After the withdrawal of US military forces and the international coalition last August 2021, the Taliban advanced towards Kabul, the country’s capital, and regained control of the government, while President Ashraf Ghani took refuge in the United Arab Emirates and the Kabul airport collapsed before the thousands of people who, as human rights defenders, journalists, fixers, translators at the service of foreign military forces or simply civilians and women, tried to flee to save their lives from the reprisals of the Taliban, in so much so that the prohibitions, repression and authoritarianism of his government at the end of the 1990s remained in the collective memory of the population.
Faced with the rise of the Taliban, the United States and international donors have frozen foreign exchange funds accumulated over the past 20 years. Reserves that were not in the Da Afghanistan Bank (Central Bank of Afghanistan) but were deposited in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), they amounted to 9,760 million dollars for the year 2020, of which, 2,000 million dollars were distributed in financial institutions in the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. The freezing of this money caused the lack of liquidity and the free fall of an economy dependent on 75% of foreign aid. High inflation, job losses and cash shortages have caused 98% of the population to be unable to access food and basic services. This situation has been aggravated by low levels of trade, the intense winter and agricultural production devastated by the worst drought in decades.
According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 24.4 million Afghans are severely food insecure and 9 million are at risk of famine. Despite this situation, United States President Joe Biden issued an executive order so that half of the frozen funds go to the victims of 9/11 2001 as compensation and keep the remaining money withheld until further notice. for humanitarian aid. This decision has been harshly criticized by human rights defenders and by the Afghan diaspora who wonder why the lives of the Afghan civilian population should continue to be sacrificed for the actions of the Taliban, and also consider that this money belongs to the Afghan people and not only to the government in turn. For her part, Shaharzad Akbar, former president of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, points out that it should not be lost sight of that any money transfer should be in exchange for the Taliban recognizing the civil and political rights of women; rights to education and work that were buried since last August.
Since then, women have been prohibited from continuing with their secondary education and according to defenders Sahar Fetrat and Heather Barr, those young women in Balkh province, northern Afghanistan, who have exceptionally been able to continue studying are forced to obey harsh dress codes. Only a minority of women work in the field of education and health, the rest have been relegated to domestic work. This has mobilized women who, shouting “bread, work, freedom” protest in the streets despite the threats and disappearances they have suffered at the hands of the Taliban. Determined not to give up in the fight to recover their rights, women are the only light that illuminates an Afghanistan that is hurt, impoverished and broken by so much violence.
*Master in Asian and African Studies with a specialty in the Middle East from El Colegio de México.
@atonalcristina1