In the weeks since the Taliban’s December 2022 decree banning women from attending university, Afghans have shown that they will not accept this latest outrage with their arms crossed. Brave female students have launched a resistance campaign, risking beatings, arrest or worse, and their male counterparts (and many teachers) have shown solidarity by abandoning their exams.
As much as the Taliban try to crush the rights of girls and women, they are unlikely to achieve a final “victory”. Afghan girls and women enjoyed the right to education in the years before the Taliban returned to power in 2021, and now neither intimidation nor prison sentences will silence them. They have experienced what it is like to be free, and they will not accept the alternative.
The Taliban have already been warned that if they exclude women from the work carried out by NGOs providing food and medical care, these organizations will have no choice but to leave the country, a message reinforced this week by the United Nations deputy secretary general. United, Amina Mohammed.
But another way to effect change is to threaten the Taliban regime with the full force of international law. The brutal and inhuman treatment of women and girls by the Taliban deserves an investigation by an international tribunal. The regime clearly violates international conventions dealing with the rights of children and women to which it has acceded.
No other country in the world prohibits women and girls from receiving an education, and no other country has such draconian forms of state-led gender persecution.
I have spoken to many Afghan students in my capacity as the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, and words cannot express their frustration. The world’s poorest and most vulnerable children know that they now bear the heaviest burden in the global fight against one of the greatest injustices of all: the denial of the rights of girls and women.
Afghan girls have been denied access to schools, denied access to public spaces, prevented from traveling without a male escort, and forced to wear burqas that cover their heads to their shoulders. feet.
University crackdown has been in the offing for some time. After the Taliban takeover in 2021, universities introduced gender-segregated classrooms and entrances and declared that female students could only be taught by female professors or older men.
Then, in October 2022, the Taliban issued sweeping restrictions on what subjects women could study. Veterinary science, engineering, economics, journalism and agriculture were considered prohibited.
But the authorities have been sending mixed signals, suggesting that the regime is not united behind the new restrictions. For example, while thousands of girls and women were allowed to sit for university entrance exams three months ago, that decision was soon followed by another that banned them from enrolling. This likely speaks to a tension between religious leadership and an education ministry that would rather see girls in the classroom than sitting at home.
The divisions in the regime are also reflected in the inequality in the implementation of policies. In some parts of the country, education continues clandestinely or in home schools, with little resistance from the authorities, and in other areas, girls are still allowed to attend regular schools, in open defiance of Taliban mandates. . Internal fissures can also be inferred from the ban on women NGO workers, a policy that the public health minister claims does not apply to the health sector.
These examples suggest that the authorities are not legislating from a position of strength. Rather, they are acting out of fear of women’s empowerment. After all, there is no other credible justification for such policies. Islam encourages education, and all of Afghanistan’s neighbors offer education for girls. They understand that girls’ education is not only in line with Islamic teaching but is also essential for economic prosperity.
Furthermore, Afghanistan itself has a history of benefiting from girls’ education. The country’s own past shows that if the Taliban continue on the path of repression, Afghans will have only half the doctors, nurses and teachers they need.
And if half of Afghanistan’s human capital has been wasted, the economy, which desperately needs to be rebuilt, will continue to be among the worst performing in the world.
During my many visits leading up to 2021 to Afghan schools where girls were taught, I saw firsthand that there was widespread enthusiasm for universal education, both in rural areas and in cities. The Taliban’s many bans go against fundamental human aspirations. People everywhere want more freedom, not less.
The Taliban’s policy on the education of girls and women represents neither the true Afghanistan nor the true Islam. It is urgent that the international community, and especially the Muslim world, come together to support young Afghan girls in their fight for their rights. —© Union Project
Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, is the Chairman of Education Cannot Wait’s senior steering group. Yasmine Sherif is the director of Education Cannot Wait.
