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THE BELOW (updated 12 MAR 2022)
When one hurts or kills a women
one hurts or kills hummanity and is an antrocitie.
Gino d'Artali
and: My mother (1931-1997) always said to me <Mi
figlio, non esistono notizie <vecchie> perche puoi imparare qualcosa da
qualsiasi notizia.> Translated: <My son, there is no such thing as so
called 'old' news because you can learn something from any news.>
Gianna d'Artali
Al Jazeera
14 Aug 2022
LONG READ
Features|Women's Rights
By Robyn Huang
<< <I'll be sacrificed>: The lost and sold daughters of Afghanistan
Child marriage, lack of education, financial desperation – a year on
from the Taliban takeover, what does the future hold for women and girls?
Herat, Afghanistan – The last time Aalam Gul Jamshidi saw her daughter
was the night the 16 year old was married off to a man more than twice
her age. Aziz Gul looked radiant in a sequinned, white wedding dress and
a bright yellow headscarf, but there was fear in her otherwise solemn
expressions. <If I go there, I'll be sacrificed,> her mother remembers
her daughter pleading that night last October. Aalam Gul had a sinking
feeling but convinced herself it was just nerves. Aziz Gul's marriage
had been arranged four years prior and now that the time had come, she
knew it was her duty to encourage her daughter into a new family. In
Afghan culture, once a female marries, she moves in with her in-laws.
Aziz Gul left her family’s home in Gozar Gah, a suburb of Herat, and
moved to her new husband Musa’s home in Jawand, a rural district some
200km (124 miles) away – too far for her family to visit easily. Five
months later, the phone rang. It was Musa's father calling to tell Aalam
Gul that her daughter had been killed. Her naked body had been found in
a forest just outside the village where she had lived with her in-laws.
Aziz Gul had been beaten and shot four times in the back.
She was 17 years old and four months pregnant.
Aziz Gul's family – ethnic Jamshidi Aimaq, self-described Tajik Arabs –
are originally from Badghis province. They moved to Herat during the
height of the conflict between the previous government and the Taliban,
which retook control of the country after United States and NATO forces
withdrew in August 2021. Before the family left, when Aziz Gul was just
12, her parents agreed to marry her to Musa when she turned 16 – the
minimum legal age for marriage in Afghanistan under the previous
government. The Taliban has not mentioned whether that minimum age has
changed. In exchange, her 26-year-old elder brother Aminullah would
marry Musa's 18-year-old niece, Shakar. Across Afghanistan, it is common
for children – particularly girls – to be married. Families arrange
marriages to pay back personal debts, settle disputes, improve relations
with rival families, or simply because they hope marriage will offer
them protection from the worst extremes of economic hardship, and social
and political upheaval. Though child marriage is not thoroughly tracked
in Afghanistan, with gaps in concrete, holistic data about the number of
children affected, UNICEF has reported children being sold as young as
20 days old for future marriage, with girls disproportionately affected.
Now, amid spiralling poverty and the difficulty of finding sustainable
jobs – only five percent of Afghan families have enough to eat daily,
and inflation for essential household goods is at 40 percent (PDF) –
even more families are struggling. Many are making desperate decisions
to survive, including selling their children – specifically young
daughters – into marriage or arranging their marriages in order to
receive a dowry or mahr. The dowry, paid by the groom to the bride's
family, is a traditional practice in all marriages in Afghanistan, but
more families are now seeking this to help them survive difficult
financial times.>>
Please do read all here even if it'll costs you time. I almost beg you
to so and to honour Aziz Gul:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/8/14/ill-be-sacrificed-the-lost-and-sold-daughters-of-afghanistan
Also listen to the embedded audio
Al Jazeera
19 Aug 2022
By Kern Hendricks
<<Women working inside an Afghan chemical lab face uncertain future. At
a fertiliser plant in Afghanistan's north, women work to support their
families amid changes after Taliban's return.
Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan – Arzoo Noori holds two glass vials,
carefully pouring a clear liquid from one to the other. As she holds one
beaker up to the light of the window, swirling it slowly, the solution
begins to turn a shade of translucent pink. In the high-ceilinged room
behind her, Noori and six of her colleagues – all women clad in spotless
white laboratory coats and latex gloves – make notes on clipboards,
adjust bunsen burners, and handle antiquated-looking measuring devices.
Amidst the delicate clinking of glassware and the scribble of pencils,
the room has an air of calm, quiet productivity. Noori, aged 30, is a
lab technician at Afghanistan’s largest chemical plant, located outside
the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif in Balkh province. Slight of build
and softly spoken, she exudes an air of confident professionalism as she
moves between workbenches, deftly measuring out chemicals from bottles
with peeling Russian labels. The factory, which produces urea fertiliser
for Afghanistan’s agricultural sector, is a vestige of the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. Today the fertiliser comes
packaged in freshly designed bags marked: Product of the Islamic Emirate
of Afghanistan. Towering above lush green fields, the factory
smokestacks, cooling towers, and rusting industrial facades are a stark
contrast to the simple, single-story mudbrick homes that dot the
surrounding landscape. Noori began working at the factory when she was
23 years old after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in chemical
engineering from Balkh University. She started as a lab assistant and
quickly worked her way up to become manager of the entire urea
production laboratory. It was a position that she studied hard for and
was proud to earn.
Yet soon after the Taliban retook control of the country last August,
Noori was stripped of her role and the female staff were separated from
their male colleagues. On an afternoon in March, Noori, engrossed in her
work, is for the moment less interested in talking about these changes
than in explaining the test that she and her colleagues are conducting.
<This is a test to assess the pH balance of the water we use here at the
factory,> she says without looking up from the beaker in front of her.
<It’s a simple task – we only have to add a few chemicals to the water –
but if we don’t monitor the pH balance, other processes in the factory
will be affected.> Noori – one of nearly 200 women working in the
factory – takes immense pride in her work. She knows she is a vital part
of the factory. But now, working under the supervision of a man far less
qualified than herself, Noori and many of her female colleagues wonder
what the future holds for them – and for their careers – in the
Taliban's Afghanistan.
Changes to women's jobs
One year since the Taliban regained full control of Afghanistan, the
country remains in a fragile and impoverished state despite signi-ficant
improvements to security. Climate change is wreaking havoc across the
country – Afghanistan faces its worst drought in 27 years, and now has
the highest level of emergency food insecurity of any nation on earth. A
recent World Food Programme report projected that 22.8 million Afghans –
roughly half of the country – faces severe food insecurity in 2022.
Hundreds of thousands of families are now entirely reliant on the food
provided by NGOs and the United Nations. Battered by the lasting effects
of conflict, climate change, and international sanctions, Afghans also
struggle to find any means of consistent income. Women have been hardest
hit, with female employment expected to fall by 28 percent this year,
according to the United Nations International Labour Organization.
Against the backdrop of a humanitarian and economic crisis, the rights
of Afghan women have also begun to erode. Many girls' high schools
around the country remain closed, locking thousands out of an education
that seemed within their grasp only 12 months ago. Across the country,
many women, particularly those working outside the healthcare and
education sectors, have lost their jobs, and now find themselves unable
to secure any form of employment. Some remain at home simply out of fear
of interacting with the Taliban. Others continue to attend their jobs
but find their workplaces are now gender-segregated. Demonstrations in
support of women’s rights have, on several occasions, been violently
repressed, and many women remain fearful that advocating for their
rights will result in harassment, arrest, or worse. Noori and her
colleagues at the factory live in one of Afghanistan's least socially
conservative cities and many of the women of Noori’s generation had some
access to education and families who encouraged them to pursue their own
careers as independent women. But when the Taliban returned to power in
2021, several of Noori’s older female colleagues worried that they might
be barred from working at the state-owned plant. Previous Taliban rule
Zia Omar, 50, has worked as a lab technician at the factory for 35
years. Like many women of her generation at the factory, she was hired
and trained by the Soviets during their decade-long occupation. A gentle
woman with a ready laugh, Omar wears a pink hijab draped loosely over
her hair and shoulders. With decades of experience, she can easily hold
a conversation as she carries out her tasks. Omar says that she was
forced to stop working under the previous Taliban government from 1996
to 2001. <They didn’t allow any women to work in the factory,> she says.
<For almost six years I was stuck at home with no job.> When her
husband's wage as an engineer at the factory proved too small to support
the whole family, Omar decided she could contribute from home. She
bought a sewing machine and spent the rest of the Taliban’s first rule
tailoring clothes which her husband would then sell in the local
bazaar.>>
Note from Gino d'Artali: I's indeed a <Long read> but please click here
to read all:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/8/19/women-working-inside-an-afghan-chemical-lab-face-uncertain-future
Al Jazeera
17 Aug 2022
By Samira Sayed-Rahman
Samira Sayed-Rahman is a Canadian-born Afghan humanitarian worker.
<<Afghanistan’s crisis started well before August 2021
I worked for Afghanistan's government. Now I recognise we, too, bear
responsibility for the country's struggles. On the morning of August 15,
2021, I boarded a 9am flight from Kabul to Istanbul, thinking I would be
back at work in a few days’ time at the Afghan state-owned national
utility company I called the office. When we landed in Istanbul late
afternoon, the beeps and dings of cellphone notifications from people's
devices were soon replaced by gasps and cries. Within seconds, I saw
grown men and women fall to the airport floor in tears. While we were in
the air, Afghanistan's elected leadership had fled and the Taliban had
arrived in Kabul. I would eventually see images of Taliban fighters
walking on the grounds of my old offices in the presi-dential palace.
Everything I had spent the past seven years working towards unravelled
in the time we were in the air. In the weeks and months prior, my
colleagues and I were negotiating long-term power-purchase agreements
and investments in Afghanistan's energy sector. We were discussing 10
and 25-year plans. We were developing stra-tegies to turn Afghanistan
into a regional hub for connectivity. I belie-ved in a vision of a
sustainable, self-reliant country if only the latest war would end. The
war did end, but instead of connecting Asia with the world, Afghanistan
— which sits at the heart of the continent — is now isolated. Its people
are without money, jobs and increasingly food, a year after the Taliban
came back to power. When I returned in March to a very different Kabul
from the city that I had left last August, it was as a humanitarian
worker no longer focused on long-term strategies but on programmes aimed
at ensuring basic survival.
A country that has seen so many political upheavals over the last five
decades is in a more dire situation than it has ever been. Still, the
cessation of active warfare allowed me to travel to some of the most
remote areas of the country that were difficult to access under the
democratic governments before the return of the Taliban.>>
Read the very long story but very written complete opinion i.e. article
here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/8/17/afghanistans-crisis-started-well-before-august-2021
Al Jazeera
16 Aug 2022
By Durkhanai Ayubi and Mina Sharif
<<FORK THE SYSTEM
Features
Yearning for Afghanistan, in one meal Naan and kebab mean big family
gatherings, laughter and joy. But for Afghan families torn apart by
conflict, they bring bittersweet memories. One of our, all of our,
fondest childhood memories is the aroma of homemade naan baking, filling
our sparsely furnished diaspora homes with comfort. What we lacked in
material possessions paled against the deeper nourishment of healing
through food. Naan-e-Afghani (Afghan bread) is a huge part of our
cuisine and sustenance, as plentiful as wheat is in Afghanistan – from
the flaky, irresistible naan-e-roghani for break-fast to the round and
oblong lavash breads studded with nigella and sesame seeds that
accompany most meals. In the many naanwayis (bread bakeries) of
Afghanistan, the flatbreads bake on the walls of traditional vertical
tandoors until they become golden. The naanwahs (bakers) sit on
platforms around the top of the tandoor, kneading and shaping the dough
and passing it along to be plastered onto the hot tandoor walls for
baking. With intuitive ease born of long experience, the naanwahs use a
pointed metal rod to effortlessly peel the naan from the tandoor wall
just at the point when it is slightly crusty on the outside, and soft
and pillowy inside. Afghan naans are nearly always flatbreads, a simple
mix of flour, water, oil, salt and leaven – kneaded into an elastic
dough and left to rise before shaping and baking. If you are making
flatter naans, you use less leaven, like a paratha, to make a runny
dough that can be poured on a heated iron skillet. Naan was still an
everyday thing to smell wafting through our refugee homes, baked in our
mothers’ electric ovens, not in the tandoors of naanwayis. Kebab was
not.
As children, helping our mothers marinate the pieces of chicken and lamb
the night before an event carried with it a sense of excitement –
knowing the next day meant a day trip or a back yard barbecue with
family and friends. Kebab is a familiar word to many, and in Afghan
cuisine, it has many variations – from skewers of meat cooked over hot
coals to fried chapli kebabs that are common street food, to elongated
shami kebabs, to kebab-e-degee, which is cooked in a pot. But it is not
an everyday food. In a traditionally subsistence- and agriculture-based
culture, meat was a rarity, to be eaten sparingly, on special occasions
– without waste. Kebab is a treat to mark everything from birthdays to
communal gatherings.
For us, they meant gatherings, marked by uncles in the back yards and
parks of Australia and Canada flipping skewers and fanning coals as they
discussed the dismal politics of the homeland.
What was 'home'?
We are two Afghan-born women who have lived for decades – since we were
toddlers – as diaspora on opposite sides of the world. We are also
cousins, who, like so many generations of Afghan families separated
through unrest, have spent our lives apart.
Durkhanai, after spending time in a refugee camp in Pakistan, arrived in
Melbourne, Australia with her nuclear family in 1987. From there, they
moved to settle in the smaller town of Adelaide, where they connected
with a small group of Afghan families arriving in Australia – that group
has since grown. Mina arrived in Vancouver, Canada with her parents in
1984, a time before social media when the reality of displacement meant
they had no way to know if they even had any family in Canada.
Eventually, her grandparents, and many of her aunts, uncles, and cousins
who left Afghanistan would move from various countries and settle near
each other in Toronto. Our families became refugees during Afghanistan’s
communist era when the Cold War struggle for global dominance between
then-Soviet Russia and the United States unfolded as a great devastation
– a spiritual and physical exile Afghanistan never completely recovered
from with echoes that reverberate through to the present traumas in the
country. On a collective level, the unrest led to a fragmentation of
Afghan identity and a dilution of our intellectual histories and
cultural knowledge. On an individual level, our displacement as children
often presented itself as a <clash> of cultural norms, a challenge until
we were better aware and able to reconcile these disparities in a way
that led to a fuller sense of identity.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/8/16/yearning-for-afghanistan-in-one-meal
Note by Gino d'Artali: Tens of thousands found i.e. seek refuge again in
the diaspora after the taliban took over control of Afghanistan again.
What they have left are their memories and the traditional kitchen. For
the ones left behind there's hunger, starvation and fear.
France 24
15 Aug 2022
By Tom Wheeldon
<<Afghan opposition 'very weak' despite mounting anger against Taliban.
One year after the fall of Kabul, many of the opposition commanders
famous for their stand in Panjshir Valley remain exiled in Tajikistan.
Analysts paint a picture of a weak armed resistance against the Taliban
and an Afghan population that increasingly abhors the Islamic
fundamentalist group but is too exhausted to oppose it. When Afghanistan
captured the world's attention shortly after the Taliban's precipitous
takeover on August 15, 2021, the media focused on the Panjshir Valley –
where late Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud held off both the Soviets
in the 1980s and the Taliban in the 1990s. The lionised commander's son
Ahmad Massoud vowed to fight the Taliban from Panjshir once again. But
by September, Massoud had fled to neighbouring Tajikistan along with
other resistance commanders. The apparent plan was to use Tajikistan as
a staging ground to take on the Taliban. At the time, analysts lamented
that it was a <non-viable prospect>. Since then, the few journalists
with access to Panjshir have reported on common resistance attacks on
Taliban positions. Washington Post journalists who visited Panjshir
wrote in June that <residents say assaults on Taliban positions are a
regular occurrence and dozens of civilians have been killed, with some
civilians imprisoned in sweeping arrests>. Panjshir situation now
‘substantially different’. This situation makes a stark contrast to the
state of play in Panjshir under Ahmad Shad Massoud – when the valley was
the one holdout against Taliban during their first rule over Afghanistan
from 1996 to 2001. <It’s substantially different this time around,> said
Omar Sadr, formerly an assistant professor of politics at the American
University of Afghanistan, now a senior research scholar at the
University of Pittsburgh. <Panjshir is occupied,> Sadr went on. <At
least Ahmad Shah Massoud could maintain a stronghold from which to
resist the Taliban. Now the resistance is in the mountains; they don’t
control the villages or the highways. That makes the task much more
difficult in terms of the supply chains needed for fighting; it impacts
upon the quality of the resistance.>. Looking at Afghanistan as a whole,
the opposition is <very weak> , said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow
at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Security, Strategy and
Technology. <In fact, it has turned out to be more feeble than many
analysts expected.> The opposition has struggled to mobilise tribal
support as well as to mount any significant operations,” Felbab-Brown
continued. <There was quite a bit of expectation that this spring they
would engage in attacks – but the Taliban has been able to effectively
neuter them.> In this already difficult context, it was a strategic
error for Ahmad Massoud and other resistance commanders to base
themselves across the border, Sadr suggested: <The high-level leadership
is in Tajikistan while the mid-level fighters are in Panjshir. Ahmad
Massoud is a political leader, not much of a military leader – and it
would have been much better if he and other senior figures could have
joined the troops on the ground; it would have increased their
legitimacy and boosted morale.>
'More radical and more repressive'
When the Taliban seized Kabul last year they tried to present themselves
a reformed, more moderate successor to the outfit that brutally ruled
Afghanistan two decades ago – the notorious <Taliban 2.0> narrative. The
Islamic fundamentalists soon revealed <Taliban 2.0> to be nothing but a
propaganda tool. In doing so, they alienated swathes of Afghan society
and ensured that vehement anti-Taliban sentiment is by no means confined
to the Panjshir Valley, Sadr noted. <You can see this Taliban 2.0
business is not true – look at the way they’ve put in place political
and economic discrimination of non-Pashtuns, they’ve banned girls'
education, they carry out extrajudicial killings,> he put it.>>
Read more here:
https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20220815-afghan-opposition-very-weak-despite-mounting-public-anger-against-taliban
Opinion by Gino d'Artali: Mr. Felhab-Brown really is overlooking and
even insults the Afghanistan's Women Resistence Actions and the Women
standing up against the taliban!
The Guardian
15 Aug 2022
By Emma Graham-Harrison in Kabul
<<'I daren't go far': Taliban rules trap Afghan women with no male
guardian.
Hasina* cannot send her two daughters to school, because they are
teenagers and high school is banned for girls in Taliban-ruled
Afghanistan. But she cannot take them out of the country to finish their
education because she is a divorced single mother, and women are barred
from long-distance travel without a male 'guardian' to escort them.
Wazhma* lies awake worrying what she will do if her sick, elderly mother
needs emergency medical help at night. Her father is dead, she is
unmarried and her teenage sister is disabled.
She is terrified that as women out alone at night, even on their way to
a hospital, they would be stopped and harassed by the Taliban.
Most Afghan women have had to learn to endure new restrictions and
controls over the last year, but there is one group whose lives have
been particularly curtailed. Women who live in households without a
close male relative, whether through tragedy, circumstance or choice,
now exist in a legal limbo, because they do not have a close male
relative to act as a mahram, or 'guardian'. In the Taliban's extremist
reimagining of Afghanistan, women are not fully autonomous citizens of
their own country. Instead a man is deemed responsible for their
presence in public, including how they dress and where they travel.
Officially, any woman travelling more than 75km (46 miles) or leaving
the country needs a mahram. If a woman is found to have broken the
Taliban’s dress codes, their male relatives face punishment. The rules
have been enforced sporadically, with some officials turning a blind eye
to solo travel. Raihana* was barred from boarding a plane earlier this
year for a work trip but says women have since been allowed back in the
air alone.
....
But many others across Afghanistan have reported restrictions on women's
movements that go far beyond the official regulations. They told the
Guardian that Taliban fighters have barred them from even short
journeys, including commuting to work, sometimes using indirect tactics
such as threatening drivers who take solo female passengers. Health
workers said they had personal experience of women being barred from
accessing medical help without a mahram in at least two districts, one
in central Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province and one in southern Helmand.
These extreme controls fuel the fears of women such as Wazhma, even
about journeys that should be legal, like taking her mother to hospital
in Kabul. She used to have a senior government job, travelling abroad
and extensively across Afghanistan. Since the Taliban ordered most
female civil servants to stay away from work and then advised women not
to leave home except in cases of necessity, she can count on her hands
the number of times she has left her own neighbourhood. <Because of my
mother's situation I want to take her abroad to a better hospital, but I
don't dare to. I know that if I travel far they are likely to stop me,>
she said, adding that she found the situation unbearable. <I can't
tolerate this. I am a person who studied and worked all these years, now
an illiterate man can stop me, ask questions, argue with me, and I
cannot argue with him.> >>
Read all here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/15/taliban-rules-trap-afghan-women-no-male-guardian
Al Jazeera
13 Aug 2022
<<Taliban disperses Afghan women's march for 'work and freedom'
Female demonstrators carrying a banner that read 'August 15 is a black
day' demand rights to work and political participation.
Taliban fighters beat female protesters and fired into the air on
Saturday to dispersed a rare rally in the Afghan capital, Kabul, days
before the first anniversary of the group's return to power. About 40
women marched on the education ministry in Kabul, chanting <bread, work
and freedom>. Despite the pledges made when it retook power, the Taliban
has limited Afghan women’s rights, including keeping high school girl
students out of school.
Some protesters who took refuge in nearby shops were chased and beaten
by Taliban fighters with their rifle butts, according to the AFP news
agency. The demonstrators carried a banner, which read <August 15 is a
black day> as they demanded rights to work and political participation.
<Justice, justice. We're fed up with igno-rance,> they chanted, many not
wearing face veil. <Unfortunately, the Taliban from the intelligence
service came and fired in the air,> said Zholia Parsi, one of the
organisers of the march. <They dispersed the girls, tore our banners and
confiscated the mobile phones of many girls.> But protester Munisa
Mubariz pledged to continue fighting for women’s rights. <If the Taliban
want to silence this voice, it's not possible. We will protest from our
homes,> she said. Some journalists covering the demonstration – the
first women's rally in months – were also beaten by the Taliban
fighters, an AFP correspondent saw.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/13/taliban-disperse-rare-womens-protest-in-kabul
3 video's embedded
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