Afghanistan - The Repeating Past
I’ve been meaning to write about the situation in Afghanistan for a few weeks now. On 15 August 2022, I attended a small rally here in Canberra to remember one year since the Taliban took, or as the Afghan lady speaking at the event said, “were handed”, control of the Afghan government. It was organised by Amnesty International, and the focus was on the Taliban’s swift and forceful wind back of the rights of women and children, along with a range of other significant human rights abuses.
I left wanting to know more about the current situation. I read a few recent reports, one by Amnesty International, titled The Rule of Taliban: A Year or Violence, Impunity and False Promise, and another by UN Women, titled Gender Alert No. 2. – Women’s Rights in Afghanistan One Year After the Taliban Take Over. Head to those reports if you want to read more about the current situation on the ground in Afghanistan.
Recent History
The Taliban were last in power in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. The country’s history goes much further back of course, as does the history of people living in the region. The religion of Islam has been in Afghanistan since the 7th century AD, and it is suggested that early humans lived in northern Afghanistan around 50,000 years ago. Let’s not go quite so far back though, not this time anyway. For now, let’s start on December 5, 2001, when UN sponsored negotiations saw four major Afghan factions agree to create an interim post-Taliban administration in Afghanistan. Sure, there were whole a lot of happenings that led to this, but again maybe that’s for another post.
In 2004, Afghanistan held general elections amongst the challenges of extremists’ threat, difficult terrain and adverse weather conditions. Hamid Karzai was declared the winner, and the result was endorsed by the United Nations-Afghan joint electoral commission. The UN noted that the election process wasn’t perfect, but that it set the stage for work towards vigorous democracy. This period of democratic stage setting saw the ratification of several international human rights treaties. Between 2001 and 2022, Afghanistan ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and several other human rights reporting mechanisms. It also saw a period of free and independent media, which allowed for light to be shone on challenging issues such as corruption, security crisis, governance, economic, social, cultural, women issues and health problems. Civil society also grew significantly. Amongst the many challenges, Afghanistan was becoming a more just place for all who lived there.
It was all lost in the blink of an eye on 15 August 2021. I’m sure those scenes from Kabul airport are still fresh in many minds around the globe. I am very aware that foreign interference, including that of the US in Afghanistan, has a wide array of impacts – that isn’t something I’m exploring here, although as glimpses will show, it certainly has played a role in how the current situation came to be. I instead want to focus on the fact that there has unfolded a human rights crisis of unprecedented scale, almost overnight, during which the Taliban have been able to contradict the many assurances they made to the world, and the Afghan people, with absolute impunity.
So, just how bad is the human rights situation in Afghanistan today? Here’s a brief look through the headlines in the Amnesty International and UN Women report mentioned earlier. Have a read of them for more information - if I’ve not referenced information below it’s because you can find it in either of the reports.
Rights of Women and Girls
The Un Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan stated on 1 July 2022, Taliban repression is “unparalleled globally in its misogyny”. Yes, all Afghans are living through a humanitarian disaster, but for women and girls the situation is catastrophic. The Taliban’s on-the-ground position on the rights of women and girls has not changed since they were last in power. They continue to systematically exclude women and girls from public and political life, and restrict access to education, justice, employment and health services. Women’s lives in Afghanistan are once again confined to the home. Suicide rates among women have increased, and mortality rates are expected to rise. The situation is as bad as it gets. The Global Gender Gap Index 2021 ranked Afghanistan as 156th out of 156. Australia was ranked 50th, but let’s talk about that another time.
Just ten days after seizing Kabul, women and girls were ordered to stay home by the Taliban, because their foot soldiers had not yet been trained in how to respect them. That’s not a good place to start. It took less than a month for the Ministry for Women Affairs to be replaced with the Taliban’s Ministry for the Preaching and Guidance and the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Girls above the age of six were barred from attending school, many still are, with the current estimate being that 80% of secondary school age girls are denied their right to education. Meena, a 29-year-old schoolteacher from Kabul sums the state of schooling up well when she told Amnesty International, “I thought that era was a nightmare that could not be repeated; that my daughter would never experience what I did in the 1990s. But now the truth is in front of me; it is brutal to think that we are repeating history – and the worst part of that history”.
The Taliban made promises regarding their allowance of girls to attend school and attain the same level of education as boys. There was even a date in March 2022 where school were going to re-open for girls, after their initial closure upon the Taliban taking over. The final say of the re-opening of schools for girls came down to the leadership shura, or council, based in Kandahar, which is presided over by a supreme leader called the amir al momineen (commander of the faithful). This is a theocratic structure, which was grafted back into government with the recent Taliban victory. This body ruled against the re-opening of girl’s school after several hard-line clerics expressed the position of Sheikh Haibatullah Akhunzada – current supreme leader of the Taliban. He is an austere cleric who took came to power after the U.S. assassination of Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour in Pakistan in 2016. Mansour was a more worldly, pragmatic leader, who travelled abroad and was open to negotiation. It has been suggested that if he were still alive, girls would be freely attending school today.
Women’s access to university is also constrained by gender segregation and a strict dress code for women who are in public. These strict dress codes are the result of a directive issued by the Taliban on 7 May 2022 which required all women outside of the house to wear Islamic hajib and fully cover their faces except the eyes. In effect, this limits the freedom of movement of women in Afghanistan. To violate this results in the punishment of male relatives, thus making them responsible for enforcement. Women have also been excluded from participant in public and political life, for example when around 4,500 clerics and leaders gathered to discuss the nation’s future on 30 June 2022, not one woman was present. The Taliban excluded them on the basis that they would be adequately represented by their sons, husbands, and fathers. Civil society no longer provides space for women’s-based organisations to be run, and guidelines issues on 21 November 2021 limit the representation of women and girls in all forms of media.
Women’s access to health services is almost non-existent. In early 2022, just ten percent of women were able to cover their basic health needs. Furthermore, around the same time almost all women-headed households faced insufficient food consumption, with most of them having to limit food intake and borrow food. This is in addition to the significant levels of violence against women and girls, and complete lack of justice and accountability available to them. Nearly nine out of ten women have experience at least one form of intimate partner violence in their lifetime, and child and forced marriages have increased since the Taliban have been in power. The arbitrary interpretation and application of the law within the male-dominated justice environment means that harmful patriarchal norms are enforced that promote impunity for the violation of women’s rights.
Repression and Violation of Human Rights
The Taliban’s repression and violation of human rights is not restricted to the country’s women though. The media guidelines mentioned above include an array of journalism rules that limit the freedom of expression for all. These rules include:
forbidding journalists to publish stories that are contrary to Islam, insult national figures or violence privacy;
requiring journalists to conform to ethical principles that mean they must ensure they report in a balanced manner; and
requiring journalists to treat all matters not confirmed by officials with care.
These rules have been backed up with a pattern of harassment, intimidation and detention stifling all forms of free expression. This extends to freedom of assembly. While large anti-Taliban protests were taking place in Afghanistan early in their current period of rule, these have been curtailed by the Taliban’s use of violence against people assembling in public, and their arrests and threats of arrest within an ad hoc and opaque detention and justice system.
The arbitrary nature of the criminal legal system highlights how their implementation of Shariah law is not codified and is instead open to a wide variety of interpretations that result in detainees facing opaque and ad hoc legal decisions. The previous legal system has been almost completely dismantled, and the Taliban’s interpretation of Sharia law is now in place. The Taliban have arrested an estimated 1,247 people since they seized the capital. Torture and ill-treatment are commonplace, including people being hit by rifle butts and whips. The Taliban have also targeted, and killed, a range of professions who had connection to the previous government. This includes security forces, judges, prosecutors, media workers, civil society activists and human rights defenders. Report have also emerged of abuses against people, or their family members suspected of involvement in resistance activities.
Sharia Law
Democracy has been replaced by a complete reliance on Sharia law, the Taliban have been clear and open about that. Islamic scholars are now determining the Afghan legal system, so that the principles of Islamic law now guide the nation’s direction rather than the political system put in place by Hamid Karzai and his government back in 2004. To quote Taliban senior commander Waheedullah Hashimi, “We will not discuss what type of political system we apply in Afghanistan because it is clear. It is Sharia law and that is it”. The implications are broad, for example Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid has stated that the rights of women would be respected “within the framework of Islamic law”. Another spokesman, Suhail Shaheen noted that “as for women, they can have their basic rights as per Islamic rules”.
So, what is Islamic Law? You probably know it by the name ‘Sharia’, which literally translates to ‘the way to a watering source’ in Arabic. The foundations of Sharia go back to the revelations of the Quran the Prophet Muhammad, and the reform that he established alongside the first Muslim community in Medina in the year 622. The rules of Sharia are believed to be an expression of Allah’s (the Arabic term for God) will, but also subject to the interpretation of Islamic scholars. The Prophet’s legal approach was progressive and modern for its time, and as Islam grew rapidly into the early eighth century Muslim scholars built a complex and detailed system of law based on the Prophet’s foundations. Between the eighth and 17th century, Sharia was the most sophisticated and well-developed legal system in the world. It protected five basic human rights, which were to be above violation by Caliphs and sultans – the right to life, property, freedom of religion, freedom of mind, and to raise a family.
Things are clearly different now though. How might an organisation such as the Taliban, who claim they are implementing the same sophisticated and well-developed law, appear to be so medieval and globally irrelevant? The following five reasons help us to begin to understand this complex question:
From the 11th century onwards, the gate of ijtihad (an interesting theological concept worth of a future post) was declared closed by Muslim scholars, which discouraged new legal interpretation. Between the 11th and 14th centuries the Islamic world was busy dealing with the Crusades, Mongol invasion, and the plague. There was little time for new interpretation of law, and scholars had reasoned that Islamic law was well developed already.
The majority of the Muslim world was colonised by Europe from the 19th century onwards, which saw the collapse of the Islamic political, legal and religious institutions.
After WW2, a new age of Muslim nation-building was driven be secular modernists, who directly implemented versions of western governments rather than allowing space for Sharia.
In modern times, the role of Muslim scholarship shifted and was reduced as a wider range of professional pursuits became available. Talented Muslims were drawn to other professions rather than Islamic law.
The growing influence of puritanical Salafism (a literal, straight-forward and uncompromising form of Islam) among jihadist groups such as Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Islamic State has seen them cherry-pick and implement Quranic verses and prophetic traditions out of wider context.
What Next?
So, what to do with this information? We can see that the Taliban’s implementation of Sharia law has resulted in a dire humanitarian situation for those living in Afghanistan, especially for women and girls. UN Women and Amnesty International make a range of recommendations, both for the Taliban and the international community. I’m not going to tell you to donate to cause or join any organisation - you’re all grown up, you can do that on your own accord if you feel it’s right.
Instead, here’s what I think you and I can do at the very least:
Read reports by organisations such as Amnesty International and UN Women, and watch/read content form news organisations that continue to follow events – stay informed on what is happening in Afghanistan.
Make a genuine effort to understand some of the complexities involved in the situation as you come across them.
Talk with your friends and family about what you learn – keep the conversation alive.
Show up when there are events in your local area, or when there are online petitions raising awareness. Let your local Afghan community know that you care.
This might not seem like much, but it’s more than most people are doing. What you do beyond that is up to you. Organisations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and UN Women all have a range of ways that you can get involved in their work.
Here’s hoping for a day, soon, where the people of Afghanistan can live in freedom, with access to their basic human rights and with the future of their country in the control of all people.
