Afghan girls deplore Taliban’s new order to cover faces in public | Taliban Information

The Taliban has issued yet another decree imposing further restrictions on Afghan ladies, and criminalising their clothes.

While the Taliban have always imposed restrictions to govern the our bodies of Afghan women, the decree is the primary for this regime where legal punishment is assigned for violation of the costume code for ladies.

The Taliban’s not too long ago reinstated Ministry for the Propagation of Advantage and Prevention of Vice announced on Saturday that it's “required for all respectable Afghan girls to put on a hijab”, or scarf.

The ministry, in a press release, recognized the chadori (the blue-coloured Afghan burqa or full-body veil) because the “greatest hijab” of choice.

Also acceptable as a hijab, the statement declared, is a long black veil masking a woman from head to toe.

The ministry statement provided an outline: “Any garment masking the physique of a woman is taken into account a hijab, supplied that it isn't too tight to signify the physique components neither is it thin sufficient to reveal the body.”

Punishment was additionally detailed: Male guardians of offending women will obtain a warning, and for repeated offences they will be imprisoned.

“If a woman is caught without a hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) can be warned. The second time, the guardian can be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian can be imprisoned for three days,” in line with the statement.

Akif Muhajir, a spokesman for the ministry, stated that authorities workers who violate the hijab rule will be fired.

And male guardians discovered guilty of repeated offences “might be despatched to the courtroom for further punishment”, he mentioned.

The new decree is the latest in a sequence of edicts restricting women’s freedoms imposed for the reason that Taliban seized power in Afghanistan last summer. News of the decree was acquired with widespread condemnation and outrage by Afghan ladies and activists.

“Why have they diminished women to [an] object that's being sexualised?” asked Marzia, a 50-year-old university professor from Kabul.

The professor’s identify has been changed to protect her id, as she fears Taliban repercussions for expressing her views publicly.

“I am a training Muslim and value what Islam has taught me. If, as Muslim males, they've a problem with my hijab, then they should observe their very own hijab and decrease their gaze,” she mentioned.

“Why ought to we be handled like third-class citizens because they cannot practice Islam and control their sexual desires?” the professor asked, anger evident in her voice.

As an single girl who takes care of her mom, Marzia does not have a mahram. She is the sole breadwinner in her small household.

“I'm single, and my father died very way back, and I take care of my mom,” she stated.

“The Taliban killed my brother, my solely mahram, in an assault 18 years in the past. Would they now have me borrow a mahram for them [to] punish me subsequent time?” she asked.

Marzia has repeatedly been stopped by the Taliban whereas travelling on her own to work in her university, which is a violation of an earlier edict that forbids girls from travelling alone.

“They repeatedly stop the taxi I'm in, asking where my mahram is,” Marzia stated.

“When I try to clarify I don’t have one, they received’t pay attention. It doesn’t matter that I'm a revered professor; they show no dignity and order the taxi drivers to abandon me on the roads,” she said.

“I have had to stroll several kilometres to home or my courses on multiple event.”

Marzia’s sentiments had been echoed by ladies’s rights activists based in Afghanistan and outside the nation.

Activist Huda Khamosh was a frontrunner within the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that occurred after the Taliban takeover last summer. She evaded arrest during a Taliban crackdown on female protestors in February. Later, Khamosh confronted Taliban leaders at a convention in Norway, demanding that they launch her fellow feminine protestors held in Kabul.

“The Taliban regime was imposed on us, and their self-imposed rules don't have any legal basis, and ship a flawed message to the younger ladies of this technology in Afghanistan, reducing their identification to their garments,” mentioned Khamosh, who urged Afghan women to boost their voices.

“By no means be silent,” she stated.

“The rights granted to a lady [in Islam] are extra than simply the appropriate to choose one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh mentioned, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that centered solely on the correct to marriage, but did not tackle issues of labor and training for ladies.

“Women have dignity and agency over their lives,” she said.

“Twenty years [of gains made by Afghan women] just isn't insignificant progress to lose in a single day. We won this on our own would possibly, combating the patriarchal society, and no one can remove us from the community.”

The activists also mentioned that they had predicted the present developments in Afghanistan, and positioned equal blame on the international community for not recognising the urgency of the scenario.

Samira Hamidi, an Afghan activist and senior researcher at Amnesty Worldwide, stated that even after the Taliban’s take over last August, Afghan girls continued to insist that the worldwide neighborhood preserve girls’s rights as “a non-negotiable component of their engagement and negotiations with the Taliban”.

However the international group had failed Afghan girls yet once more, Hamidi stated.

“For a decade Afghan ladies have been warning all actors involved in peace negotiations about what returning the Taliban to energy will means to girls,” she mentioned.

The current state of affairs has resulted from flawed insurance policies and the worldwide neighborhood’s lack of “understanding on how severe girls’s rights violations” are in Afghanistan, she mentioned.

“It is a blatant violation of the correct to freedom of alternative and motion, and the Taliban were given the area and time [by the international community] to impose further reprisals and systematic discrimination,” Hamidi said.

Khamosh, the activist, agrees.

“The world is betraying a complete technology with their silence,” she mentioned.

“It is a crime in opposition to humanity to allow a rustic to turn into a jail for half its inhabitants,” she said, adding that repercussions from the ongoing state of affairs in Afghanistan will be felt globally.

Marzia, the professor, shared a similar sense of disappointment.

“We're a country that has produced some of the most good ladies leaders. I used to show my students the worth of respecting and supporting women,” she said.

“I gave hope to so many young ladies and all of that has been thrown in [the] trash as meaningless,” she said.

“My heart breaks into pieces with every new ‘law’ and decrees they situation that contradicts our Islamic and Afghan values.”