By: Rukhshana Media
Afghan women protesters wrote one hundred letters to the United Nations Security Council about the living conditions of one hundred women under the authoritarian rule of the Taliban.
They urged the Security Council to take immediate action regarding the women’s rights situation in Afghanistan.
According to Rukhshana Media’s findings, they have written their one-year memories in two languages of Persian/Dari and English.
“These hundred letters are actually the suffering letters of one hundred Afghan women who have experienced oppression, suffocation, deprivation, and despair under the rule of the most misogynistic and repressive regime in Afghanistan,” the women protestors say.
The contents of the letters include targeted and continuous murders of women, stoning and beating of women, sexual assaults, torture, and arbitrary arrests, forced and underage marriages, forced hijab, mistreatment, humiliation, insulting of women, the closure of girls’ schools above the grade six, closure of gyms, parks, and funfairs, public baths, and other cases of violations of women’s rights.
One of the protesting women has examined the living situation of women during the past year, according to a letter seen by Rukhshana Media.
The letter says that women in Afghan society have made significant progress in various sectors in the last two decades, including the creation of women’s rights organizations, work in government offices, presenting in the media, and sports.
The letter also says that before the Taliban seized Afghanistan in mid-August last year, , about 300 women were working in the judicial institutions of the previous government; But with the arrival of the Taliban, all of them were forced to flee the country.
“Suddenly a storm arose,” the letter says. “It destroyed all the achievements of the Afghan people, especially women.”
“The Taliban came back again, this time, more brutally than before, they started to destroy these achievements and people,” the letter adds.
Meanwhile, Tarranom Saeidi, an Afghan women’s rights activist who fled to Canada, told Rukhshana Media that the letters are the real account of the miserable condition of women’s lives under Taliban rule and that the letters are actually 100 shouts for justice, freedom, equality, and respect for women’s rights.
Ms. Saeidi says that this time women have resorted to pen to continue their awakening and “freedom” protests so that they can defend their basic rights.
She says that women and girls today are deprived of the right to work, education, free travel, art, and sports, and girls’ schools are closed, funfairs and women’s bathrooms are closed to them, and universities are also going to be closed to girls soon.
Ms. Saeidi says that instead of finding a solution for women to get out of this situation, the international community, United Nations, and international criminal organizations have unfortunately moved in line with the Taliban and even support them.
She adds that the United Nations and the World Bank send a huge amount of money to the Taliban every week, and their authorities take every penny of them and not even a cent reaches the people of Afghanistan.
Fowzia Wahdat, another women’s rights activist based in Kabul, says that the letters are the facts from the lives of women that she or one of her family members experienced, organized in the form of a story sent to the Security Council.
Ms. Wahdat says the initiative to reflect on all the crimes of the Taliban forces that have been committed against the Afghan people, especially Afghan women and girls, over the past year.
Afghan women protestors have protested many times against the Taliban’s restrictions imposed on women and girls, including restrictions on their basic rights, which were suppressed violently with arrests, beatings, torture, and fires into the air.
In the past two weeks, the Taliban forces arrested four women’s rights activists, including Zarifa Yaqubi, Zainab Rahimi, Farhat Popalzai, and Humaira Yosufi.
