Afghan girls deplore Taliban’s new order to cover faces in public | Taliban News

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

While the Taliban have all the time imposed restrictions to control the bodies of Afghan women, the decree is the first for this regime where prison punishment is assigned for violation of the dress code for ladies.

The Taliban’s not too long ago reinstated Ministry for the Propagation of Advantage and Prevention of Vice introduced on Saturday that it's “required for all respectable Afghan women to put on a hijab”, or headscarf.

The ministry, in a press release, recognized the chadori (the blue-coloured Afghan burqa or full-body veil) as the “finest hijab” of selection.

Also acceptable as a hijab, the assertion declared, is a long black veil covering a lady from head to toe.

The ministry assertion supplied a description: “Any garment masking the body of a girl is considered a hijab, offered that it isn't too tight to characterize the body parts nor is it thin sufficient to disclose the physique.”

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

“If a girl is caught with out a hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) can be warned. The second time, the guardian might be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian can be imprisoned for 3 days,” in accordance with the statement.

Akif Muhajir, a spokesman for the ministry, said that authorities staff who violate the hijab rule might be fired.

And male guardians found guilty of repeated offences “will be despatched to the courtroom for additional punishment”, he said.

The brand new decree is the most recent in a collection of edicts proscribing ladies’s freedoms imposed since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan last summer time. News of the decree was acquired with widespread condemnation and outrage by Afghan women and activists.

“Why have they diminished ladies to [an] object that's being sexualised?” asked Marzia, a 50-year-old college professor from Kabul.

The professor’s name has been modified to protect her identity, as she fears Taliban repercussions for expressing her views publicly.

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

“Why ought to we be handled like third-class citizens because they cannot follow Islam and control their sexual needs?” the professor asked, anger evident in her voice.

As an unmarried girl who looks after her mom, Marzia doesn't have a mahram. She is the sole breadwinner in her small household.

“I'm unmarried, and my father died very long ago, and I take care of my mom,” she stated.

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

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

“They usually stop the taxi I am in, asking the place my mahram is,” Marzia stated.

“When I try to explain I don’t have one, they won’t listen. 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 have had to stroll several kilometres to house or my classes on multiple occasion.”

Marzia’s sentiments were echoed by women’s rights activists based mostly in Afghanistan and out of doors the country.

Activist Huda Khamosh was a pacesetter within the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that came about after the Taliban takeover last summer time. She evaded arrest during a Taliban crackdown on feminine protestors in February. Later, Khamosh confronted Taliban leaders at a conference 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 foundation, and send a unsuitable message to the young girls of this technology in Afghanistan, lowering their id to their clothes,” mentioned Khamosh, who urged Afghan girls to raise their voices.

“By no means be silent,” she mentioned.

“The rights granted to a woman [in Islam] are more than simply the appropriate to choose one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh said, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that centered solely on the proper to marriage, however didn't tackle issues of work and education for girls.

“Girls have dignity and agency over their lives,” she stated.

“Twenty years [of gains made by Afghan women] just isn't insignificant progress to lose in a single day. We won this on our own would possibly, preventing the patriarchal society, and no one can remove us from the community.”

The activists also said they'd predicted the current developments in Afghanistan, and placed equal blame on the international community 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 last August, Afghan ladies continued to insist that the worldwide group preserve ladies’s rights as “a non-negotiable part of their engagement and negotiations with the Taliban”.

However the international group had failed Afghan women yet again, Hamidi said.

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

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

“It is a blatant violation of the fitting to freedom of selection and motion, and the Taliban were given the area and time [by the international community] to impose additional reprisals and systematic discrimination,” Hamidi stated.

Khamosh, the activist, agrees.

“The world is betraying a whole technology with their silence,” she said.

“It's a crime in opposition to humanity to permit a rustic to show into a prison for half its population,” she mentioned, adding that repercussions from the continuing state of affairs in Afghanistan will probably be felt globally.

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

“We are a country that has produced a number of the most brilliant girls leaders. I used to show my students the worth of respecting and supporting ladies,” she stated.

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

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