A-Infos (en) France, UCL AL #369 - Antipatriarchy - Afghanistan: Segregation and Persecution of Women, Let's Break the Silence (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In Afghanistan, the Taliban regime has recently further tightened 
legislation to render women invisible, silence them, and subjugate them 
to men. As March 8th approaches, UCL Montreuil invited Shakiba Dawod, a 
feminist refugee in France. ---- Who still talks about Afghan women? 
Hardly anyone, worries Shakiba Dawod, a member of the Parliament of 
Exiles, an association primarily composed of refugees from Syria, Iran, 
Iraq, Guinea, Kurdistan, and Afghanistan.

After returning to power in Kabul in August 2021, the Taliban reinstated 
the segregation affecting more than 15 million women: girls over 12 are 
forbidden from attending school or participating in sports, from 
working, accessing healthcare, or traveling alone in public, and the 
marriage of girls as young as 6 is decriminalized (the religious 
injunction being against forcing them into sexual relations before the 
age of 12). Since January 2026, a new Penal Code has authorized domestic 
violence (unless the husband inflicts "serious injury").

Yet, the normalization of the Taliban regime continues. In July 2025, 
Moscow officially recognized it. Four months later, Berlin hosted its 
diplomats. The European Commission, for its part, is studying "the 
potential organization of returns" of refugees to Afghanistan.

Underground Schools
What about women's resistance, both in Afghanistan and in exile?

In catastrophic economic conditions, Afghan women protest and defy 
repression, even going so far as to ride bicycles in public or 
demonstrate in the streets with their faces uncovered. Groups pool their 
resources to rent a room from a male accomplice and set up clandestine 
schools there. Young girls attend them at the risk of their lives. 
Despite the ban, midwives help women give birth.

In exile, the situation is no better. In France, the destruction of 
migrant camps by the police disperses and isolates exiles. "We thought 
we could bring the future of Afghanistan to life in exile, but we 
haven't managed to develop a project or a manifesto," laments Shakiba 
Dawod. "Today, we're limited to providing administrative support and a 
few fundraising events." "The heart of the intellectual output of the 
Afghan exile community is in Germany, in Berlin, within the Afghanistan 
Women's Studies Academy (AWSA), which maintains sisterly ties with 
Iranian and Kurdish activists. The Revolutionary Association of the 
Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), founded in Kabul in 1977, still exists in 
exile and, despite threats, continues to defend democracy, secularism, 
and feminism. But overall, exiled women speak out too little," laments 
Shakiba Dawod, who also denounces the drift of certain figures, such as 
taekwondo champion Marzieh Hamidi, who went so far as to endorse the 
Islamophobia of the far-right group Nemesis.

It is worth remembering that before 2001, solidarity with Afghan women 
was a recurring theme within the feminist movement in Europe. NATO's 
invasion of Afghanistan, under the guise of "bringing democracy and 
liberating women," subsequently led to twenty years of self-censorship, 
for fear of being associated with an imperialist agenda. It is time to 
end this self-censorship.

Comrades from UCL Montreuil

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Afghanistan-Segregation-et-persecution-des-femmes-rompons-le-silence
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en