Women were released from arbitrary detention after being forced to sign pledges that they and family members would not protest or speak publicly about their experience in detention.Īmnesty said four Taliban whistleblowers revealed details of the detention and abuse of women and girls in prison-like facilities. A soldier who was walking next to me hit me in my breast, and he said, ‘I can kill you right now, and no one would say anything.’ This happened every time we went out: we were insulted-physically, verbally and emotionally,” the report quotes one woman as saying. “They did this to us so that we couldn’t show the world. That prompted a change of tactics, according to women quoted in the Amnesty report, who said they were later beaten on areas of their bodies, such as breasts and the pubic area, that they could not show publicly. Women protesters who were detained and beaten showed their injuries publicly. Regulations on clothing followed soon after, with attention to such minutiae as how much of the face can be shown and a ban on perfume. Despite Taliban promises, after they retook power, women were ordered to stay indoors and were permitted outside their homes only with a male relative as a chaperone. Many saw them as a sign of things to come, remembering the harshness of the earlier Taliban attempt to run the country from 1996-2001. In the weeks and months after the Taliban’s takeover, women took to the streets to protest against restrictions that were introduced almost immediately. It notes that the Taliban have reneged on commitments voiced after their return to power to “uphold the rights of women and girls” and have instead imposed “systematic discrimination … has violated the rights of these women and girls.” Amnesty says things have only gotten worse. Pressure from the international community, including neighbors like Iran and China, as well as the United States and the United Nations, has yielded no concessions from the Taliban on restoring women’s liberties. Many have families living outside Afghanistan who are not subject to the strictures they are imposing on Afghans. Taliban figures, however, ensure their own daughters are educated, either in privately run schools in Afghanistan or abroad. Women have been sacked from their jobs and banned from secondary school and, effectively, all higher education. Since then, conditions for all Afghans have deteriorated, though the treatment of women and girls has been particularly concerning, as the Islamists have appeared determined to expunge them from all social involvement. The report, Death in Slow Motion: Women and Girls Under Taliban Rule, comes almost one year after the Taliban’s return to power last August. “If the international community fails to act, it will be abandoning women and girls in Afghanistan, and undermining human rights everywhere.” “The Taliban are deliberately depriving millions of women and girls of their human rights, and subjecting them to systematic discrimination,” said Agnès Callamard, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, in a statement. Taliban “whistleblowers” say the number of women detained for “moral crimes” (being outside with a man who is not a relative) is growing. Women detained after protesting for their rights describe horrific treatment, including electrocution, beatings with cables, and being deprived of food, water, and medical care. The Taliban’s brutality toward women in Afghanistan is a “suffocating crackdown” that goes beyond the widely condemned bans on work and school to include sex slavery, forced marriages, violence, torture, and disappearances, according to Amnesty International, which published a new report on the subject Wednesday.
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