One of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s main religious advisers will not overturn a decree issued by clerics in the north reimposing Taliban-style curbs on women, in another sign of returning conservatism as NATO forces leave the country.
Just days after the US launched a US$200 million program to boost the role of women in Afghanistan, a senior member of the country’s top religious leaders’ panel said he would not intervene over a draconian edict issued by clerics in the Deh Salah region of Baghlan Province.
Deh Salah, near Panshir, was a bastion of anti-Taliban sentiment prior to the ousting of the austere Islamist government by the US-backed Northern Alliance in 2001.
However, the eight article decree, issued late last month, bars women from leaving home without a male relative, while shutting cosmetic shops on the pretext they were being used for prostitution — an accusation residents and police reject.
“There is no way these shops could have stayed open. Shops are for business, not adultery,” Enayatullah Baligh, a member of the top religious panel, the Ulema Council, and an adviser to the president, said late on Friday.
Residents of Deh Salah described the order as a fatwa, or religious edict, although only senior clerics in Kabul should issue such a binding religious order.
However, underscoring opposition to the edict, a mayor was shot dead by a teenaged shop owner while trying to enforce the order, which also barred women from clinics without a male escort, threatening unspecified “punishments” if they disobeyed.
Afghanistan has one of the world’s highest infant mortality rates and more than a decade after the US-backed toppling of the Taliban, it still ranks as one of the worst nations to be born a girl.
Under Taliban rule from 1996 until 2001, women were forced to wear the head-to-toe covering burqa and sometimes had fingers cut off for wearing nail varnish.
The decree, signed by a conservative cleric in the area named Zmarai, contained a warning of holy war if authorities tried to block it: “If officials do react to our demands, we will start a jihad.”
There is growing fear among many people in Afghanistan that the withdrawal of NATO-led forces and efforts to reach a political agreement with the Taliban to end the 12-year-old war could undermine hard-won freedoms for women.
In the deeply conservative, male-dominated country where religion often holds more sway than legal authority, religious leaders have often been a major barrier to women obtaining the rights granted to them under the constitution.
In Deh Salah, home to about 80,000 people, most of them ethnic Tajiks rather than the majority Pashtuns, the main community from which the Taliban draw support, a cosmetic shop owner named Abdullah stood before his business — now hidden behind plywood sheeting — and said clerics were increasingly flexing their muscles.
“They want to bring back the Taliban days. If they have their way they will take control in this district and make life impossible,” Abdullah said.
Deh Salah police commander Colonel Abdul Ahad Nabizada also rejected the claims underpinning the decree, but said the mayor who was shot while closing the shops had been frightened into action by the threat of jihad against him if he was deemed to be blocking the edict.
“Everyone here is Muslim. We haven’t seen any behavior like they claim in this small city. There were women coming to get their needs in the market and conservative people were against it,” Nabizada said.
The government also appointed a former Taliban official to the country’s new human rights body, while criminal laws under consideration in parliament would prevent women and girls testifying against family members accused of abusing them.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing