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Calls for Recognition of Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan Reaches Mandela’s South Africa

The term apartheid was conceptualized to explain the institutionalized discriminatory practices of the regime in South Africa that came down after decades of peaceful resistance led by Nelson Mandela. Thousands of miles away and three decades later, activists and intellectuals resorted to the term to explain the restrictive policies of the Taliban against women in Afghanistan.

That discussion was brought home in South Africa at the 21st Annual Mandela Lectures, delivered on Tuesday, December 5, by Malala Yousafzai. The 26-year-old Pakistani activist was perhaps uniquely suited to connect the plight of women in South Asia to Mandela’s struggle against racial segregation. In 2014, Malala won the Nobel Peace Prize, joining the ranks of Mandela, after being shot for her education activism by the Tahrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an ideological offshoot of the Taliban who now rules over Afghanistan.

In her speech, Malala championed a cause the women of Afghanistan have taken up after the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. She castigated the group for excluding women from public life and repeated pleas of Afghanistan’s women for the recognition of the group’s restrictive policies as ‘gender apartheid’. “Our first imperative is to call the regime in Afghanistan what it really is. It is gender apartheid.”

The Nobel Laureate’s emphasis on the need to recognize gender apartheid as a crime against humanity only speaks to the relentless activism by women of Afghanistan in the face of the Taliban’s oppressive policies that have taken away from them any opportunity for participation in their country’s public life and future.

As opposition and resistance against the group have remained largely weak and disorganized, women have shown unprecedented resilience to challenge the Taliban’s otherwise uncontested authority. The effects of their protests on the streets in Afghanistan are replicated by efforts of those in exile to not only alarm the world but also build coalitions to echo their voice.

They were not absent in South Africa on Tuesday. Metra Mehran, an activist who had to leave Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban’s return to power two years ago, joined Malala on stage after she delivered her speech, hosted by Graça Machel, Nelson Mandela’s widow.

In appealing to the world to codify Taliban crimes as gender apartheid, Mehran read a letter that she said a teenage girl from Afghanistan had sent her. Since their return to power, the Taliban have banned girls’ access to education beyond grade six.

“I feel alienated and worthless. I am afraid of wishing,” Mehran read from the letter, reminding the audience that it was the 886th day that girls were kept out of school in Afghanistan.

After the withdrawal of international forces from Afghanistan, the outside world has struggled to pressure the Taliban to change their behavior, particularly on women’s issues, beyond what activists consider lip service to the cause of women’s rights. “We need an international mobilization to equal the problem there,” Mehran said of the need for a more coherent and principled position against the Taliban.

A recent joint report by the UN Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan and the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls has revealed alarming details of widespread and systematic discrimination against women and girls in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover. The report concludes that the Taliban’s action may amount to a crime against humanity of gender persecution under the Rome Statute.

Afghanistan’s and international human rights defenders think they have a unique opportunity to codify gender apartheid in international laws as the United Nations reviews its convention on crimes against humanity.

As the global powers prioritize attending to geopolitical imperatives, human rights violations continue around the world. Rights groups fear that the lack of attention and action by liberal democracies in the Western world undermines the credibility of international norms and institutions at the core of global order after WWII.

“As an international community we shouldn’t allow anyone to do these practices and get away with it,” Mehran said, warning of the implications of silence against the Taliban, “atrocities happening in Afghanistan are not going to remain there. It’s going to cross boundaries.”

Graça Machel, Nelson Mandela’s widow, issued a stark warning about the global implications of the Taliban’s suppression of women’s rights in Afghanistan. “Afghanistan is an experiment that can be transferred to any other country,” she said, emphasizing the need for a unified and amplified global response to defend women’s rights. “We live with gender-based violence which is everywhere. We have to be aware that other countries can copy what’s happening in Afghanistan and make it a legal system.”