Seguir leyendo »
This week, the Taliban made a bombshell announcement that they will ban women from attending university or teaching in Afghanistan. It is a decision that has done more in a single day to entrench discrimination against women and girls and set back their empowerment than any other single policy decision I can remember.
Since the Taliban returned to power, girls have been banned from attending secondary school. Now they are being banned from primary school. Thousands of female government workers have been told to stay at home. Other recent rulings prevent women from travelling without a male relative or attending mosques or religious seminaries.… Seguir leyendo »
Hearts may break, but spirits do not. So listen, murderers of Afghan women. There is steel in us, forged in fires that have burned across generations. You underestimate the strength of steel.
In Kabul on the morning of Sept. 30, nearly 400 young Afghans, primarily members of my country’s Hazara ethnic minority, were gathered inside a tutoring center to take a practice college entrance exam. They were separated by sex per Taliban-imposed restrictions, the girls in one area, the boys in another. The girls outnumbered the boys, as the Taliban’s closure of girls’ schools had made privately run centers such as this one the only places where girls could hope to continue their education.… Seguir leyendo »
La educación de las niñas afganas ha sufrido un duro golpe. De nuevo, las mujeres vuelven a ver desaparecer sus derechos más básicos como es el de la educación. BBC ha publicado en días pasados un estremecedor vídeo en el que aparece una niña afgana que llora porque no le permiten asistir a la escuela por el hecho de haber nacido mujer. En pleno siglo XXI se sigue tolerando que se borren los derechos de las mujeres en pro de un malentendido relativismo moral en el que cada vez importa menos la situación de las mujeres y sus derechos.
El derecho al conocimiento debería ser inalienable pero lejos de eso cada vez se encuentra más en peligro en el caso de las mujeres.… Seguir leyendo »
Just hours after reopening girls’ high schools in Afghanistan for the first time in nearly seven months, the Taliban ordered them shut, sparking plenty of heartbreak and outrage, but no substantive policy or political repercussions. That must change.
At a United Nations pledging conference for Afghanistan on Thursday, leaders lined up to reiterate their condemnations, but fell well short of establishing a red line: a date by which the Taliban must reopen girls’ middle and high schools and ensure every Afghan girl can receive the education she deserves.
These must be preconditions for the international community’s continued engagement with the Taliban — and they cannot be allowed to use girls’ education as a bargaining chip.… Seguir leyendo »
Sometimes 20 years can fall away like nothing. Sometimes time telescopes into a vivid memory of a flash of red above a sea of blue.
On March 23, 2002, I was 12 years old, living in Kabul, walking into an all-girls public school for the first time in my life. The Taliban — the extremists who from 1996 to 2001 had essentially outlawed girls’ education — was gone, its regime fallen, its edicts swept away. It was the first day of the new school year.
But I remember the fear in our school courtyard that day. How it flowed around me in deep blue tides.… Seguir leyendo »
In mid-July, in a rural part of Afghanistan, two sisters made a promise.
They’d just arrived home for their semester break from their boarding school in Kabul, and their grandmother came to see them, carrying scythes. The Taliban, resurgent, was drawing closer to their village. This woman told her granddaughters to take these curved blades, and she told them that if Taliban fighters ever came to the house, the girls must be swift. There would be no time to hesitate.
If the Taliban comes into this house, she said, use these scythes to kill yourselves.
In December, the Taliban agreed to allow UNICEF to open thousands of informal schools in parts of Afghanistan controlled by the armed group. The Taliban-initiated school talks have been ongoing for the past two years, and originally grew out of negotiations over polio vaccination campaigns inside Taliban territory. The program will establish community-based classes, reaching as many as 140,000 children — both boys and girls.
Why would the Taliban — a group known for the systematic destruction of women’s access to education — not only agree to but initiate talks on the provision of education? The Taliban continues to fight the government of Afghanistan, and the armed group’s political goal remains unchanged: To reestablish a strict Islamist system of government, a shift that would probably reverse many of the rights granted to women in the 2004 post-Taliban Constitution.… Seguir leyendo »
I spent most of the past year in Afghanistan, where I lived and taught in a rule-of-law program funded by the U.S. government at an American-run Regional Training Center. My R.T.C. housed about 700 men, primarily Afghan police trainees. The international community consisted primarily of American soldiers and civilian contractors as well as military personnel and civilians from other nations. I was the only foreign woman who lived in the camp.
Very few Afghan women ever came into the R.T.C., which was used primarily for police training. Various other groups such as the European Union Police Mission in Afghanistan, DynCorp International and the German military offered other courses, focusing on such topics as forensics, crime scene investigation, law and witness interviews.… Seguir leyendo »
While Americans are right to be alarmed by the rising numbers of roadside bombs and suicide attacks in Afghanistan, we can’t overlook a more subtle campaign that has been a key element of the Taliban’s strategy for years: disrupting access to schools.
Close to 1,000 schools have been bombed or burned since 2006, and hundreds of teachers and students have been killed. The Taliban, who when they were in power banned education for women, attack girls’ schools disproportionately, and in some southern provinces the proportion of girls attending middle school has dropped to less than 1 percent.
These attacks are made easier when there is a physical school to take aim at.… Seguir leyendo »
Few things symbolize progress in the fight against poverty better than the face of an educated girl. And I was fortunate enough to see hundreds of them during a trip to Afghanistan in 2006. Those faces, eager and alert, lit up the courtyard of a new school built to educate 1,000 girls in central Afghanistan's Bamian province.
Gone were the days of Taliban rule, when girls were forbidden to study and women weren't allowed to teach. Afghanistan's future leaders could learn -- out in the open.
Perhaps that is why last month's brutal attack on a group of Afghan schoolgirls in the southern city of Kandahar was so heartbreaking.… Seguir leyendo »
Utilizamos cookies para el correcto funcionamiento de la página web y analíticas para estadísticas.ACEPTARPolítica de privacidad
