FRANCE 24 spoke to prominent Afghan women’s rights activist Mahbouba Seraj, on the day the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor announced that he was seeking arrest warrants against senior Taliban leaders over the persecution of women in Afghanistan, calling it a “crime against humanity”. The move is “long overdue”, Seraj reacted. She went on to say that Afghan women “have been suffering since the minute the Taliban arrived”. “Nothing was being done,” she added.
For women in Afghanistan, “education is out, walking around is out, travelling is out. Going to the park is out, going to the doctor is out. Even right now, going to the institutes and learning something, to become a nurse or a doctor or a midwife, that’s also out. So there’s got to be a stop to this,” Seraj told FRANCE 24 from Afghanistan’s capital Kabul.
On December 29, the Taliban issued a decree banning the construction of windows in residential buildings overlooking areas used by women and ordering that existing ones should be blocked.
“Seeing women working in kitchens, in courtyards or collecting water from wells can lead to obscene acts,” the decree states.
A day earlier, the Taliban said they would close all national and foreign NGOs that employ women.
‘This is gender apartheid’
Seraj said she believed the situation in Afghanistan was indeed “gender apartheid”, adding that “something has to be done because we are we are dying here. The women of Afghanistan are literally dying.”
The Afghan women’s rights activist noted that for “a lot of people within the international community, it (the situation of Afghan women) is not acceptable”.
On the international stage, however, a debate exists about whether there is a moderate Taliban versus a more hardline Taliban, especially when it comes to women’s rights.
“There are people that don’t really believe in this way of treating the women of Afghanistan the way the way they are doing it as part of the Taliban,” Seraj said.
“But that doesn’t mean anything”, she explained, since discriminatory laws against women are nevertheless implemented by the Taliban, “who have the power to own the women”.
‘We have to start talking to each other’
No country, until now, has recognised the Taliban regime, which seized power back in August 2021.
“Isolation is not good for the people of Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not only Talibs. Afghanistan is not only a certain group of people. Afghanistan is 40 million people, 20 million of them are women and 20 million of them are men. So this country has this much as far as the population is concerned. And we do need to have our place in the world. This whole isolation of ours is just not acceptable,” Seraj said.
She continued: “We have to have discussions. We have to start talking to each other. We have to come up with some kind of a solution.”
Asked whether she is considering staying in her country for good, despite the situation for women, Seraj insisted: “I will be staying here until my last breath”.
Watch more‘It’s not acceptable when half the population is silenced’: CEO of Afghan media group Moby
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