Afghanistan: Taliban curse condemn women to slavery
By Akansha Vashist
Chandigarh, February 23: The good Taliban existed in the day-dream of the western powers led by the US who were in hurry to run away from Afghanistan. The Taliban were bad, and bared their uglier teeth to the women of the country once the western powers abandoned Afghanistan to medieval age stuck mullahs who swarm the war ravaged country with sophisticated arms slung over their shoulders.
The European countries are now testing limits of their sanction powers to tame the rabid Taliban, revealing rogue faces day after day, as they condemn women to life of slavery to the men. The arctic winter has left devastating trails in Afghanistan where more than 80 per cent of the people are starving, according to the accounts of the local and international agencies.
Latest decree of the ruling Taliban has been to ban women from accessing contraceptives and also travelling without the company of make companions. For the Taliban, contraceptive is a “western conspiracy to control the Muslim population”. One by one all of the basic human rights of women have been taken away. They have, literally, confined women to their homes. Most of these women are sole bread winners of their homes.
“I never imagined we would be living like this,” Farzana told a leading newspaper in Kabul, who added: “We had a good house once, but it was destroyed by fighting in the war. My husband had work, but now there is none. As a mother, it pains me to send my children out in this awful cold to beg, but we have no choice.” This appears to be the story of over 40 million Afghans.
Winters have been extremely harsh in the second year of Taliban Rule. This has been accentuated by the callous attitude of the Taliban Government. More than 160 people and two million livestock have perished in the arctic winters, according to Government sources.
According to the World Food Program, nearly 20 million people face acute food shortages this winter, and six million face “emergency-level food insecurity”. The Taliban have not provided relief to the population and whatever little help that reached via foreign aid has been cut by the international agencies in response to the restrictions imposed by the ruling regime on women.
Heavy snowfall in many parts blocked roads, making it almost impossible to send aid to the people in need. After the ban on contraceptives, women would now have to face unwanted pregnancy and resultant anemia, thus, further making them vulnerable. Earlier, pregnant women were taken care by the female NGO workers or healthcare providers, but the Taliban have banned women from working in the NGOs. This gap has not yet been filled.
Naila Mirza, a junior doctor in Kabul, told CBS News that many pregnant mothers have been coming to the hospital where she works seeking abortion advice. “I witnessed mothers with tearful eyes who wanted to keep the baby, but economic hardship forced the couple to abort the child,” Mirza said, adding “due to a lack of proper nutrition, we are seeing six-month-old babies who look like two-day-olds, because mothers who should be eating during pregnancy are starving”.
“The Afghan winter, as everybody in Afghanistan knows, is the big messenger of doom for so many families in Afghanistan as we go through these many years of humanitarian need … we see some of the consequences in loss of life,” UN aid chief Martin Griffiths told Reuters.
The situation has become so dire that people are forced to eat whatever they can find or get. Even menial work is hard to find. “We only have old, dried-up bread from neighbors,” said Shallah, a mother of nine, whose worn brown shawl is draped to expose just one eye to the elements.
(Author is an independent researcher)
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