“The Taliban Are Burying Us Alive”, Says Habiba Akbari, Who Works For Afghan Aid
New
Age Islam News Bureau
14
January 2023
• Egyptian Television Presenter Yasmine Ezz Accused Of
Promoting Women's Subjugation
• Iranian Chess Referee, Shohreh Bayat, Kicked Off
Commission After Quarrel Over Women’s Solidarity
• Woman Admits Attacking Afghanistan Refugees In
Aberdeen
• Afghan Fans Disappointed At Australia Cancellation
Over Women’s Rights
Compiled by New Age Islam News Bureau
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/taliban-afghan-aid-habiba-akbari/d/128875
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“The Taliban Are Burying Us Alive”, Says Habiba
Akbari, Who Works For Afghan Aid
Nurses treat a measles
patient in the intensive care ward of a hospital in Herat, Afghanistan, March
6, 2022. Since the Taliban administration banned women from aid work, many
groups have suspended their operations in the country and warned of permanently
shutting down if the ban remains. (Kiana Hayeri / The New York Times)
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By Christina Goldbaum and Najim Rahim
Jan. 13, 2023
For years before the Taliban seized power and the
economy collapsed, Jamila and her four children had clung to the edge of
survival. After her husband died trying to cross the Iranian border, she and
her children moved to a camp for displaced people in northwestern Afghanistan
and relied on aid organizations.
One group brought her oil, flour and rice — food that
kept her family from starving. Another gave her children pens and notebooks —
the only supplies they had in primary school. A third vaccinated them against
measles, polio and other illnesses.
But when Jamila tried to arrange an emergency parcel
of food in late December, the aid worker cut the call short, explaining that
the organization had suspended its operations: Last month the Afghan government
barred women from working in most local and international aid groups, prompting
many to stop their work. Jamila’s heart sank.
“If they are not allowed, we will die of hunger,” said
Jamila, 27, who goes by only one name, like many women in rural Afghanistan.
“We are starving.”
Just weeks since the Taliban administration’s decree,
women across the country are grappling with the disappearance of lifesaving aid
that their families and the country have relied on since the country plunged
into a humanitarian crisis.
It has been a dual tragedy for Afghanistan, and for
Afghan women in particular.
For many women and girls who had already faced
increasing restrictions under the new government — including being shut away
from many jobs, high schools, universities and public parks — the new edict
removed one of the few remaining outlets for employment and public life. Given
the conservative system that had existed in Afghanistan even before the Taliban
took power in 2021 and amplified the most hard-line traditions, aid groups had
relied on female workers to reach other women and their families, who were
often segregated from any contact with outside men.
Now, amid a malnutrition and health care crisis that
has worsened as the Afghan government’s changes have turned the world away,
many aid groups say the banning of those female workers has made it nearly
impossible for them to work in the country. Those organizations described the
move as a “red line” that violated humanitarian principles and that, if it
remains in place, could permanently shut down their operations in Afghanistan.
The result is likely to be millions of Afghans left
without critical aid during the harsh winter months. A record two-thirds of the
population — or 28.3 million Afghans — are expected to need some form of
humanitarian assistance this year as a hunger crisis looms over the country,
according to United Nations estimates.
“This is not a choice. This is not a political
decision. It’s actually reality. We cannot do our job if we do not have a
female staff in place to work,” Adam Combs, regional director at the Norwegian
Refugee Council, said in a news conference late last month.
In recent weeks, United Nations officials have met
several times with the Afghan authorities to try to resolve the crisis, they
said. But while Afghan officials have urged the resumption of aid programs,
they have also indicated that the Taliban administration’s top leadership is
unwilling to reverse the edict. Instead, the leadership has doubled down on
accusations that women aid workers had not worn Islamic head scarves, or
hijabs, in accordance with the new government’s laws on women’s attire,
according to summaries of those meetings and other documents obtained by The
New York Times.
In a meeting in late December between United Nations
officials and officials with the Taliban administration in Kandahar — the
heartland of the Taliban movement and center of power of the new government —
Afghan officials accused Western countries, particularly the United States, of
using aid as political leverage to push unwelcome Western values on the
country, according to the documents.
Late last month, Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for
the Taliban administration, said on Twitter that all organizations within
Afghanistan must comply with the country’s laws, adding: “We do not allow
anyone to talk rubbish or make threats regarding the decisions of our leaders
under the title of humanitarian aid.”
Afghan officials have said that the ban does not
directly apply to the United Nations — one of the last Western entities to
maintain a presence in Afghanistan. Still, most U.N. aid agencies work with
nongovernment organizations to implement their operations — many of which had
relied on female aid workers to reach women and families in need and have now
suspended their programs.
Many international donors also require that women make
up at least half of the people an aid organization reaches in order to receive
funding.
For women across the country, the effects of the ban
and the suspension of aid have been devastating.
The situation “is a disaster,” said Abeda Mosavi, an
employee of the Norwegian Refugee Council, or N.R.C., who works with Afghan
widows in Kunduz, an economic hub in northern Afghanistan. “I don’t know the
extent to which the Taliban understood the role of women in aid organizations
and the crises that women will face after this.”
Since the ban was issued and N.R.C. suspended its
operations, Ms. Mosavi has barely been able to sleep, she said, haunted by
worries about the women she worked with to help make ends meet. Late last year,
Ms. Mosavi met a widow with eight children who she said was trying to secure a
quick marriage for her 13-year-old daughter — effectively selling her for a
$2,000 dowry — to an older man to be his second wife. The woman felt it was the
only way she could keep her other children alive and fed, but Ms. Mosavi
persuaded her not to go through with it, and put her in touch with a food aid
program.
“I don’t know what will happen to her now,” Ms. Mosavi
said, racked with worry. “There are hundreds of cases like this.”
Other women aid workers — many of whom are the sole
providers for their families — have themselves worried about how to put food on
the table if the ban remains in place.
“If we are not allowed to work in NGOs, what should my
children and I eat?” said Najiba Rahmani, 42. Ms. Rahmani, a widow in the
northern province of Balkh, was unemployed for six months before finding a job
in November with Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance, an implementing
partner that works with the U.N.’s World Food Program.
Those six months without a job were like a living
nightmare, she said.
Her family could not afford electricity in their home.
She had to borrow money from relatives — who were struggling themselves — to
try to scrape together the university fees for her two sons and daughter.
The government’s barring of women from attending
universities last month was devastating to her and her daughter. Then the ban
on NGO work came down, and it felt not just like a new blow, but like a prison
sentence, condemning them all to return to a life of begging and hardship.
“I am in a lot of pain,” Ms. Rahmani said, breaking
down into tears. “My wound is always fresh. The wound of a woman in my
situation is always fresh, it never heals.”
Since the fall of the Western-backed government in
August 2021, the new authorities’ initial promises that women would have
opportunities like employment and a public life — requirements for engagement
with Western donors — have nearly all been reversed.
Today, women are barred from gyms and public parks,
and from traveling any significant distance without a male relative. They
cannot attend high school or university. At checkpoints along streets and in
spot inspections on farms, the morality police chastise women who are not
covered from head to toe in all-concealing burqas and headpieces in public.
It has been a realization of some women’s worst fears
about Taliban rule and a devastating loss for those who had hoped for much more
than just an end to the war.
Habiba Akbari, who works for Afghan Aid, a British
humanitarian and development organization, spent much of the past four years
dodging sporadic fighting between the Western-backed government and Taliban
forces to travel between her hometown in Badakhshan Province and her university
in Kunduz City.
Ms. Akbari graduated last year — just before the
Taliban administration banned women from attending university — and secured a
job with the aid group. Her monthly salary of 30,000 Afghanis — around $350 —
sustained her seven siblings and parents after her oldest sister and the
family’s main provider was dismissed from her post as a prosecutor. But now,
her work has been suspended — and any hope she held for her future has
vanished.
“The Taliban are burying us alive,” Ms. Akbari said.
Source: New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/13/world/asia/afghanistan-women-aid-taliban.html
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Egyptian Television Presenter Yasmine Ezz Accused Of
Promoting Women's Subjugation
Yasmine Ezz, Egyptian
television presenter. Photo: @yasminezzmbc / Instagram
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Kamal Tabikha
Jan 11, 2023
Two of Egypt’s top women’s rights authorities have
filed legal complaints against a television presenter on a private Saudi
Arabian channel for content that they say promotes violence against women.
Prominent women’s rights activist Nehad Abol Komsan,
who heads the Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights, on Wednesday published a
photo of the official complaint she filed with the country’s prosecutor general
against MBC presenter Yasmine Ezz, whose statements about women’s role in the
home put her at odds with Egypt’s feminist groups.
Ezz presents a nightly talk show on MBC Masr, Kalam El
Nas (or Talk of the People) during which she interviews celebrities and
discusses social issues. The 34-year-old presenter has repeatedly stirred up
controversy with unsolicited advice on her talk show urging women to be more
obedient to their husbands and continually asserting that women’s rights
movements have gone too far and are destroying the family unit.
In one episode, she told viewers: "When did we
forget to glorify our husbands? If your husband is named Mohamed, you can't
just call him Mohamed, you have to call him Mr Mohamed."
In another episode, she urges wives to use their
"winter voices" on their husbands, which by her own description
denotes a "surrender to your husband that makes him feel that there is an
innocence about you that you haven't lost".
Her comments are repeatedly criticised by those she
interviews, most of whom are prominent celebrities.
In the complaint, Ms Abol Komsan, known for a
moderate, religious brand of feminism that is much more palatable to Egypt’s
conservative populace than more extreme takes on the subject, called on the
National Council for Women (NCW), a state-affiliated centre for women’s rights,
and the Journalists’ Syndicate to step in and halt broadcasting of Ezz’s show
in Egypt.
NCW president Maya Morsy on Tuesday made a sharply
critical social media post addressing “a female trend journalist on a
non-Egyptian channel” in which she urged her to consider that what she
broadcasts is being heard by a new generation of impressionable young men and
women whose respect for each other could be seriously affected by it.
But Ezz was named in an official complaint filed by
the NCW and submitted to the Egyptian Ministry of Information calling for the
halting of her show in Egypt.
“Your children and grandchildren will see your
statements and they will not be proud,” Ms Morsy wrote on Facebook. “Content
published in the electronic sphere is a permanent mark on your person that will
never go away.”
Ms Morsy urged her unnamed presenter to practise
better journalistic ethics and called on the network who hosts her show to stop
broadcasting “these kinds of jokes that cannot be called journalism”. She said
that she believes the presenter says such things only to be shocking and to go
viral on social media.
Later on Tuesday, Ezz made a scathing post of her own
on her official Facebook page.
There she argued that she had the right to present
what she thinks is correct on her talk show and that she knew and was proud
that her children would see her show because “I say what I say to preserve the
family unit”.
“I grew up in a stable family built on mutual respect
and morality and I have always pledged to promote those values as a
journalist,” Ezz wrote, “I am proud to be Egyptian. My society taught me these
values and I have preserved them.”
Ms Morsy and Ms Abol Komsan’s positions on Ezz were
backed by prominent members of Egypt’s arts world, including screenwriter
Medhat El Adl, who applauded Ms Morsy in a Facebook post for “standing up to
someone trying to send women back to the era of the harem”.
But there were those who defended Ezz too, including
director Omar Zahran, who chastised Ms Morsy in a Wednesday Facebook post. He
said Ezz is “merely promoting more respect between a man and his wife”.
Source: The National News
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Iranian Chess Referee, Shohreh Bayat, Kicked Off
Commission After Quarrel Over Women’s Solidarity
13 January ,2023
Iranian chess referee Shohreh Bayat said a gesture of
solidarity with female compatriots at a tournament in Iceland has caused a feud
with the game’s global body and seen her kicked off a commission.
Bayat wore a “Women, Life, Freedom” T-shirt at a
prestigious tournament in October, soon after protests began in Iran over the
death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in custody for breaking strict Islamic
dress code.
“I don’t think it’s normal to stay quiet about this,”
Bayat, 35, told Reuters in a video interview. She is among a string of sports
figures to clash with authorities over the hijab policy and express solidarity
with anti-government demonstrators.
“This is a big human rights matter. I think if we stay
quiet about these things, we cannot forgive ourselves,” she added.
Bayat, who was also accused by Iran of violating hijab
practice at a tournament in 2020, said the International Chess Federation
(FIDE) had removed her from its arbiters’ commission after she angered its
President Arkady Dvorkovich.
The Iranian said Dvorkovich asked her to change her
attire in Iceland, after another chess official had raised the issue. She
reappeared at the tournament in a yellow suit and blue blouse: the colors of
the Ukrainian flag.
FIDE confirmed Dvorkovich had requested she not wear
the shirt about women's rights. The federation said it respected Bayat’s
political activities but that she “disregarded direct instructions given to her
to stop wearing slogans or mottos.”
“No matter how noble or uncontroversial the cause is,
doing activism from that role is inappropriate and unprofessional,” it said in
a statement to Reuters.
Tehran casts the protesters as pawns of a Western-led
push to overthrow the government.
‘Beautiful message’
Bayat accused Dvorkovich, a Russian deputy prime
minister from 2012 to 2018, of succumbing to geopolitics.
“Iran and Russia are very united in the war against
Ukraine,” she said. “When I was told by Dvorkovich to take off my T-shirt, that
was the reason probably.”
“My T-shirt was not political at all... It’s one of
the most beautiful women's rights messages in the world.”
According to a message seen by Reuters, a senior FIDE
official told Bayat she had been removed from the commission because Dvorkovich
was “furious” with her.
Dvorkovich did not respond to a request for comment.
FIDE said it had not discussed any disciplinary action
against Bayat and values her as an arbiter.
Bayat lives in London, fearing for her safety after
photos of her at the 2020 tournament in Russia brought criticism in Iranian
state media.
Bayat said at the time that she does not agree with
the hijab, but that she had been wearing a headscarf during the championship’s
first matches, although it had been loose and was not visible from some angles
in photographs.
Since Iran’s Islamic Revolution, all women are required
to wear a hijab in public, including sportswomen abroad. Women who break the
dress code can be publicly berated, fined or arrested.
Bayat was awarded the International Women of Courage
Award by the United States in 2021 and has since used her platform to advocate
for Iranian women.
“When I can, when there is an opportunity, I have to
raise the voice of Iranian people,” she said.
Source: Al Arabiya
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Woman admits attacking Afghanistan refugees in
Aberdeen
A woman has admitted an unprovoked attack on two
refugees in Aberdeen.
Sarah Craig, 38, assaulted the two women in the city's
Kidd Street in October last year.
Aberdeen Sheriff Court heard the women were refugees
from Afghanistan and did not know their attacker.
They had left a hotel for a walk and Craig began
remonstrating with them for no reason. They were repeatedly punched and kicked,
and one was left with a scar on her head.
Craig admitted two charges of assault, one to the
victim's permanent disfigurement.
She also admitted acting in a racially aggravated
manner towards three other people during the same incident, calling them an
offensive name.
Source: BBC
Sentence was deferred until next month and Craig was
remanded in custody.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-64253334
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Afghan fans disappointed at Australia cancellation
over women’s rights
13 January, 2023
KABUL (Reuters) – Afghan cricketers playing on a
stony, snowy pitch in Kabul on Friday said they were disappointed they would
not be able to see a highly anticipated series against Australia, who withdrew
over concerns over women’s rights.
Australia’s men’s team pulled out of the three-match,
one-day international series, to have been held in March in the United Arab
Emirates, following further curbs on women’s and girls’ rights imposed by the
hardline Islamist Taliban administration.
“The decision by Australia made us very disappointed,”
said 25-year-old fruit seller Abdullah.
Noorullah Amiri, a salesman, said he too was saddened
by the cancellation but hoped the Taliban would eventually allow all girls to
attend school and university.
“They have to think about these issues, they have to
listen to the nation so that Afghanistan can stand on its feet in the future,”
Amiri said.
“We were waiting from a long time ago for this game…
In this hard time in which people are facing challenges and have no job, this match
was a good source of happiness and could bring a smile on the faces of people.”
Despite decades of violence and upheaval, Afghanistan
has an enthusiastic and widespread cricket following.
Australia were scheduled to play a test match against
Afghanistan in November 2021 but the fixture was postponed after the Taliban
took power in August that year.
The Taliban have since closed most girls’ high schools
and in December ordered universities to ban female students and NGOs not to
allow female staff to work until further notice.
The Taliban largely banned education of girls when
first in power from 1996 to 2001.
No country has formally recognised the administration
of the Taliban, who took over Afghanistan with a speed and ease that took the
world by surprise.
The Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB) has criticised
Australia’s decision, saying it had put political interests over sportsmanship
and that cricket had contributed to education and social development in the
country.
Cricket Australia chief executive Nick Hockley
defended the decision, saying “basic human rights” are not politics.
Some Afghan female athletes and sports enthusiasts
agreed.
“I am happy the world is taking such a decision to
support us. As an athlete I am very happy, because if I can’t have my rights,
how I can disagree with such a decision?” said Parisa Arif, a former girl’s
soccer team coach.
Source: The Print
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