Young Afghan women can no longer walk the halls of their school for a year now. The United Nations has again called on the Taliban authorities to take “urgent measures” to reopen middle and high schools to girls from Afghanistan, calling their closure for a year “shameful” and “unparalleled in the world”.
“Sunday marks a year of exclusion of girls from secondary school in Afghanistan. A year of lost knowledge and opportunities they will never find again. Girls have their place in school. The Taliban must let them come back”, insisted the UN secretary general Anthony Guterres.
When they came to power in the summer of 2021, the Taliban banned secondary schools for young girls. On March 23, the attempt to reopen the doors of colleges and high schools to them had lasted only a few hours. The same day, the Taliban had turned around and announced their closure again, much to the dismay of thousands of girls who had returned home in tears.
The Taliban have since maintained that the ban was only linked to a “technical problem” and that classes would resume once a program, based on Islamic precepts, had been defined.
According to the United Nations, “more than a million girls” mainly between the ages of 12 and 18 have been prevented from going to school during the past year, which is not the case for boys for whom schools have reopened on September 18.
“A tragic, shameful anniversary”
“It is a tragic, shameful and completely avoidable anniversary,” said Markus Potzel, acting head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Manua), in a statement on Sunday. “The continued exclusion of girls from secondary school has no credible justification and has no equivalent anywhere in the world. It is deeply damaging for a generation of girls and for the future of Afghanistan,” he added.
“It is the responsibility of the Taliban to create conditions conducive to peace, inclusion, security, human rights and economic recovery. The international community remains ready to support a government that is representative of the entire population and that respects their rights,” he concludes.
Inaccessible jobs, clothing restrictions…
Since their return to power, the Taliban have imposed very strict rules on the conduct of women, especially in public life. In addition to closing secondary schools, Islamist fundamentalists have barred women from many government jobs and require them to cover themselves fully in public, ideally with a burqa.
At school and at work, in public spaces or at the heart of their private lives, Afghan women live under the “suffocating repression” of the Taliban authorities, deplores Amnesty International in a report published last July. “Their draconian policies deprive millions of women and young girls of their right to lead a free and fulfilling life in safety”, summed up Agnès Callamard, secretary general of the NGO.