I cannot describe what they did to me after killing my father.'Ī fifteen year-old girl in Kabul, 1995 International intervention in 2001 The Mujahideen had already stopped me from going to school, but that was not enough. They came to our house and told him they had orders to kill him because he allowed me to go to school. 'They shot my father right in front of me. A woman in Kabul had the end of her thumb cut off for wearing nail varnish, for example, in 1996. Afghan women were brutalised in the law and in nearly every aspect of their daily life. Rape and violence against women and girls was rife. A woman could be flogged for showing an inch or two of skin under her full-body burqa, beaten for attempting to study, stoned to death if she was found guilty of adultery. If she disobeyed these discriminatory laws, punishments were harsh. If a woman left the house, it was in a full body veil (burqa), accompanied by a male relative: she had no independence. In Kabul, residents were ordered to cover their ground and first-floor windows so women inside could not be seen from the street. Women were essentially invisible in public life, imprisoned in their home. There were many other ways their rights were denied to them. Banned from being involved in politics or speaking publicly.Banned from accessing healthcare delivered by men (with women forbidden from working, healthcare was virtually inaccessible).Banned from showing their skin in public. Banned from leaving the house without a male chaperone.Banned from going to school or studying.The Taliban enforced their version of Islamic Sharia law. Under the Taliban, women and girls were discriminated against in many ways, for the 'crime' of being born a girl. The Taliban ruled in Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001. They came together with the aim of making Afghanistan an Islamic state. Many of their members were former Mujahideen fighter who had been trained in Pakistan during Afghanistan's civil war in the '80s and '90s. The group emerged in 1994 after years of conflict. The Taliban are now notorious for their human rights abuses. Taliban rule in the 1990s Who are the Taliban? In the 1950s purdah (gendered separation) was abolished in the 1960s a new constitution brought equality to many areas of life, including political participation.īut during coups and Soviet occupation in the 1970s, through civil conflict between Mujahideen groups and government forces in the '80s and '90s, and then under Taliban rule, women in Afghanistan had their rights increasingly rolled back. Afghan women were first eligible to vote in 1919 - only a year after women in the UK were given voting rights, and a year before the women in the United States were allowed to vote. Until the conflict of the 1970s, the 20th Century had seen relatively steady progression for women's rights in the country. 'As a girl, I remember my mother wearing miniskirts and taking us to the cinema. Think of women in Afghanistan now, and you'll probably recall pictures in the media of women in full-body burqas, perhaps the famous National Geographic photograph of 'the Afghan girl', or prominent figures murdered for visibly defending women's rights. Listen to the audio clip below to hear Horia's overview of thirty years of complex and fraught history, and the impact that occupation and militarisation has had on the women and girls living in Afghanistan. Now Horia works at Amnesty as our Afghanistan Researcher. Horia Mosadiq was a young girl when Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979. 'Afghan women were the ones who lost most from the war and militarisation.' Throughout the changing political landscape of Afghanistan in the last fifty years, women's rights have been exploited by different groups for political gain, sometimes being improved but often being abused. In the last three decades, the country has been occupied by communist Soviet troops and US-led international forces, and in the years in between has been ruled by militant groups and the infamous oppressive Islamic Taliban. Afghanistan has a tumultuous recent past.
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