Taliban authorities on Saturday ordered non-governmental organizations to stop working with women for failing to follow an appropriate dress code, an announcement that comes four days after girls were banned from studying at university for the same reasons.
“The Ministry of Economy […] orders all organizations to stop women’s work until further notice,” said the ministry, responsible for approving licenses for NGOs operating in Afghanistan, in a letter obtained by AFP.
“There have been serious complaints about non-compliance with the Islamic hijab and other rules and regulations relating to women’s work in national and international organizations,” the ministry said.
“In case of disregard of the directive […] the organization’s license which was issued by this ministry will be cancelled”, specifies the letter which is addressed to national and international NGOs.
Two international NGOs that AFP spoke to confirmed that they had received the ministry statement.
“We are suspending all our activities from Sunday,” a senior official of an international organization involved in humanitarian action in several remote regions of the country told AFP, on condition of anonymity. “We will soon have a meeting of senior officials from all NGOs to decide how to handle this issue,” he added.
The UN humanitarian coordinator for Afghanistan, Ramiz Alakbarov, denounced in a tweet a “manifest violation of humanitarian principles”.
This decision is “a new deplorable attempt to erase women from political, social and economic spaces”, denounced Amnesty International.
Dozens of national and international NGOs work in multiple sectors across remote areas of Afghanistan, and many of their staff are women.
The announcement comes just four days after the Taliban government decided to ban Afghan women from attending public and private universities in the country for an indefinite period.
The Minister of Higher Education, Neda Mohammad Nadeem, explained two days after this announcement that he had taken this decision because “students who were going to university […] did not respect the instructions on the hijab”.
“The hijab is obligatory in Islam,” he insisted, referring to the requirement for women in Afghanistan to cover their faces and their entire bodies. According to him, girls who studied in a province far from their home “did not travel with a ‘mahram’, an adult male companion either”.
Rare manifestation of men
On Saturday, some 400 students in Kandahar, the birthplace of the fundamentalist Islamist movement, boycotted their exams in solidarity with female counterparts and demonstrated in the streets. The demonstration was dispersed by Taliban forces who fired into the air, a professor at Mirwais Neeka University told AFP, on condition of anonymity. Protests by men are extremely rare in Afghanistan.
This new attack on women’s rights has come as a shock to many young Afghan women already excluded from secondary schools and has drawn international condemnation.
Despite their promises to be more flexible, the Taliban, who took power in August 2021 after 20 years of war with the United States and NATO forces, have returned to the ultra-rigorous interpretation of the Islam which had marked their first passage to power (1996-2001).
For 16 months, draconian measures have multiplied, in particular against women who have been progressively excluded from public life and excluded from secondary schools.
Various members of power had said that there were not enough teachers or money but also that schools would reopen once an Islamic curriculum was developed.
As well as being deprived of education, women are also banned from most government jobs or paid a pittance to stay at home.
They are also prohibited from traveling without being accompanied by a male relative and must wear a burqa or hijab when leaving their homes. The Taliban also banned them from entering parks, gardens, sports halls and public baths.