Ottawa urged to act after Taliban shuts women out of higher education
The federal government has condemned the regime’s move
as an “outrageous violation” of women's rights
Afghan women and advocacy groups are urging the federal government to do more to support female students in Afghanistan after the Taliban imposed an open-ended ban on women attending universities.
In a letter, Afghanistan's de-facto minister of higher education Neda Mohammad Nadeem has instructed the country's public and private universities to suspend "the education of females until further notice."
Western governments, including the U.S. and Canada, condemned the move within hours.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the Taliban's action "indefensible," adding education is a human right and "essential to Afghanistan's economic growth and stability."
He also warned of unspecified consequences for the regime.
Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly tweeted that the Taliban was denying women and girls "the prospect of a better life."
"Equal access to education is a right to which every woman and girl is entitled," she wrote. "We condemn this outrageous violation."
But many are looking for something more than words from Ottawa.
Friba Rezayee is a former Afghan Olympian who arrived in Canada in 2011; she now helps other female Afghan athletes flee the Taliban through her organization Women Leaders of Tomorrow. She said the government of Canada needs to forge ties with non-governmental organizations in Kabul to support Afghan women.
"Those small grassroots organizations are still working and we are the people who have contacts and people on the ground, to make change, and also reach out to those women and families who are in need," she said.
Like many western countries, Canada shut down its embassy in Kabul indefinitely after the Taliban completed its military takeover in August 2021.
Ottawa did appoint a senior official for Afghanistan, David Sproule, who has met with Taliban representatives more than a dozen times since. Together with other Global Affairs Canada staff and diplomats from other western countries, he has been pressing the regime on women's rights to education, the fight against terrorism and the need to extend safe passage for Afghans trying to leave the country.
Rezayee said those talks clearly went nowhere.
"The Canadian government has been very nice and patient with the Taliban," she said.
She pointed out that the regime shut girls out of high schools months ago.
"They are taking Afghanistan and Afghan women nearly three decades back," said Habiba Nazari, an applied sciences student at the University of British Columbia.
Nazari, who lives in Vancouver, fled Afghanistan before the Taliban's takeover — but her six sisters had to stay behind.
Now, she fears her younger sisters will never be able to attend university.
"They are really thinking about this — 'We are not going to school, we don't have any opportunity to attend any school, any program.' And they don't know about their future," she said.
Lauryn Oates works with Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, a non-governmental organization that works to promote literacy and access to education in Afghanistan.
Her group is urging Ottawa to fund virtual schooling for girls and women shut out of the education system in Afghanistan, and to provide schooling for those who've moved on to third countries outside Canada.
"Make sure that girls and women have access to alternative forms of education," she said.
Oates said she fears shutting girls and women out of school is only part of the Taliban's plan.
Her organization pointed to an Afghan newspaper, Hasht-e-Shubh, which published what appeared to be a leaked draft of a Taliban proposal for a new educational curriculum,
CBC News has not independently verified this publication, but Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan suggested the Taliban wants "a complete ban on images of all living things, mention of music, television, elections, birthdays, radio" and "non-Islam figures such as scientists."
"Access is meaningless if you don't get a true education that actually means something that you can do something in your life with, that you have better life opportunities, better livelihood opportunities with," Oates said.
Asked to offer comment for this story, the federal government did not address the concerns raised by Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan but pointed instead to Joly's tweet.
‘My dreams are over.’ Taliban ban on women
in university sparks private anguish, public
protests
Female students cried publicly over the move. Some male
By Marjan Sadat
Wed., Dec. 21, 2022
Wurranga Arif, an 18-year-old student of civil engineering, was dressed head to toe according to Taliban rules, to go to her third-semester promotion exam at the largest university in Kabul.
She was on her way when she was told the gates of universities were being closed to female students.
The announcement had come: The Taliban were banning women and girls from university. The news this week is drawing international condemnation as the latest regressive step from a regime that regained power more than a year ago.
For women in Afghanistan, it is devastating.
Arif says that upon hearing the news, she thought that everything in her life was over. She felt that she was in a grave from which there is no return, she told the Star in an interview.
“My dreams are over forever. I think the weight of the sky is on my shoulders, and I am very sad,” Arif said via WhatsApp, speaking in Persian.
“In this situation, Afghanistan could be called a graveyard. My country is heading toward destruction,” Arif said. She still holds out a bit of hope for a reversal of the decision and a chance to go back to university.
It is a decision that will affect thousands of other women in the country.
Female university students cried publicly this week. Some male students left their classes in protest, and a few university lecturers at public and private universities resigned.
Arif asked, “Is it really possible for a country to progress without educating women?” and then answers herself. “Never.”
The Taliban’s decision has been condemned by the United Nations, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Norway, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia — the birthplace of Islam — and the U.A.E., an influential country in the Persian Gulf, along with Pakistan were the only three countries that recognized the Taliban regime in the 1990s.
Dr. Davood Moradian, director of the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies, who relocated to the U.K. after the fall of the Afghan republic last year, said that he was only surprised by those who have been surprised by the Taliban move.
“To their credit, they have been consistent in their determination to have the world’s first gender apartheid. Only their apologist and naive observers chose to ignore this,” Moradian told the Star via WhatsApp from London.
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Universities are being closed to women in a country where schools for girls have already been closed by the Taliban, despite repeated requests from the international community to reopen them.
Shaharzad Akbar, the head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission during the Republic era, said the decision of the Taliban to close the gates of universities to women has created a sense of anger in society.
“The new decision of the Taliban once again proved to us how misogynistic the Taliban are,” Akbar said via WhatsApp, from outside the country.
Akbar said that the continuation of the situation will hurt the whole country.
“The situation is getting worse every day. The Islamic world should express its opinion about the situation in Afghanistan and stand by the women of my country, because the decisions of the Taliban on women present a bad and negative image and understanding of Islam to the world.”
Mirwais Balkhi, the minister of education in the previous government of Afghanistan, who currently lives in the U.S., said this decision and others make clear that the Taliban have not changed in any way, in their goals or in their thinking.
“This was the last nail in the hope of women. With this situation, there is no reason for the girls to hope, on the one hand, and for all of us to hope for the reform of the Taliban,” Balkhi told the Star via WhatsApp, speaking in Persian.
Balkhi believes that the Taliban will not be tamed by the language of tolerance. They consider the tolerance of the world to be weakness and failure, he said. He added that this situation emboldens the Taliban and their terrorist associates.
“Afghanistan is moving toward underdevelopment and social, cultural and economic collapse.”
With the takeover by the Taliban on Aug. 15, 2021, the situation of Afghan women in this country is getting worse day by day. New restrictions against women are announced every few days or weeks.
Afghanistan is now the only country in the world whose women are not allowed to go to secondary schools, universities, parks, public women’s bathrooms, and sports clubs, and once again, like the Taliban in the 1990s, they are whipped and stoned in public on different charges.
Sliding back to the Taliban of the ‘90s
December 22, 2022
Earlier this month, there was a glimmer of hope from Afghanistan. Against the grain of its policies since resuming power in August 2021, the Taliban regime had allowed girls in 31 out of 34 provinces to appear for their secondary school examinations. Girls had not been allowed to attend school for over a year. But that hope, tragically and predictably, stands belied. Last month, women and girls were banned from parks, swimming pools, gyms and other public spaces. This week, the Taliban has reportedly banned women from universities in Afghanistan. With this latest move, it is undeniable that the country has been plunged back into the regressive, authoritarian, misogynistic rule that was the hallmark of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s. It is also a sign of the limitations of the leverage the international community has to influence the Afghan Taliban.
In the last few weeks alone, in addition to the actions against women citizens, the Taliban has brought back public flogging and executions. These “policy” decisions put paid to the notion that the regime’s desire to escape sanctions and gain international legitimacy post the US withdrawal would force it to maintain at least the veneer of following global norms with respect to human rights. A year later, even those states that had recognised the Taliban in the ’90s — Saudi Arabia, UAE and Pakistan — have not done so this time. The Pakistan security establishment was not-so-subtly jubilant at the return of the Taliban. As the Taliban’s closest ally, it saw the negotiated US withdrawal as a diplomatic and strategic win, in no small part because regime change undermined New Delhi’s position in the country. But that relationship too seems set to sour, as the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has renewed hostilities against the army: Earlier this week, the TTP attacked a counter-terrorism centre and took hostages and on Thursday, the Pakistan army stormed the building, and claims to have killed all the hostage-takers.
The need for international legitimacy, economic logic and even the imperative of maintaining a cordial relationship with its closest “ally” — it seems that the Taliban is relatively immune to these pressures. The West is preoccupied with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the economic and geopolitical crisis that it has engendered. With few internal pressures, the Taliban regime, it seems, can trample on the rights of citizens, particularly women, with impunity. The constraints of the international community in such a situation must be recognised and addressed urgently in multilateral fora.
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