The United Nations has begun a review of its operations in Afghanistan and instructed staff not to work until May 5th after the Taliban barred its female staff from employment. The UN has engaged with the Taliban on reversing the ban.
UN special representative for Afghanistan Roza Otunbayeva said: “In the history of the United Nations, no other regime has ever tried to ban women from working for the organisation just because they are women. This decision represents an assault against women, the fundamental principles of the UN, and on international law.”
The UN mission (Unama) warned that the Taliban ban seeks to “force the United Nations into having to make an appalling choice” between staying on and supporting the Afghan people and upholding the principles on which the UN was founded.
The UN has 20 specialised agencies based in Afghanistan and nearly 4,000 staff, of whom 3,300 are Afghans.
The agencies provide basic health, shelter and food aid to 28.3 million Afghans, more than half the population.
Due to decades of warfare, destruction of the country’s infrastructure, and prolonged drought, 22.8 million Afghans face food insecurity while 3.5 million are displaced within the country.
UN and international relief agencies rely on women to deal with women, since deeply conservative social norms prevent men from engaging with widows, divorced women and unmarried women who head households.
Women are said to share with their children food and medicine provided by UN and international aid agencies, while some men might not. Although drug users are imprisoned by the Taliban, addiction remains a major problem among Afghan men who use their families’ slender resources to feed their habits. Despite Taliban pledges to eradicate opium poppy, Afghanistan is the source of 80 per cent of the world’s heroin.
The latest banning order is an extension of last December’s prohibition on women working for national and international non-governmental agencies. This led several leading humanitarian organisations to shut down operations temporarily. Female health professionals have been excluded from the shutdown, because only they can treat women and girls.
Since returning to power in August 2021 the Taliban has imposed a series of measures to severely restrict girls’ and women’s activities. The Taliban has denied them education beyond primary schooling. They have also been denied the right to employment and freedom to travel, and cannot visit parks, gyms and entertainment venues.
In some provinces, the Taliban has reversed divorces granted to women by judges who did not consult husbands. The judges have voided subsequent marriages and declared them adulterous. Adultery has been punished with public lashings.
The prohibition on UN employment of women coincided with rare public criticism by three Afghan religious scholars over the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education beyond sixth grade. The Associated Press cited Abdul Rahman Abid, who argued that in Islam knowledge is obligatory for men and women, and women should therefore be allowed to study.
“My daughter is absent from school, I am ashamed, I have no answer for my daughter,” he said. “My daughter asks why girls are not allowed to learn in the Islamic system. I have no answer for her.”
