‘How to conceive relations with a regime that locks up women?’ – Technologist

In the street, they must be covered from head to toe, speak in a low voice and are not allowed to laugh – that would be obscene. They leave school at age 12: secondary, vocational or university education is closed to them. Marriage is common between the ages of 11 and 15. Their presence is prohibited in parks, cafés, teahouses and other public places. Beyond 72 kilometers from home, they must be chaperoned. With rare exceptions, the job market is inaccessible to them. All female faces have been removed from advertising billboards. Women exist only within four walls.

Under the Taliban regime, once again in power in Kabul, Afghan women are taken hostage. But little was said about this collective kidnapping during the autumn session of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York at the end of September. This form of terrorism did not make the news. Yet we knew. While the delegations were meeting in one of the world’s most tolerant cities, the Taliban had laid their cards on the table. At the end of August, they published the 114-page Code of the Status of Afghan Women: Sharia, Islamic law, for everyone in the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” with the added bonus of house arrest for women, from birth to death.

Beyond the atrocious fate reserved for half the population of a country of 39 million, Afghanistan under Taliban rule poses one of the key questions of tomorrow’s international scene. What role should human rights – in this case, women’s rights – play in relations between countries? Afghanistan is among the nations that have demonstrated the failure of armed intervention for humanitarian (or strategic) purposes.

Along with Iraq, invaded by the United States, it was the tomb of the neoconservative illusions of the early 2000s. Democracy cannot be imposed. But the question remains: How to conceive relations with a regime that locks up half its population? China and Russia, the two powers intent on changing the international order, have put forward a proposal.

Minimum dialogue

Instrumental in Pakistan’s expansionist ambitions, the Taliban first seized power in 1996. Because they harbored Al-Qaida, the perpetrator of the September 11, 2001 attacks, they were driven out of Kabul by force that winter. Thanks first to Donald Trump’s cowardice and then to Joe Biden’s flippancy, the Taliban regained power in August 2021 – without the population rising up against them.

To prevent famine and disease from adding to women’s misery, the UN and a few NGOs are maintaining humanitarian assistance and a minimum of political dialogue with Kabul. The same goes for the European Union and the US.

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