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FEATURED NEWS
- AFGHANISTAN: Taliban imposes new dress code, segregation of women at Afghan universities
- KYRGYZSTAN: Kidnapped, raped, wed against their will: Kyrgyz women’s fight against a brutal tradition
07 September 2021
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AFGHANISTAN
Taliban imposes new dress code, segregation of women at Afghan universities
By Frud Bezhan
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RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi (03.09.2021) – https://bit.ly/3jRzfOE – The Taliban has imposed a new dress code and gender segregation for women at private universities and colleges in Afghanistan, in line with a decree issued to educational institutions and obtained by RFE/RL.
All female students, teachers, and staff must wear an Islamic abaya robe and niqab that covers the hair, body, and most of the face, according to the extensive document issued by the Taliban-run Education Ministry on September 5. The garments must be black, the text added, and women must also wear gloves to ensure their hands are covered.
Classes must also be segregated by gender — or at least divided by a curtain — according to the order, which added that female students must be taught only by other women. But it added, though, that “elderly men” of good character could fill in if there were no female teachers.
Since seizing power after the collapse of the internationally recognized government in Kabul last month, the Taliban has said “women and girls will have all their rights within Islam.”
The militants have attempted to project a more moderate image and reassure Afghans and the world that it has changed. During its brutal regime from 1996-2001, the Taliban oppressed women and severely restricted girls’ education.
But the Taliban’s new rules — which came into effect on September 6 as private universities reopened — highlight how women’s lives are set to dramatically change under the rule of the hard-line Islamist group after the gains of the past 20 years.
‘Clear Sign Of Repression’
“The new changes like gender segregation in schools and universities are clearly creating more fear and a culture of discrimination against women and girls,” said Samira Hamidi, an exiled women’s rights activist who fled Afghanistan due to threats by the Taliban.
“Women wearing black veils do not represent Afghan culture,” she added. “It is a clear sign of repression in the life of women and girls.”
Before the Taliban’s return to power, Afghan women studied alongside men and attended classes with male teachers. There was also no dress code that forced women to cover themselves.
But women are now confronted with a new, harsher reality.
Photos widely shared by Afghans on social media showed men and women at Ibn Sina University, a private institution in Kabul, separated in classes by a curtain. Many of the women pictured wore black robes and hijabs, although their faces were visible — an apparent violation of the new dress code.
According to the decree issued by the Taliban, women should wear an abaya, the figure-shrouding outer garment, and niqab, a cloth that covers the face except for the eyes.
Maryam, a woman from the southeastern city of Khost, told Radio Azadi that many women were ready to wear a hijab, which covers the head. But she said the all-encompassing niqab or burqa would not be “acceptable to Afghan women.”
‘Good Behavior’
The Taliban also imposed the wearing of burqas in the 1990s.
The Taliban’s decree also said men and women should use separate entrances and exits at universities and colleges.
“Universities are required to recruit female teachers for female students based on their facilities,” the document said.
If it is not possible to employ female teachers, then institutions “should try to hire elderly men teachers who have a record of good behavior.”
While women must study separately, they are also required to finish their classes five minutes earlier than men to stop them from meeting outside.
The documents also stipulates that women must remain in waiting rooms until their male classmates have left the building.
Despite the new restrictions, the Taliban permitting education for women is a positive, said 18-year-old Salgy Baran, who received the highest score in Afghanistan on her university entrance exams this year.
“The Taliban must deliver on what they promise,” she told Radio Azadi, referring to the militant group’s pledge to protect women’s rights, including the right to education. “Our university professors must be encouraged and appreciated, and we must be optimistic about the future.”
Violating Women’s Rights
But others are not convinced that the Taliban has changed and will permit women to exercise their right to education and work.
After the U.S.-led invasion, university admission rates soared in Afghanistan, particularly among women. Millions of girls of all ages also flocked back to school, though the gains in female education were mainly restricted to the cities.
Women also played a role in public life as ministers, members of parliament, and provincial officials. They also had the right to vote and work outside their homes.
When it previously controlled Afghanistan from 1996-2001, the Taliban forced women to cover themselves from head to toe, banned them from working outside the home, limited education only to pre-adolescent girls, and required women to be accompanied by a male relative if they left their homes.
The Taliban has, thus far, reimposed many of the same repressive laws and retrograde policies that defined its extremist former rule.
In Kabul, the Taliban has advised women to largely remain indoors. The militants have dismissed female journalists working for state-run television. The Taliban has also ordered many former female government workers not to return to work even as their male colleagues went back. Many girls’ schools have also remained shut in the capital.
Scores of women have staged protests in Kabul, the western city of Herat, and the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif in recent days, demanding equal rights.
Protest organizers said Taliban militants violently dispersed a crowd of women who had taken to the streets of Mazar-e Sharif on September 6 to call for their rights to be preserved and their inclusion in the new government.
Frud Bezhan covers Afghanistan and Pakistan, with a focus on politics, the Taliban insurgency, and human rights. He has reported from Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Turkey. Prior to joining RFE/RL in 2011, he worked as a freelance journalist in Afghanistan and contributed to several Australian newspapers, including The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. BezhanF@rferl.org
Photo credits: Hoshang Hashimi
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KYRGYZSTAN
Kidnapped, raped, wed against their will: Kyrgyz women’s fight against a brutal tradition
At least 12,000 women are still abducted and forced into marriage every year in Kyrgyzstan. But pressure is growing to finally end the medieval custom
By Mauro Mondello
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The Guardian (30.08.2021) - https://bit.ly/2X2E5j6 - A isuluu was returning home after spending the afternoon with her aunt in the village of At-Bashy, not far from the Torugart crossing into China. “It was 5 o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday. I had a paper bag full of samsa [a dough dumpling stuffed with lamb, parsley and onion]. My aunt always prepared them on weekends,” she said.
“A car with four men inside comes in the opposite direction to mine. And all of a sudden it … turns around and, within a few seconds, comes up beside me. One of the guys in the back gets out, yanks me and pushes me inside the car. I drop all the samsa on the pavement. I scream, I squirm, I cry, but there is nothing I can do.”
The man who kidnapped her would soon become her husband. At the wedding, Aisuluu discovered that she was not even the woman he had intended to kidnap for marriage. But in the haste of having to return home with a bride and after wandering the streets all afternoon, the man decided to settle for the first “cute girl” he saw.
This was 1996, and Aisuluu was a teenager. Today she has four children by her kidnapper-turned-husband, to whom she is still married.
Known as ala kachuu (“take and run”), the brutal practice of kidnapping brides has its roots in medieval times along the steppes of Central Asia, yet persists to this day. It has been banned in Kyrgyzstan for decades and the law was tightened in 2013, with sentences of up to 10 years in prison for those who kidnap a woman to force her into marriage (previously it was a fine of 2,000 soms, worth about $25).
The new law has not curtailed the practice, however, and prosecutions are rare. Nevertheless, according to the human rights organisation Restless Beings: “This is a significant development, in that prior to this the sentence for stealing livestock was considerably more than that for ala kachuu.”
“A happy marriage begins by crying,” goes one Kyrgyz proverb, and those tears are of anger and terror at the start of a marriage for ala kachuu brides.
Ala kachuu is practised in all the countries of Central Asia, but it is especially common in the rural areas of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, a predominantly Muslim nation of about 6 million people. During Soviet rule, the custom was rare and parents generally arranged marriages.
Data from the Women Support Center, an organisation that fights for gender equality in the country, indicates that at least 12,000 marriages take place, and are consummated, every year against the will of the bride. (The figure is from a 2011 report and believed to be an underestimate). Men kidnap women, they say, to prove their manhood, avoid courtship (considered a tedious waste of time) and save the payment of the kalym, or dowry, which can cost the groom up to $4,000 (£3,000) in cash and livestock.
After the ala kachuu, which in some cases can be a consensual “kidnapping” when a couple wishes to speed up the process of marriage, the brides are taken to the house of the future husband. The in-laws welcome the woman and force her to wear the jooluk, a white shawl that signifies submission to the bride’s new family. Then comes the wedding. About 80% of the girls kidnapped accept their fate, often on the advice of their parents.
According todata from the Unicefoffice in Bishkek, the percentage of girls aged 15 to 19 who become pregnant in Kyrgyzstan is among the highest in the region, while 13% of marriages take place before the age of 18, despite it being illegal.
It is estimated that 2,000 women are raped by their future husbands each year (again this number is believed to be well below today’s figures), and are thus condemned to marry, because returning to their family would be a deep mark of shame. Fleeing brides also risk further violence and even death.
One such bride, Aizada Kanatbekova, 27, was found strangled to death in a field in early April this year, two days after being forcibly bundled into a car with the help of two passers-by. The kidnapping took place in daylight in the centre of the capital, Bishkek – an alarming indication that this practice is not limited to the countryside.
Altyn Kapalova, a writer, feminist activist and researcher at the University of Central Asia in Bishkek, condemned the lack of legal protection for women. “A police station is not a safe place for a woman seeking help. If a woman goes to a police station to report a kidnapping, they laugh at her, tell her it’s not their business, to go home and settle it with her family,” she said.
In 2018, one shockingly gruesome case highlighted the authorities’ callous attitude. The victim, Burulai Turdaaly Kyzy, a 20-year-old medical student, was murdered in a police station by the man who had kidnapped her. He stabbed her, then carved her initials and those of another man she had planned to marry on to the woman’s body. The officers had left the two of them alone in the waiting room.
The perpetrator was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison. But activists say that the majority of violence against women still goes unpunished. “The problem is one of culture, of education, and not of laws,” said Kapalova, who has received constant threats since 2019, when she jointly organised Kyrgyzstan’s first feminist art exhibition. The highly controversial show, Feminnale, brought whip-wielding nationalists out in protest when it ran for 17 days at the Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts in Bishkek.
Another artist hoping to change attitudes is Tatyana Zelenskaya, who works with the human rights organisation Open Line Foundation, which supports victims of bride kidnapping through counselling and legal advice. Zelenskaya created the drawings and graphics of Spring in Bishkek, a video game for smartphones that aims to convince young people that kidnapping is not a tradition but a crime.
In just over six months, the app has already been downloaded more than 130,000 times; an extraordinary success, given that developers had hoped for 25,000. In the game, players witness the kidnapping of a best friend and must free her, while messages with suggestions prepared by psychologists, journalists and activists appear on the screen, as well as real telephone numbers that can be used in an emergency.
“The idea is to make the girls understand that they are masters of their own destiny. This is why we transform them into heroines capable of rebelling and changing the course of things,” said Zelenskaya. “For a generation of women who grew up with the idea that nothing is possible without a man’s approval, unhinging this concept is difficult.”
The Kyrgyz government has given little indication that it supports these efforts. Indeed, the wording of the new constitution is read by many as a shift in priorities towards an erosion of human rights and fundamental freedoms if they are in conflict with “traditional” values.
Resistance to those old values is embodied by the dynamic group of eight Kyrgyz women aged 18 to 24 behind the Kyrgyz Space Programme, an initiative funded by private donations. They plan, next year, to launch into orbit Kyrgyzstan’s first satellite, a tiny “nanosatellite” with only basic functions but nevertheless capable of receiving and sending a signal.
“We have been working on a CubeSat for some time, building it entirely, piece by piece: technology, programming, mathematics, physics, up to welding,” said Kyzzhibek Batyrkanova, the eldest in the group.
All eight women are studying aerospace engineering while constructing the CubeSat. They also travel to remote areas to give seminars to schoolchildren, especially girls, on the basics of engineering, mathematics, science and technology. They also share personal stories of female “emancipation”.
Anna Boyko, who oversees the physics and programming courses for the group, says: “I was like them, a young girl whose highest aspiration was to find a ‘charming prince’ . Then I took part in two weeks of training in a computer company … and after two days they all realised that I was much better than my male companions with computers.”
Photo credits: Noriko Hayashi/Panos
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Disclaimer: Human Rights Without Frontiers (HRWF) publishes information from a variety of outside sources which express a wide range of viewpoints. The positions taken in these communications are not necessarily those of HRWF.
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Are women's rights and religion
inherently at odds with each other?
This report by HRWF addresses early, forced and
child marriages, female genital mutilation,
violence against women, 'honour' killing, public dress
codes, and reproductive rights. Through these
various violations of women's rights, the report
explores the ways in which religious texts, practices,
cultural influences, and patriarchal systems influence
or motivate the infringement of these rights; and to
discover and highlight the powerful potential that religion
and religious leaders have to help guarantee women's
rights around the world.
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Other HRWF newsletters: Freedom of Religion or Belief | Human Rights in the World | LGBTQI People & Human Rights | Religion & Security
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Some activities of HRWF Int'l in 2021
HRWF co-organizing with CESNUR a webinar on the International Day for the Commemoration of Victims of Violence Based on Religion or Belief (22.08.2021)
Publication in Nova Religio: “Shincheonji and Coronavirus in South Korea: Sorting Fact From Fiction. A White Paper.” By Massimo Introvigne, Willy Fautre ́, Rosita Sˇoryte ́, Alessandro Amicarelli, and Marco Respinti. CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers, 2020. 32 pages, University of California Press (15.08.2021)
HRWF participating in a workshop of a conference online in the US about the persecution of religious minorities through taxation. Topic: Persecution of JW in France and Tai Ji Men in Taiwan (08.08.2021)
HRWF co-organizing a webinar with CESNUR about “The UN Int’l Day of Friendship and Tai Ji Men’s Case” (31.07.2021)
HRWF director interviewed by EU REPORTER and EU TODAY about Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan (29.07.2021)
HRWF director participating in a press conference at the Press Club in Brussels about Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan (27.07.2021)
HRWF director and Zsuzsa-Anna Ferenczy publishing an article in EU REPORTER about the arrest of Buddhists in China (23.07.2021)
HRWF co-organizing a webinar with CESNUR about “Parliaments, Human Rights and Tai Ji Men’s Case” on UN International Day of Parliamentarism (30.06.2021)
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