[INTERVIEW] Afghan women struggle yet remain resilient under Taliban rule

Alison Davidian, the U.N. Ladies nation consultant in Afghanistan, poses throughout an interview with The Korea Occasions at U.N. Ladies Data and Partnerships Centre in Seoul’s Jongno District, Monday. Korea Occasions picture by Shim Hyun-chul

Because the Taliban seized energy in August 2021, Afghanistan has turn out to be the epicenter of one of many world’s most extreme girls’s rights crises. Practically 4 years on, the scenario has solely worsened.

Ladies and women are systematically disadvantaged of basic rights, together with training, freedom of speech, motion and political participation. In August final yr, the Taliban launched a morality legislation that additional consolidated its management over girls’s voices.

Alison Davidian, the U.N. Ladies’s nation consultant in Afghanistan, warns that the disaster unfolding within the nation just isn’t an remoted incident however a stark reminder to the world of the necessity to shield hard-fought progress towards gender equality.

„Afghanistan, in some ways, is a warning as a result of it’s an excessive instance of the gender inequalities that exist in all of our societies. It’s a warning about what we take without any consideration just isn’t protected,“ Davidian stated in an unique interview with The Korea Occasions on Monday throughout her go to to Seoul. It marked her first official journey to the town in honor of Worldwide Ladies’s Day, which falls on March 9.

She assumed her position at U.N. Ladies in Afghanistan proper because the Taliban took management and has witnessed the swift and troubling backslide in girls’s rights.

„Afghanistan is the one nation on the earth the place girls and women are banned from secondary training as a coverage. There’s no ministry for girls’s affairs, and there are not any girls within the Cupboard. Ladies are restricted from many areas of labor and wish a male guardian each time they should catch public transport,“ she stated.

„The result’s that girls’s faces, voices and views have gotten more and more invisible. On this local weather of worry and uncertainty, that invisibility is changing into normalized.“

Her go to to Seoul, a metropolis that has undergone fast transformations in its pursuit of gender equality, aimed to spotlight the hyperlink between Afghanistan’s girls’s rights disaster and broader international challenges.

Many outdoors Afghanistan would possibly assume that such excessive repression would by no means occur elsewhere, she famous.

„However you recognize, in the future you get up, you’ve got a brand new change. You’ve got a change in authorities, and the issues that you just took without any consideration should not there anymore.“

U.N. Ladies’s work in Afghanistan focuses on supporting packages led by native girls throughout sectors corresponding to well being and fundamental safety companies. The group additionally helps maintain girls’s companies by partaking with native girls’s organizations.

„There are few areas the place girls can nonetheless work. So we’re supporting girls’s entry to finance and to capital,“ she stated, explaining that many Afghan girls’s financial actions are largely restricted to jobs like tailoring and handicrafts at dwelling.

A burqa-clad Afghan girl walks via a market in Kabul, Afghanistan, March 6. EPA-Yonhap

Regardless of the grim actuality, Davidian and her crew discover hope within the resilience of Afghan girls.

„I bear in mind a incapacity rights activist who stated to me, ‘I’ll maintain working, I’ll maintain preventing, I’ll maintain assembly with girls and creating increasingly initiatives. I’m not going to surrender,’“ she stated. „That is actually the spirit of Afghan girls.“

When requested about her motivation, Davidian replied, „My motivation is that in the future, Afghan girls is not going to must be resilient anymore — that they’ll have the ability to go to high school, go to work, run in a park or go to a gymnasium, and so they received’t even must suppose twice about it.“

Past Afghanistan, the U.N. activist expressed considerations a few broader rollback of ladies’s rights worldwide.

„We’re seeing undoubtedly a brand new chapter within the international pushback on girls’s rights … A whole lot of member states that have been champions of the agenda, we’re beginning to see defunding and deprioritization of gender equality,“ she stated.

„However gender equality isn’t only a ethical crucial — it advantages everybody,“ she stated. „When you’ve got ladies and men capable of equally take part, it results in higher outcomes throughout all measures.“

In that sense, she known as for strong investments in girls’s empowerment, explaining that many research present that when girls are concerned in decision-making, economies thrive, peace agreements last more, and companies carry out higher.

Throughout her journey to Seoul, Davidian delivered a speech on the Worldwide Ladies’s Day occasion organized by the Seoul-based U.N. Ladies Data and Partnerships Centre, Wednesday. She additionally met with Korean youth and civil society members.

Davidian, who stated she has a deep curiosity in Korean tradition and meals, added, „I’m actually honored to be right here and study from Korea’s personal journey on gender equality.“