A group of Afghan women protesters has slammed the decision of US envoy Rina Amiri to engage directly with the Taliban, claiming she risked formalizing gender apartheid and terrorism.
Ms Amiri, US special envoy for Afghan Women, Girls and Human Rights announced this week she had met a delegation of Taliban representatives in Doha.
“Having been urged extensively by Afghans and human rights defenders on the need to directly engage the Taliban on human rights, particularly the extreme restriction on women and girls, I joined my colleagues in talks with the Taliban,’ she tweeted.
This brought a furious response from the Coalition of Afghan Women’s Protest Movements, who called her remarks “disgraceful and untrue”.
In a statement released on Tuesday, the protesters said that they had fought for nearly two years to defend human rights by enduring imprisonment, torture and repression and had never called for direct interaction with the “terrorist” Taliban. Rather, they had used the slogan “No to the Taliban” from the first day of their struggle.
The Coalition members asked Rina Amiri to apologize to the women and girls of Afghanistan for “false statements” and to not mistake the voices of Taliban lobbyists for the voices of women and human rights activists.
They added that the Taliban were depriving Afghan women and girls of the right to education, work, sightseeing and even life because of their gender.
Ms Amiri’s decision was also attacked by the protest movement Purple Saturdays, which has likened interaction with the Taliban to “paying ransom to kidnappers”.
It called her remarks a “pure lie” and said any support for the Taliban risked contributing to another terrorist event like 9/11.
In a statement, the group said the Taliban had no will stop supporting terrorist groups and adhered to the idea of “Global Jihad”,
The Afghan Women’s Political Participation Network also attacked Rina Amiri’s statement, calling it a great betrayal of the people’s trust, especially Afghan women.
The protesters said Afghan women would continue their struggle against the Taliban despite the dangers and accused Rina Amiri of a shameful “retreat and surrender”.
From now on, Afghan women would not recognize any voice in world meetings as the representative of women, the statement continued. They would only recognize the “street bastion and resistance front”.
The two-day meeting in Doha between representatives of the US Foreign Ministry and the Taliban ended yesterday.
