Women activists from Afghanistan staging a hunger strike in Germany against the Taliban’s repressive gender rules said they would continue their protest despite falling health.
Marking the third day of their strike, Tamana Zaryab Paryani, a women’s rights activist and one of the protestors, said in a video post on Sunday that the health condition of her colleagues and herself is “not really good.”
“But we will continue our hunger strike until our demands are heard.” She said in a quavering voice.
Paryani and her colleagues are on the fourth day of a 12-day hunger strike that began on Friday in Cologne, Germany.
They are calling on the international community, including their host country where they fled to following the Taliban takeover, to formally recognize the Taliban’s repressive rules against women and girls as “gender apartheid.”
Halt on financial support and official engagement with the Taliban authorities and the immediate release of political prisoners who remain in the group’s detention centers are their two other demands.
“In Afghanistan, Taliban has deprived women of their basic human rights because of their gender,” Paryani told BBC Persian in an interview Saturday, adding that they have been subjected to torture, sexual abuse, killing, and discrimination by the Taliban.
“The international community is silent in the face of an ongoing gender apartheid in Afghanistan. We had no choice but to launch a hunger strike to call on the world to recognize it and take action against it.”
A group of women protestors, affiliated with the Women’s Movement for Freedom, recently held an indoor protest in Kabul to join the call for recognition of gender apartheid in Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, told the Human Rights Council in Geneva in June, “Grave, systematic and institutionalized discrimination against women and girls is at the heart of Taliban ideology and rule, which also gives rise to concerns that they may be responsible for gender apartheid.”
