Afghanistan, a ruthless punishment cell for women

There can always be a greater degree of cruelty, even if it is hard to imagine. Human beings give constant proof of this. When a prison wall is breached, the first thing to be lost is freedom, but from then on what can be done to the incarcerated person depends on the sole will of the jailers, especially when their power to inflict suffering is not curtailed.

Afghanistan has once again become a huge prison for half of its population, i.e. for women. It has taken the Taliban less than a year and a half to transform the country into a sinister dungeon, in which the degree of suffering endured by its female prisoners is steadily increasing.  

The intervention of the United States and its Western allies in the country, so reviled by the extreme left around the world, especially in Europe and Latin America, had given women back the hope of equal rights with the male half of Afghanistan. They had been able to put aside the burqa, that prison dress that those who impose it - and the sympathisers who thank them for it - justify in supposedly divine dispositions and respectable cultural differences vis-à-vis the decadent and corrupt West. They had been able to return to school, even to university, and to acquire the knowledge necessary to help rebuild the country. They had even managed to have contact with foreign people and institutions, which could show them other realities and other ways of seeing the world. It was undoubtedly the greatest achievement, if not the only major one, of the twenty years of Western presence in Afghanistan and of the very costly war sustained throughout that time, since the Taliban regime's terror was ousted from power between 1996 and 2001.  

All this has collapsed since the disastrous departure and evacuation of US soldiers and their allies from Afghanistan. As soon as the new Taliban regime was installed, it did not take long to gradually tighten the noose on its subjects, especially women. First they re-imposed stifling clothing on them; then they evicted them from schools and colleges; then they banned them from university, demanding a complete cessation of the studies they were already doing this academic year, after also barring them from their jobs. Now, they have banned all non-governmental organisations, both Afghan and foreign, from employing them, thus closing the penultimate window through which they could breathe.  

The Kabul leadership argues that this is in accordance with the Sharia, the rigorous application of which will offer the crowds, deprived of other spectacles, floggings and other public punishments. All of these measures have been accelerated in recent weeks, when these fundamentalists have been able to see that the world has been more occupied with weathering the storm of its own crises or, at best, with guessing where the global hostilities that began with Russia's aggression in Ukraine might flare up.

Certainly, isolated voices of protest are being heard in the developed world, which sees the fruits of so much war effort and money spent in Afghanistan disappearing overnight. But, in general, the world's gaze does not dwell for long on this seemingly cursed land. And, yes, the silence that seems to be observed throughout the Muslim world is resounding.

The tragedy of the women in Afghanistan has the same thing in common with that of the Iranian women. In both cases, ayatollahs and Taliban alike are determined to show women that they are inferior beings, that they are not worth half as much as men, that they can only make their presence felt in public if they do so covered up like caged animals, and that they can never have autonomy as human beings and free people to enjoy themselves as they please.

Perhaps it is time to remember that, in the midst of parties and celebrations, many women are abused, imprisoned and killed, and all of them, at least in Afghanistan, are confined in a huge and narrow punishment cell, for the simple crime of being just that: women.