SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
What's it like to be a girl or a woman in Afghanistan today, three years after the Taliban took back control? Well, here's just one example - the Taliban's ministry of vice and virtue has declared that women are not even allowed to raise their voices inside their own homes if they can be heard outside those walls. Sahar Fetrat is a researcher at Human Rights Watch who focuses on women's rights. She joins us from London. Ms. Fetrat, thanks so much for being with us.
SAHAR FETRAT: Thank you for having me in the program.
SIMON: You are in touch, I gather, with girls and women in Afghanistan.
FETRAT: Yeah.
SIMON: What do they tell you about what it's like to live there now?
FETRAT: Thank you, Scott. The situation for Afghan women and girls is absolutely suffocating. That's the term that they use. I'll just tell you what are the things that Afghan women and girls lost in the past three years. One day before the Taliban returned to power, in Afghanistan, millions of girls were in school. More than a quarter of the members of the Parliament were women. Women were members of the government. They were ministers. They were judges. They were professors, helicopter pilots. Women were singers, painters. They were in media. They were conceptual artists and actors. They had access to the world outside home, even if limited, even with problems and difficulties and challenges. But since the Taliban took power, the situation seems, from what the women and girls tell us, absolutely bleak and hopeless. And they say it's a graveyard of dreams for women and girls.
SIMON: A graveyard of dreams. I know in the early days of the Taliban there were women who were out protesting.
FETRAT: Yeah.
SIMON: Does that happen anymore, or is it too dangerous?
FETRAT: Afghan women have been going out to the streets and protesting the Taliban's abuses from the very beginning because they knew they had an experience of their mothers or their aunts that were very familiar to them, and they were not only fighting for their own rights, but the rights of every Afghan. Afghan women have been going and fighting in different ways. You know, they've been talking to media. They've been starting campaigns. But because it's getting, as you said, extremely dangerous, they have had to find ways to organize together and get together indoors or use social media, whenever they have access, to make the most out of it and send a clear message to the world outside about who the Taliban are, what they are doing to women and what the international community - or the world outside - could do to show solidarity with women of Afghanistan.
SIMON: What could - or in your judgment should - people outside Afghanistan do?
FETRAT: One thing that is - I always hear from girls and women when I talk to inside Afghanistan, they say that in no way this should be normalized. Another, you know, for governments and for - with the U.N., one thing that Afghan women have been campaigning for, for example, is the qualification of gender apartheid as a crime against humanity.
SIMON: Let me follow up and ask you a question - when you talk about how the international community shouldn't normalize the Taliban, the international community also has an obligation to try and get humanitarian aid into Afghanistan, doesn't it?
FETRAT: Yes.
SIMON: Isn't it difficult to decry the Taliban as criminals and then expect them to cooperate in bringing international aid into the country?
FETRAT: The discussion of whether we talk about rights or, you know, human rights or, you know, humanitarian aid - I don't think they are mutually exclusive. The international community, in one way or another, already engaged with the Taliban. The issue is about how they can keep the engagement or have the engagements that they already have in a principled way, in a way that is not undermining human rights.
SIMON: Yeah. President Trump's administration, in his first term, negotiated directly with the Taliban and excluded what was then the Afghan government. But of course, the withdrawal of U.S. forces was under President Biden. Does the Taliban care who's in the White House?
FETRAT: It's hard to know what the Taliban want.
SIMON: Well, do you hear from anyone in Afghanistan as to what they might think about that?
FETRAT: With Trump being in power or in the White House impacts Afghanistan. Aid or any other issue related to Afghanistan or human rights issues related to Afghanistan would be discussed. For example, when it comes to accountability mechanism or for asking for U.N. for an accountability mechanism that is not only forward-looking, that looks at the past and present abuses, we can assume that we will not have those kind of support with Trump being in the White House. But, you know, people that I am talking to are so much busy with the day-to-day struggles of life that at this point, they are really feel harmed by American - like, the U.S. foreign policy that, you know, to a normal person wouldn't matter so much who is in the White House, because they feel betrayed, you know, either way.
SIMON: Yeah. Sahar Fetrat, researcher at Human Rights Watch, speaking to us today from London. Thank you so much for being with us.
FETRAT: Thank you.
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