The Taliban vs. Women and Girls in Afghanistan heart of this
topic from
here (The Hill) – selected key parts with this story headline:
“Afghanistan:
The ones we leave behind”
Right up front, let's dispense with any fantasy that today's Taliban will be kinder and gentler to girls and women than they were when the extremist group cruelly controlled the country more than 20 years ago.
Taliban leaders
know what the world wants to hear from them, but their fighters and commanders
will impose a harsh rule at a local level.
That is especially true when it comes to Taliban treatment
of girls and women – we should expect the worst from today's Taliban.
Already, according to the UNHCR (The United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees), nearly 400,000 Afghans have been forced from their homes
since the beginning of 2021, largely due to Taliban-initiated or sanctioned
violence across the country.
Women and children bear a disproportionate brunt of the
hardship that comes with their displacement.
While the Taliban may not have changed much over the last 20
years, Afghanistan today is much different than it was when they governed.
Far beyond the so-called Western feminists, millions of Afghan girls and women over the last two decades have been: (1) going to school, (2) opening businesses, (3) becoming clinic workers, (4) teachers, and (5) taking on roles in provincial and national government.
But
those gains are fragile, especially in a society where widespread gender-based
violence remains entrenched and will be exacerbated by most Taliban rule.
Over the past decade, women lawyers were leaders in
expanding legal protections for girls given in marriage as young as nine years
old and subject to barbaric Taliban treatment. However, despite that, men who
were convicted of domestic violence in the past decade were among the thousands
released by the Taliban from the general prison population recently (e.g., part
of the 5,000 that Trump promised them). Now those men are returning to hunt
down their families.
Add to these restrictions on women's movements – such as: (1) not being allowed to leave the house without a male relative (not even in a medical emergency), or (2) to study past a certain grade level, or (3) to work except in specific roles.
The result is a
category of people who are left helpless and subject to predation. All of them will
be victims, but few can evacuate. Nor should they have to: This is their
country, and they have the right to live there, free from violence and abuse.
The international community has very little leverage left in
Afghanistan and with the Taliban specifically, but we must use what we have to
protect the women we leave behind. But how?
First: The issue
of political recognition of the Taliban should come only after they make a
meaningful commitment to uphold Afghanistan's human rights obligations and
truly act on that commitment with a pledge of non-reprisal against civil
society and the former government.
Second: Humanitarian
assistance and access to Afghanistan's Central Bank reserves should come at the
price of allowing safe operation by international assistance agencies and the
opening of airports and land borders to unimpeded travel. Kabul's airport
should become and remain internationalized.
Third: In exchange
for normalization of relations with the Taliban and their possible seat in the
United Nations, the UN Security Council and Human Rights Commission, working
together, should augment the current UN Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) with the
authority to help Afghans protect their own human rights.
Implementing mechanisms could be Special Rapporteurs or a
council of high-level global human rights experts from the Islamic world, such
as Ministers of Justice and Human Rights Commissions from Malaysia, Morocco,
Indonesia, and elsewhere. These experts should have an unfettered right to meet
with journalists, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and other representatives.
Representatives, for example, from minority communities that
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has noted face a
special genocidal threat.
My 2 Cents: As I said,
women and girls are a mental challenge and threat to the Taliban and their
block-headed thinking.
Thanks for stopping by.
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