The Taliban’s effective ban on women working sank in yesterday, sparking rage over the dramatic loss of rights after millions of female teachers and girls were barred from secondary school education.
After pledging a softer version of their brutal and repressive regime of the 1990s, the Islamic fundamentalists are tightening their control of women’s freedoms one month after seizing power.
“I may as well be dead,” said one woman, who was sacked from her senior role at the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Photo: AFP
“I was in charge of a whole department and there were many women working with me ... now we have all lost our jobs,” she said, asking that she not be identified for fear of reprisals.
The acting mayor of the capital, Kabul, has said that any municipal jobs currently held by women would be filled by men.
That came after the Afghan Ministry of Education ordered male teachers and students back to secondary school at the weekend, but made no mention of the country’s millions of women educators and girl pupils.
The Taliban on Friday also appeared to shut down the former government’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs and replaced it with one that earned notoriety during their first stint in power for enforcing religious doctrine.
While the country’s new rulers have not issued a formal policy outright banning women from working, directives by individual officials have amounted to their exclusion from the workplace. Many Afghan women fear they would never find meaningful employment.
A new Taliban government announced two weeks ago had no women members.
Although still marginalized, Afghan women have fought for and gained basic rights in the past 20 years, becoming lawmakers, judges, pilots and police officers, although mostly limited to large cities. Hundreds of thousands have entered the workforce — a necessity in some cases as many women were widowed or support invalid husbands as a result of two decades of conflict.
Since returning to power on Aug. 15, the Taliban have shown no inclination to honor those rights.
When pressed, Taliban officials say women have been told to stay at home for their own security, but would be allowed to work once proper segregation could be implemented.
“When will that be?” a woman teacher said yesterday.
“This happened last time. They kept saying they would allow us to return to work, but it never happened,” she added.
During the Taliban’s first rule from 1996 to 2001, women were largely excluded from public life including being banned from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a male relative.
In Kabul on Friday, a sign for the former Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice was erected at the building housing the old government’s Ministry For Women’s Affairs building in the capital.
Vice ministry enforcers were notorious for punishing anyone deemed not to be following the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islam.
On Sunday, about a dozen women protested briefly outside the building, but dispersed when approached by Taliban officials.
No official from the new regime responded yesterday to requests for comment.
In Herat, an education official insisted the issue of girls and women teachers returning to school was a question of time, not policy.
“It is not exactly clear when that will happen: tomorrow, next week, next month, we don’t know,” Shahabudin Saqib said. “It’s not my decision because we have had a big revolution in Afghanistan.”
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