Death in Slow Motion: Women and Girls Under Taliban Rule

Remember Girls Not Brides? Good luck. You're gonna need it.

Abandoned. Erased. Alone. Afghan women are on their own. Nobody will come to their aid. No matter what.

In the middle the image from the Amnesty International report on women and girls under Taliban rule. To the sides Degas' painting of Dante and Virgil who are about to enter hell.

December 02 is International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. The obvious topic this year is the world cup football in Qatar. In 2014 Deadspin, a sports magazine, wrote "Qatar's World Cup Expected To Take More Lives Than 9/11", which is about 3.000. Qatar is furious. As it turns out at least double that number didn't survive. According to the Guardian some 6,500 migrant workers died in Qatar, building a 200 billion dollar infrastructure for the world cup. And that's a very conservative estimate. There's more than enough coverage - but very little action - when it comes to a world cup built on modern slavery, let's focus on Afghanistan instead.

In August 2021, the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. This Summer Amnesty International released it's report on the position of women in Afghanistan. Death In Slow Motion tells the story of the ruling Taliban suffocating crackdown destroying lives of women and girls.

• Women protesters detained, forcibly disappeared and tortured
• Women and girls swept up in arrests and detained for ‘moral corruption’
• Huge increase in child, early and forced marriages.

"In less than a year, the Taliban have decimated the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan. Soon after they took control of the country’s government, the Taliban said they were committed to upholding the rights of women and girls. Yet they have violated women’s and girls’ rights to education, work and free movement; demolished the system of protection and support for women and girls fleeing domestic violence; arbitrarily detained women and girls for infractions of the Taliban’s discriminatory rules; and contributed to a surge in the rates of child, early and forced marriage in Afghanistan. Women who peacefully protested against these restrictions and policies have been harassed, threatened, arrested, forcibly disappeared, detained and tortured."

It's horrible workers died in the preparations for the world cup. We, the West, are furious. Of course we are, despite the fact we know this was going to happen. And it did. Glad there is the world cup to show [how much] we care. And to highlight our moral superiority, especially towards the host country. Just one thing, let's not overdo it. After all, the tiny Arab nation has natural gas, lots of it. With Russia turning off the tap we need new friends.

Usually I know more or less what I want to write, not today. All I know is that the women of Afghanistan should abandon all hope. They have. Looking beyond Amnesty's report, each and every search result I clicked was more harrowing than the previous one. 

“ When people show you who they are, believe them the first time”
- Maya Angelou 

Of course girls don't get to attend school under the Taliban. Rule number one of staying in power is keeping them dumb is what keeps them under the thumb. Hard to rise up and revolt if you cannot read or write, especially not in our digital world. It's something the Catholic church knew all to well. In the early centuries AD, the Bible was translated into Latin. There was a lot of resistance from the Catholic church, fearing it would loose influence over it's flock. Making it available in vernacular languages was a central demand of the Protestant Reformation. Remember Luther? No good deed goes unpunished and translations subsequently became the main weapon in the armoury of Protestant missionaries.

Something similar is happening in Afghanistan. Forced marriage equals rape. ‘If You Don’t Have Money, You Have Sisters’ is a story in the Wall Street Journal on how Afghan men use Taliban rule to settle scores. It's hard to gauge the actual level of support for the Taliban but it is estimated that at the most 15 percent of the population agrees with it's rulers. Me, myself and I coming full circle.

One desperate example on the practice of forced marriages in the Amnesty report stands out. Imagine the insane choice that is imposed upon a mother. One Mother was forced to marry her 13-year-old daughter to her 30-year-old neighbour. Mom claims to be relieved. “She won’t be hungry anymore.” Not a single mother in the world will give up her child if there is any other way. Never. This Mom is now forced to considering to marry of her 10-year-old daughter as well. The little girl was doing so good in school. But under the Taliban girls don't get to go to school anymore.

"If they don’t open the school, I will have to marry her off.”  

One way to prop up your regime is by adding new recruits. Providing the newbies with an infinite supply of women for sex, marriage and whatever else comes to mind, never fails. Also because it makes them complicit from day one. In a desperate attempt to protect their young girls, parents try to marry them of to anyone but the Taliban.

Other side of the coin. Moral corruption. Don't you agree it's grotesque for the Taliban to arrest women for moral corruption. Especially if you decide exactly what moral corruption is after you arrest them? One should be so unlucky to be facing a judge who got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Penalties on the other hand don't leave room for interpretation. They are fixed, ferocious and inhuman. It's horrors never fail to include at least one of the four horsemen of the Taliban. They are: torture, mutilation, rape and murder. And before you start to argue, just remember, these acts of cruelty are designed to serve a higher purpose - one that has nothing to do with religion. The Taliban have weaponized fear to stay in power. The only limit to the horrors they unleash upon women is their imagination. That bad, yes. So bad in fact that other nasty states like Iran and China have called upon the Taliban to turn it down a notch or two. Who could've guessed?

An Afghan judge hits a woman with a whip in front of a crowd in Ghor province, Afghanistan August 31, 2015

All that nasty stuff is hard work, which is why the Taliban's primary tool to retain in control is locking up women at home. This March it was decreed that on most occasions women need a male chaperone if they leave the house. Six months later that has morphed an even bigger monster. It now is an unwritten rule that women cannot leave the house without a guardian. No matter what, not even in life or death situations such as visiting the hospital.

But that isn't nearly ambitious enough. The Taliban strive to erase women from society, all women. Afghan women are already a prisoner in their own country. To speed up confining them to the four walls of their home, Afghan women are now banned from entering parks.

Finally, a fortnight ago the Afghan supreme leader ordered full implementation of sharia law.  Don't ask what took them so long to make it official, let's wonder about the small print instead. Punishment is still fixed, unlike the crimes for which you are about to be punished. Afghan women live in a world where anything can become a crime. The Quran offers no recourse, nor does the past. Judges make up the rules as they go, how's that for moral corruption. Meanwhile nobody can explain what is or isn't a moral crime, but judging from the sound of it, it's serious stuff. So why are the victims punished for the actions of the perpetrators in power?

In under 12 months Talibanstan has become hell on earth. As I am writing this reports are pouring in about a woman being publicly flogged for venturing out without male guardians. When I look it up, dozens more fill my screen, including one of a mass public flogging at a football stadium. And yes the usual dignitaries were invited to the circus, just like the commoners.

Bread, brutality and circuses

Never expected for this post to come full circle like that. Wedding rings are round, no beginning, no end, emphasis on the latter, making them a symbol of eternity. Italian writer Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in the 14th century. The first of three part deals with Hell, depicted as nine concentric circles of torment located within the Earth. I think the Taliban just added a tenth circle to hell. "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." 

 

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December 02 is the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. As a reminder for us kinky people about the ugly truth of real world slavery, once a year I write about modern day slavery.

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