The Lump in My Throat: Five Years of Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan
I stand here to give voice, in four minutes, to a five-year-old lump in my throat. Since the Taliban seized power again in Afghanistan, we have watched helplessly as women’s civil rights have been stripped away at an unprecedented speed. Four minutes is absolutely not enough to carefully explain everything they are being deprived of. But let me take you into our reality.
We no longer live as full human beings. Our souls are still crying over our lands while we are forced to witness what is happening there.
I imagine how people here in the Netherlands open the newspaper every day and read yet another development: girls are banned from secondary and higher education. Women are excluded from almost all jobs: NGOs, media, government. Women are not allowed to travel alone, not to parks, gyms, or salons. Full coverage of the body and face is mandatory. Their voices and their presence are erased from public life.
This is not culture. This is not religion. This is a system. A system increasingly being called for what it is: gender apartheid. Gender apartheid does not simply mean discrimination; it means the systematic erasure of women from society.
The result is the worst famine Afghanistan has experienced in our time. Women are not allowed to work, only to beg. Mothers take their own lives out of sheer despair. And yet Afghanistan has a different past. In 1964 women gained the right to vote. Afghan women sat in parliament. Afghanistan had female ministers while many countries ( including the Netherlands) had not even imagined it yet. That makes what is happening now all the more tragic.
Today thousands of women and girls disguise themselves as men in order to work, or simply to go outside, just as they did in the 1990s. One story currently circulating is that of Nooria, thirteen years old. For three years she worked disguised as a boy — Noor Ahmad — in a café to support her family. The Taliban took her away. We do not know where Nooria is today. The only thing circulating is a video recorded by the Taliban in which she was forced to tell her story on camera.
Why should this concern us? Should we feel responsible? Yes. Because this is not happening somewhere far away without our involvement. The Netherlands, Europe, and NATO spent twenty years on missions in Afghanistan with women’s rights as their promise. We promised Afghan women a future; and then we abandoned them.
But it goes further than that. The Netherlands is now prosecuting Afghanistan for these crimes against women. And that is good. But what is the Netherlands doing within its own borders? For years, the Dutch immigration service kept Afghan women waiting in asylum procedures, only to deny them residence permits. Why? Because according to the authorities they were not “Western enough.” According to the Netherlands, they could apparently cope just fine under Taliban rule. That was literally their argument.
We sent hundreds of letters to political parties, especially to D66, emphasizing that this was normalizing gender apartheid. Eventually, partly because of our actions and collective outrage, the immigration service withdrew those statements and, after years of waiting, the women were finally allowed to stay. But who gives them back the years they lost waiting? And after sending letters to members of parliament, did we hear anything back? No answer. Not a single answer from a single D66 member of parliament.
And that is precisely the danger when parties that call themselves progressive get in bed with fascist parties in order to govern. Yes, we now have our very first gay prime minister. But what does symbolic representation mean if vulnerable and marginalized groups are still being left behind? What does that mean for emancipation? Not a fucking thing.
Solidarity is not a symbol. Solidarity is responsibility.
Meanwhile, we talk about peace. We have sat at negotiation tables with the Taliban, just as we have done with the Iranian regime. But who is missing there? Women. The women who risk their lives every day while bombs are falling on them as we speak across Southwest Asia.
Our movement is built on three words: Jin. Jiyan. Azadî.
Woman. Life. Freedom.
Afghan women today also call for: Bread. Work. Freedom. Because without bread there is no life. Without work there is no dignity. And without freedom there is no humane existence.
Close your eyes for a moment. See the revolution through the eyes of an Afghan woman. Imagine a warm and peaceful Afghanistan. A woman cycles home after her karate class, not as one of the few Afghans in a sports class somewhere in the West, but together with her own neighbors in her own city. She feels her body move freely. She rides through the fresh mountain air beneath the cliffs of Band-e Amir. She stops at a stall to buy pomegranates, not from a child forced to work, but from an adult earning their bread with dignity. She cycles on, her hair loose in the wind, free. Along the way she eats the pomegranate, the juice dripping down her hands. A young man notices and offers her a napkin. They laugh and talk about their favorite books. No one looks at them with disapproval.
Peace is not epic. It lives in these small, sensory freedoms. That is the Afghanistan which the women are fighting for. That is why we march today. In times of brutal warfare, it is unacceptable that women have no role in conversations about peace.
And that is why I want to ask something of you. Stop debating from privileged positions about what “good feminism” is, what white feminism is, or how we should define intersectionality, while in places where gender apartheid exists women are losing their most basic rights. It is frustrating to see people who rarely speak about places like Afghanistan spend endless energy explaining feminism.
If more energy goes into defining feminism than into paying attention to the most vulnerable and marginalized women, then that is white feminism to me, regardless of what color you are. Debating from privilege while elsewhere women are disappearing.
No more silence. Never again. I want our feminism to be loud, angry, and unyielding when it comes to Afghan women.