Amie Ferris
As the protracted Nato-led war rumbles towards
its official close, Afghan women are once again pondering their fate.
By Amie Ferris-Rotman
In the months leading up to the 1929 overthrow of King Amanullah, the dynamic Afghan reformer whose wife Queen Soraya notoriously tore off her headscarf in public, historians say, the girls and women of Kabul detected change in the air. They shied away from the handful of schools he had painstakingly opened for them, and reluctantly took back the veil, declared optional by the king only one year before.
Now, as the protracted Nato-led war rumbles towards its official close, Afghan women are once again pondering their fate. Fearing that the power vacuum created by the withdrawal of foreign troops in 2014 might be at least partially filled by the Taliban, Afghan women are following their ancestors and retreating. They are leaving work, government and, in some instances, abandoning the public sphere.
“Everyone in the country knew my voice, and it got to a point where I wasn’t prepared to risk my life anymore,” says Aminah Bobak, who in April abruptly ended her successful career as a journalist after a decade of radio and TV work around the country.
She is one among 200 female reporters from Afghan news outlets who left their jobs in 2012, said Abdul Mujeeb Khalvatgar, Executive Director of the Afghan media advocacy group Nai — a drop of 10 percent and the largest single-year dip since the invasion in late 2001.
Perched in a dimly lit corner of a slanted, mud-brick cafe in central Kabul, Bobak, 28, poured out her passion for journalism. She started as a biology student at university, working in her free time for a radio station. She moved to Rasaa TV, an Afghan news channel set up by global media development organisation Internews, eventually becoming its deputy editor. She remembers her time, causing her soft brown eyes to crinkle. “I loved it,” she says.
Now, just short of a fifth of 11,000 journalists are women. For the first time since the 1970s, women have become noticeable to their compatriots — often as an authoritative female voice parachuted into the wilds by airwaves.
“But joining the channel was a good chance for my enemies to recognise me, and I got scared. I mean the Taliban of course,” Bobak says. The Taliban have often regarded Afghan reporters as their enemies, and this view intensifies when they are women. Nai’s Khalvatgar points to “the thinking that the Taliban are coming back. Men will need to keep women in their homes to avoid insult, and the women are making these decisions.” By the ultra-conservative code that most Afghans still live by, women must seek permission from a male relative or husband for most decisions.
Women have won back hard-fought rights such as voting, education and work since the Taliban were toppled in 2001, and the last decade produced a league of knowledgeable, determined young women for whom the Taliban’s return is anathema. But their retreat from the public sphere hints at failure by the government and its international backers.
So fragile are the gains that Western diplomats expressed concern at Hillary Clinton’s February departure as secretary of state, wondering how the tenuous progress could be maintained without her commitment, let alone furthered. “Many of us had this feeling of ‘how are we going to keep this up?’” one told me.
President Hamid Karzai is ambivalent on women’s rights. He stressed the importance of girls’ education in a January speech at Georgetown University, but female lawmakers and rights workers say he changes his tune on home turf. In March 2012, he appeared to back comments by the Ulema Council — of religious scholars — which said women are worth less than men. Human Rights Watch, in its most recent annual report on the state of rights in the world, warned ominously that “the Afghan government’s failure to respond effectively to violence against women undermines the already-perilous state of women’s rights.” It added that growing global fatigue is “reducing political pressure on the government” to safeguard women.
Increasing anguish over security left Bobak feeling she had no choice but to quit her job.”If foreigners were staying, I’d go back to work right away,” she says.
This pervasive fear of the unknown means women are making fewer appearances on the dust-coated, rutted roads zigzagging Afghanistan’s major cities, observers say. “You hardly see women on the streets nowadays. As a woman, you feel everyone is looking at you. Even going to restaurants has become tense,” says Fawzia Koofi, 37, a member of parliament from Badakshan province, on Tajikistan’s southern border. The widowed mother of two daughters, Koofi campaigns for girls’ education, and has launched a bid to become president next year.
She is riding on the global success of her memoir, The Favored Daughter, detailing her youth as the 19th child of a polygamous father who had seven wives. Koofi was forced to change the security policy at her palatial home after receiving more written and verbal threats “than usual” from the Taliban. Several years ago, gunmen riddled her car with bullets, but she survived unscathed.
“We’re more at risk, and I think as we get closer to 2014 the risk of being targeted and attacked will increase.”
The ubiquitous feeling of oppression returned in 2012, when the “double whammy” of the 2014 troop withdrawal and presidential election reduced the ability of politicians and activists to fight for women’s rights, says Erica Gaston of the US Institute of Peace in Washington.
Last year proved violent for women, including a wave of high-profile killings, such as the car bomb attack on Hanifa Safi, head of women’s affairs in eastern Laghman province. Months later, her successor Nadia Sediqqi was shot dead. According to the UN, 301 women and girls were killed, a 20 percent increase from 2011. In January, the head of women’s affairs in northern Balkh province, Fariba Majid, fled to Finland, where she reportedly claimed asylum.
Koofi says the damaging effects of targeting high-profile women are far-reaching: “This can silence the whole women’s movement, leading sons, husbands, brothers and fathers to think twice before they allow women out of their homes.”
Educated women often evoke history when evaluating their status, capturing the tug-of-war between urban female emancipators and rural conservatives. One of the first orders the illiterate bandit Habibullah Kalakani gave after deposing Amanullah in 1929 was to shut girls’ schools. In the early 1930s, after Kalakani was deposed, his successor reopened them. The gender policy continued to swing like a pendulum for the rest of the 20th century. The 1950s saw the arrival of female doctors; a decade later women joined the government for the first time, followed by years of mass literacy campaigns. The Soviet war of the 1980s, and the civil war that began in 1992 excluded women from the public. When the Taliban took power in 1996, they banned women from talking to men who were not a relative or husband, and ordered the windows of homes painted so that women could not be seen inside.
At a police station in Kabul, First Lieutenant Zakiya Mohammadi, 47, says: “Once the Americans go we’ll have to sit at home again, bored,” she told me in the office where she has intermittingly worked for decades — depending on who was running the country.
WP-Bloomberg
As the protracted Nato-led war rumbles towards
its official close, Afghan women are once again pondering their fate.
By Amie Ferris-Rotman
In the months leading up to the 1929 overthrow of King Amanullah, the dynamic Afghan reformer whose wife Queen Soraya notoriously tore off her headscarf in public, historians say, the girls and women of Kabul detected change in the air. They shied away from the handful of schools he had painstakingly opened for them, and reluctantly took back the veil, declared optional by the king only one year before.
Now, as the protracted Nato-led war rumbles towards its official close, Afghan women are once again pondering their fate. Fearing that the power vacuum created by the withdrawal of foreign troops in 2014 might be at least partially filled by the Taliban, Afghan women are following their ancestors and retreating. They are leaving work, government and, in some instances, abandoning the public sphere.
“Everyone in the country knew my voice, and it got to a point where I wasn’t prepared to risk my life anymore,” says Aminah Bobak, who in April abruptly ended her successful career as a journalist after a decade of radio and TV work around the country.
She is one among 200 female reporters from Afghan news outlets who left their jobs in 2012, said Abdul Mujeeb Khalvatgar, Executive Director of the Afghan media advocacy group Nai — a drop of 10 percent and the largest single-year dip since the invasion in late 2001.
Perched in a dimly lit corner of a slanted, mud-brick cafe in central Kabul, Bobak, 28, poured out her passion for journalism. She started as a biology student at university, working in her free time for a radio station. She moved to Rasaa TV, an Afghan news channel set up by global media development organisation Internews, eventually becoming its deputy editor. She remembers her time, causing her soft brown eyes to crinkle. “I loved it,” she says.
Now, just short of a fifth of 11,000 journalists are women. For the first time since the 1970s, women have become noticeable to their compatriots — often as an authoritative female voice parachuted into the wilds by airwaves.
“But joining the channel was a good chance for my enemies to recognise me, and I got scared. I mean the Taliban of course,” Bobak says. The Taliban have often regarded Afghan reporters as their enemies, and this view intensifies when they are women. Nai’s Khalvatgar points to “the thinking that the Taliban are coming back. Men will need to keep women in their homes to avoid insult, and the women are making these decisions.” By the ultra-conservative code that most Afghans still live by, women must seek permission from a male relative or husband for most decisions.
Women have won back hard-fought rights such as voting, education and work since the Taliban were toppled in 2001, and the last decade produced a league of knowledgeable, determined young women for whom the Taliban’s return is anathema. But their retreat from the public sphere hints at failure by the government and its international backers.
So fragile are the gains that Western diplomats expressed concern at Hillary Clinton’s February departure as secretary of state, wondering how the tenuous progress could be maintained without her commitment, let alone furthered. “Many of us had this feeling of ‘how are we going to keep this up?’” one told me.
President Hamid Karzai is ambivalent on women’s rights. He stressed the importance of girls’ education in a January speech at Georgetown University, but female lawmakers and rights workers say he changes his tune on home turf. In March 2012, he appeared to back comments by the Ulema Council — of religious scholars — which said women are worth less than men. Human Rights Watch, in its most recent annual report on the state of rights in the world, warned ominously that “the Afghan government’s failure to respond effectively to violence against women undermines the already-perilous state of women’s rights.” It added that growing global fatigue is “reducing political pressure on the government” to safeguard women.
Increasing anguish over security left Bobak feeling she had no choice but to quit her job.”If foreigners were staying, I’d go back to work right away,” she says.
This pervasive fear of the unknown means women are making fewer appearances on the dust-coated, rutted roads zigzagging Afghanistan’s major cities, observers say. “You hardly see women on the streets nowadays. As a woman, you feel everyone is looking at you. Even going to restaurants has become tense,” says Fawzia Koofi, 37, a member of parliament from Badakshan province, on Tajikistan’s southern border. The widowed mother of two daughters, Koofi campaigns for girls’ education, and has launched a bid to become president next year.
She is riding on the global success of her memoir, The Favored Daughter, detailing her youth as the 19th child of a polygamous father who had seven wives. Koofi was forced to change the security policy at her palatial home after receiving more written and verbal threats “than usual” from the Taliban. Several years ago, gunmen riddled her car with bullets, but she survived unscathed.
“We’re more at risk, and I think as we get closer to 2014 the risk of being targeted and attacked will increase.”
The ubiquitous feeling of oppression returned in 2012, when the “double whammy” of the 2014 troop withdrawal and presidential election reduced the ability of politicians and activists to fight for women’s rights, says Erica Gaston of the US Institute of Peace in Washington.
Last year proved violent for women, including a wave of high-profile killings, such as the car bomb attack on Hanifa Safi, head of women’s affairs in eastern Laghman province. Months later, her successor Nadia Sediqqi was shot dead. According to the UN, 301 women and girls were killed, a 20 percent increase from 2011. In January, the head of women’s affairs in northern Balkh province, Fariba Majid, fled to Finland, where she reportedly claimed asylum.
Koofi says the damaging effects of targeting high-profile women are far-reaching: “This can silence the whole women’s movement, leading sons, husbands, brothers and fathers to think twice before they allow women out of their homes.”
Educated women often evoke history when evaluating their status, capturing the tug-of-war between urban female emancipators and rural conservatives. One of the first orders the illiterate bandit Habibullah Kalakani gave after deposing Amanullah in 1929 was to shut girls’ schools. In the early 1930s, after Kalakani was deposed, his successor reopened them. The gender policy continued to swing like a pendulum for the rest of the 20th century. The 1950s saw the arrival of female doctors; a decade later women joined the government for the first time, followed by years of mass literacy campaigns. The Soviet war of the 1980s, and the civil war that began in 1992 excluded women from the public. When the Taliban took power in 1996, they banned women from talking to men who were not a relative or husband, and ordered the windows of homes painted so that women could not be seen inside.
At a police station in Kabul, First Lieutenant Zakiya Mohammadi, 47, says: “Once the Americans go we’ll have to sit at home again, bored,” she told me in the office where she has intermittingly worked for decades — depending on who was running the country.
WP-Bloomberg
