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

The Taliban has issued one more decree imposing additional restrictions on Afghan girls, and criminalising their clothing.

Whereas the Taliban have at all times imposed restrictions to govern the bodies of Afghan women, the decree is the first for this regime where criminal punishment is assigned for violation of the gown code for girls.

The Taliban’s lately reinstated Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice announced on Saturday that it is “required for all respectable Afghan girls to put on a hijab”, or headscarf.

The ministry, in an announcement, recognized the chadori (the blue-coloured Afghan burqa or full-body veil) because the “finest hijab” of choice.

Additionally acceptable as a hijab, the statement declared, is an extended black veil covering a girl from head to toe.

The ministry statement supplied a description: “Any garment protecting the physique of a lady is considered a hijab, supplied that it is not too tight to symbolize the physique components neither is it thin enough to disclose the body.”

Punishment was also detailed: Male guardians of offending girls will receive a warning, and for repeated offences they are going to be imprisoned.

“If a lady is caught with out a hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) can be warned. The second time, the guardian will be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian can be imprisoned for three days,” according to the statement.

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

And male guardians found responsible of repeated offences “shall be despatched to the courtroom for further punishment”, he said.

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

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

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

“I am a practicing Muslim and value what Islam has taught me. If, as Muslim males, they've a problem with my hijab, then they need to observe their own hijab and lower their gaze,” she said.

“Why ought to we be handled like third-class residents as a result of they cannot follow Islam and management their sexual desires?” the professor asked, anger evident in her voice.

As an single lady who looks after her mother, Marzia does not have a mahram. She is the only real breadwinner in her small household.

“I'm unmarried, and my father died very way back, and I take care of my mother,” she mentioned.

“The Taliban killed my brother, my only mahram, in an attack 18 years ago. Would they now have me borrow a mahram for them [to] punish me subsequent time?” she requested.

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

“They usually cease the taxi I am in, asking where my mahram is,” Marzia mentioned.

“When I attempt to explain I don’t have one, they won’t pay attention. It doesn’t matter that I am a revered professor; they show no dignity and order the taxi drivers to abandon me on the roads,” she stated.

“I've had to stroll a number of kilometres to residence or my classes on multiple occasion.”

Marzia’s sentiments were echoed by women’s rights activists based in Afghanistan and outdoors the country.

Activist Huda Khamosh was a leader within the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that happened after the Taliban takeover last summer season. She evaded arrest throughout 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 send a incorrect message to the young women of this era in Afghanistan, lowering their identity to their garments,” said Khamosh, who urged Afghan ladies to boost their voices.

“By no means be silent,” she stated.

“The rights granted to a girl [in Islam] are extra than simply the correct to decide on one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh said, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that focused solely on the appropriate to marriage, however didn't address issues of labor and education for women.

“Ladies have dignity and company over their lives,” she stated.

“Twenty years [of gains made by Afghan women] will not be insignificant progress to lose in a single day. We won this on our personal may, combating the patriarchal society, and no one can take away us from the neighborhood.”

The activists additionally said that they had predicted the current developments in Afghanistan, and positioned equal blame on the international group for not recognising the urgency of the situation.

Samira Hamidi, an Afghan activist and senior researcher at Amnesty International, mentioned that even after the Taliban’s take over final August, Afghan girls continued to insist that the international group preserve women’s rights as “a non-negotiable element of their engagement and negotiations with the Taliban”.

But the international community had failed Afghan girls but once more, Hamidi said.

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

The present scenario has resulted from flawed policies and the international group’s lack of “understanding on how serious girls’s rights violations” are in Afghanistan, she mentioned.

“It is a blatant violation of the best to freedom of choice and movement, and the Taliban got the area and time [by the international community] to impose extra reprisals and systematic discrimination,” Hamidi said.

Khamosh, the activist, agrees.

“The world is betraying a complete generation with their silence,” she stated.

“It is a crime against humanity to allow a country to turn into a jail for half its population,” she mentioned, adding that repercussions from the continued scenario in Afghanistan will be felt globally.

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

“We are a country that has produced among the most sensible ladies leaders. I used to show my college students the value of respecting and supporting girls,” she said.

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

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