Since the Taliban took power in August 2021, Afghan women have been experiencing a situation that is unparalleled in other parts of the world.
Thanks to the Taliban and their obsessive campaign of misogyny, Afghan girls cannot go to secondary school. Women cannot go to public parks, beauty parlours or public buildings.
Women have been banned from almost all forms of paid employment, and have even been stopped from training to be midwives. Girls are being forced into marriage, women are being raped in detention. Women’s voices can’t be heard in public in case they drive men to lustful thoughts.
Thousands of others, like me, have been forced to flee our homeland, living as refugees and exiles across the world, not knowing whether we will ever be able to go home again.
The UN has repeatedly stated that what the Taliban are doing to Afghan women constitutes “crimes against humanity” under international human rights laws. Now, the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) has taken the significant step of requesting arrest warrants for senior Taliban leaders to answer to charges of gender persecution.
Yet stories of Afghan women and the oppression they are living under have fallen out of the headlines and, with a few notable exceptions, are rarely covered by the international media. The voices of Afghan women are being silenced at home and ignored by the rest of the world.
On 26 February, Afghanistan will be in the headlines, this time for a different reason, as the Afghan national cricket team walk on to the pitch to play England in the ICC Champions Trophy.
Over the past few months, I and many other Afghan women have been advocating for a boycott of the Afghan cricket team from international events.
We have been told many times – mostly by men – that sport is not political and that such actions will not solve the problems faced by Afghan women.
Our response has been that it is political and that Afghanistan’s cricket team is doing a great job at sportswashing the Taliban’s dark record, especially when you consider that they are representing a country where women are denied access to not just cricket but any kind of sport, at home or internationally.
What we’re seeing here is a slow creep towards normalisation
One of the few remaining sports institutions from the era of the republic, the Afghan cricket team continues to operate within the country and has played in international matches over the past three years, representing the Taliban-controlled state.
The argument that sport is not politics also falls apart when you examine the evidence relating to the Afghan Cricket Board (ACB) and its ties with the regime. Just a few examples: Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of the Haqqani network, as well as Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Taliban’s acting foreign minister, posed for celebratory photographs with the national team. Since coming to power, the Taliban have appointed Mirwais Ashraf as chair of the national team’s cricket board.
As the oppression of Afghan women has become more extreme and medieval, the contrast between the Taliban’s actions at home and the embracing of their national sports team on the international stage is jarring. What we’re seeing here is a slow creep towards normalisation.
Although nearly four years have passed since the Taliban came to power, and no country has yet formally recognised the group as the de facto government, advocacy efforts on the outside against their overt aggression towards women have shown little strength.
In fact, in recent months, some nations have moved closer to recognising and accepting the regime. For example, a few weeks ago, India’s top diplomat Vikram Misri met Muttaqi in Dubai, a sign that they are seeking engagement.
Afghan women and human rights defenders, including Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel peace prize laureate, have consistently urged the international community to officially recognise the Taliban regime as guilty of operating a system of gender apartheid.
They have pointed to the example of South Africa, where the recognition that the government was committing a crime against humanity by imposing a system of racial apartheid on its population, as the UN did in 1973, was a crucial step in dismantling that system and the regime that was perpetrating it.
Given this precedent, the prospect of the international codification of gender apartheid in Afghanistan could become the achilles heel of the Taliban’s religious despotism.
I, like many other Afghan women, believe that targeting this weakness and investing efforts in its recognition could eventually bring down this oppressive and misogynistic regime.
We feel like we are running out of time. Because what they are doing to women is not normal. Or at least it’s not normal yet. Don’t let sport be used to make us feel like it is. As they say in England, my adopted home, it’s just not cricket.
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Zahra Joya is an Afghan journalist, a Guardian contributor and editor of Rukhshana Media, an Afghan news service reporting on women and girls.
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