Adnkronos (Adnkronos) – "For us women, Afghanistan is an open-air prison, and the international community should do much more to help us escape this state of subjugation by the Taliban regime." Zahra Joya, an Afghan journalist forced into exile and now living in London, told Adnkronos. Internationally renowned for her reporting and advocacy for press freedom, she was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential women in the world in 2022, and received the Goalkeepers Changemaker Award from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Author of the autobiographical book 'The Vanishing Girl of Kabul', Zahra Joya knows the burden of restrictions well: “I grew up under the first Taliban regime in the 90s.
As a child, I was forced to disguise myself as a boy, calling myself Mohammed, walking miles just to go to school, which was forbidden to girls at the time. Despite my family's support, I was forced to leave Afghanistan following the Taliban's return to power in August 2021 and the death threats I received, finding refuge in the United Kingdom.
From the British capital, she runs Rukhshana Media, a news agency she founded, coordinating and secretly publishing reports from a network of local female journalists who remained in Afghanistan at risk of their lives. "Since returning to power, the Taliban supreme leader has issued over 400 decrees, more than a hundred of which directly affect women.
Women have been effectively erased from public spaces: they are barred from secondary schools and universities, they cannot go to parks or gyms, and every little movement requires the presence of a male guardian, the mahram.”
A repressive architecture that Joya calls "gender apartheid," a system designed to generate a new wave of illiteracy and erase every fundamental right. The Afghan situation also recalls the emancipation struggles of other neighboring countries, particularly the "Jin, Jiyan, Azadì" (woman, life, freedom) movement, which erupted in Iran in September 2022 following the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish woman arrested and killed by morality police for not wearing the veil properly.
Zahra Joya recognizes the profound geographical and philosophical connections between the two struggles, but is keen to draw a clear line between the two realities: "While in Iran, women face severe restrictions, they still maintain access to higher education and represent over 60% of the university student population. In Afghanistan, however, we witness absolute segregation unmatched even in nations with rigid conservative traditions like Saudi Arabia. We were on the verge of having a generation of educated women, but unfortunately, we lost it. The Taliban used the law as a weapon against us, and now, the only solution is an all-female civil war."
Faced with such a scenario, Joya believes the role of the international community becomes crucial. "Foreign governments and the public must stop justifying human rights violations by superficially labeling them as 'Afghan culture.' Extremism does not represent the culture of Afghanistan, whose majority of the population desires democracy and equality. The solution necessarily involves ending all attempts to normalize diplomatic relations with the Taliban and firmly enforcing international law, bringing the regime's leaders before the competent courts to answer for their actions. Turning our backs on Afghan women," the journalist concludes, "means abandoning the fundamental and shared values on which global civil society is based." (by Alessandro Allocca)
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