«Sand now the denial of education is perceived as the denial of a right, tomorrow education will no longer even be perceived as a righthe will also deny himself the suffering of his absence because his desire will no longer be there, and this is dystopian.”
Speaking to us about the second year of the Taliban, interviewed like her colleagues remotely, is the gynecologist Keren Picucci, who has been working in the field for 10 years. Maternity center of Emergency in the Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan. Despite promises on respect for human rights of the Doha Agreement (the 2020 peace treaty between the Taliban and the US), the Qur’anic students issued a long series of freedom-killing edicts and decrees against Afghan women.
Afghan women are disappearing
They have been banished from public life: from work, with a few exceptions, from public spaces, parks, gyms and swimming pools, from television programs and above all, the only ones in the world, from secondary and higher education, in some provinces from the fourth grade of primary school onwards. At the beginning of August the beauty salons closed, the last space where Afghan women could meet and take care of themselves, behind darkened windows and advertising posters with their faces scarred by black paint. At the end of August they prevented the students from leaving for the United Arab Emirates to continue their studies at the University of Dubai, despite the scholarships they had won.
Gender persecution crime?
The UN human rights envoy has asked the International Criminal Court whether a crime of gender persecution is taking place. The ban on education is what worries the most, because it deprives the country of its future, even more so in a society where only women can be in contact with women. Who will treat patients when there are no more female doctors? The very courageous Afghan women who take to the streets are dispersed, beaten, imprisoned and silenced.
Major protests are impossible due to strong and capillary control. But whether and how the bans, issued by the supreme leader, Sheikh Hibatullah Akhundzada, are applied depends on who governs the territory between the two main factions of the Taliban, one more orthodox and one more moderate. The women’s issue is fundamentalthe key to the stability of Afghanistan and its recognition by the international community.
The tactic of silence
“The government seems to be adopting a normalization process that includes silencing. The strategy is to wear people out by avoiding open-faced dissent with a policy of saying and not saying, doing and not doing: “we’ll close but”, “in a few months yes”, after the months have passed, “we’re working on it”. People are slowly being pumped out, because they don’t get indignant by keeping hope, in the meantime they adapt, get used to it and forget it» says the gynecologist Raffaela Baiocchi from Panjshir, who has been working in the maternity center for 16 years. «The same process of silence and normalization happens at an international level and makes us forget and not be indignant about what is happening here».
There will be no more female doctors and nurses
How can the Emergency maternity center run entirely by women, 187 including obstetricians, gynecologists, paediatricians, nurses – trained by the same hospital whose postgraduate specialization schools are equivalent to the University – and non-medical staff, continue? In December two decrees prohibited women from accessing the University and working for NGOs. «The healthcare sector is currently excluded from the “fatwa” against women regarding work. But it is involved for training: female students already enrolled can continue the course, but new enrollments and qualifying exams are prohibited. If the situation doesn’t change, there will be no more new doctors”, he denounces.
How Afghan women have changed in two years
A displaced woman who moved to Herat province. It benefits from a rural development project of the WeWorld organization
Clearly the war against women is unsustainable. And in this war, the NGO’s line is to hire as many female personnel as possible. How have the patients and staff women changed in these two years? «Patients are certainly more needy, and we have noticed a decrease in the age of first births: even girls of an estimated 15 years of age come to us – here the ages are not certain. Poverty and fear have caused a boom in marriages. Afghan women staff are increasingly those who provide income for families, and are therefore even more important. It is a complex and contradictory situation. We have a brilliant 23 year old midwife, daughter of a doctor and a midwife. When the Taliban took power, the father prevented his wife from going to work and his daughter from continuing to attend medical school. The girl, without her father’s support, has found a job with us and is saving her money hoping that she will reopen the university.
Fathers helping daughters
However, we have another whose family, despite being able to emigrate to the USA, decided to stay. She has a degree in Medicine but cannot qualify and her father brought her from Jalalabad, made her stay in a hostel in Kabul for months and now that the hostels have also closed to female students, he has her hosted by relatives . Sometimes», she concludes, «it is the families belonging to humble classes who do everything to emancipate girls». According to Dr. Picucci, maternity patients. «Despite all their troubles and “broken pieces” they rarely go away demoralized, they always have hope. They are strong women. Able to wait. Their strength has not been undermined this time either.”
Poverty drives crime
However, there is no contradiction in the data of what the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres defined as “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis“: 6 million Afghans are one step away from famine, 97 percent of the population is below the poverty line, and 28.8 million, i.e. 2/3 of the total, are in need of humanitarian assistance. From the surgical center for war victims in Kabul, the medical coordinator Eleonora Colpo, “proudly” a nurse who has been in Afghanistan for 4 years, testifies to the frightening increase in poverty and crime: «Even people with degrees or highly specialized are offering themselves for menial jobs like cleaning. And many unemployed people enter the underworld. But there is understanding. A nurse told me: «people who commit criminal acts are like me. I’m lucky because I had an extra opportunity to study and I have a good job, but if I were unemployed I would probably also be forced into crime.”
The responsibility of the West
The West is also responsible for this crisis for having cut the funds that constituted 75 percent of public spending and the maintenance of the health service, frozen 10 billion of Afghan remittances in its banks, and disregarded the promises of reception. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in 2022, out of over 270 thousand Afghan refugees in neighboring countries in need of permanent protection, the European Union welcomed 271: 0.1 percent. Beyond political choices, according to Emergency the humanitarian imperative dictates which side to take.
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