Despite denials by Taliban officials, the bravery of Afghan women coming forward underscores the severe and dehumanising treatment they endure
A piece in The Guardian, bylined Zahra Joya, Chris McGreal, Khodadad Poladi, Annie Kelly and Tom Levitt, datelined July 6, 2024, and published under the heading “Video appears to show gang-rape of Afghan woman in Taliban jail,” makes horrifying reading. According to the report, the video recording, seen by The Guardian and Rukhsana Media, an online news agency focused on covering issues affecting women in Afghanistan, shows a young woman, a human rights activist, being gang-raped and tortured in a Taliban jail by armed men. It shows her being told to take off her clothes and then raped multiple times by two men. She is seen as standing naked, her face visible, and is identifiable during the attacks. The report cites the woman as saying that she was arrested for participating in a public protest against the Taliban and was raped in a Taliban prison.
The video was sent to her after she had fled Afghanistan and spoken out against the Taliban, with the threat that it would be shown to her family and released on social media if she spoke against the Islamic Emirate in public. It also cites other examples of sexual abuse, beatings, and torture, including by electric shocks, of not only those protesting against the Taliban’s squelching of women’s rights but of young women and teenagers accused of violating hijab rules. Zabihullah Mujahid, Chief Spokesman and Deputy Minister of Information and Culture of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has, according to The Guardian report, denied the allegations of widespread sexual assaults on incarcerated women. While he could not have done otherwise, one can hardly doubt the women’s versions, given the stigma attached to victims of sexual violence in countries like Afghanistan. It takes a massive amount of courage and resolve for a woman, or her relatives, to state that she had been raped or molested in custody. Even the UN has commented on the arrests and detentions. Under the heading “Permanent Darkness,” Ajit Kumar Singh has written in the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATPOR, Volume 22, Number 18) dated March 11, 2024, that the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) had expressed grave concern over the arrest and detention of women and girls for alleged non-compliance with the Islamic dress code.
He has quoted Roza Otunbayeva, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General and head of UNAMA, as observing that enforcement measures and physical violence were “especially demeaning and dangerous for Afghan women.” Detention, she continued, carried “an enormous stigma that put Afghan women at even greater risk.”The Taliban’s war on women--perhaps the most diabolical feature of their first stint in power from 1996 to 2001—continues in their second innings with rape and molestation as a part of it. The process started in September 2021 when the Taliban removed the signboard of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in Kabul and replaced it with that of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the earlier incarnation of which had earned widespread notoriety during their first stint in power, for arbitrary and savage enforcement-- with particular harshness towards women--of the government’s obscurantist diktats.A series of measures has followed.
Women are not allowed to travel more than 70 kilometres without a male escort who is her husband or a mahram, a close blood relative—father, son brother, grandfather, great-grandfather, nephew with whom marriage is prohibited and, in whose presence, she need not wear a hijab. They are to wear “proper” hijabs, loose black garments, covering their bodies and faces, in public places and their male relatives have been made responsible under pain of punishment. They are excluded from education above the primary level and virtually every kind of employment. Worse, in a voice message broadcast by Afghanistan’s state television on March 23, 2024, the Taliban’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, had said, “We will flog the women … we will stone them to death in public [for adultery].”The Taliban had started flogging women even before the announcement, administering at least 30 strokes for “offences” like using cell phones, talking to men or being in love or relationships. All this was not unexpected given the Taliban’s obscurantist beliefs and record in power during its first coming from 1996 to 2001.
What is surprising is the silence—to say nothing of the absence of effective action--of the rest of the world, even the Western democracies, in the matter. The UN too seems to be falling in line. This is suggested by its surrender in the case of the recent conference of global envoys, held in Doha, Qatar, and attended by envoys of 25 countries including the US, Russia, China and the European Union. The conference, to promote engagement with the Taliban on a variety of issues, was the third of its kind. The Taliban, which had not attended the earlier two, attended it only after the organisers accepted their condition that women would not attend it.The UN’s capitulation has been widely condemned by human rights organisations which rightly believe it would encourage the Taliban to further trample on women’s rights. But who cares?
(The author is Consulting Editor, The Pioneer. The views expressed are personal)
