The women of Afghanistan faced an announcement last week that changed their lives. The Taliban barred their access to university education and armed guards guard the entrances to their classrooms.
Since then, various protests have sprung up in different areas of the country, advocating for women’s rights to education.
This Saturday, the security forces dispersed a demonstration of women who took to the streets of Herat to ask to go back to school. Using a water cannon, the Taliban dispersed the group of protesters.
Shaikh Neda Mohammad Nadim, the Minister of Higher Education, indicated that the government’s reasons for banning university education for women were: the arrival of women from other provinces without male escorts, attending classes without covering their faces, coeducation in the classrooms and the existence of female faculties that contrast with “Islamic law and Afghan pride”.
Photo: STRINGER
For the women’s rights activist Nahid Noori, the minister’s reasons “are illogical and have no Islamic basis”, and his explanations for relegating Afghan female students from universities “are just excuses to systematically eliminate women from the social participation and deprive them of education”.
Organizations condemn the Taliban veto on university education for women in Afghanistan
“We can easily say that they are systematically separating women from social participation,” the Afghan activist Basira Hussaini told EFE.
Before the veto, there were already restrictions on teaching women. Universities introduced gender-segregated classrooms and entrances, with female students only allowed to be taught by female professors or older men.
Women even lost their right to go to parks, which previously already had schedules so that they did not cross paths with men. (YO)
Source: Eluniverso
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