Beneath the Veil
Note: All images are from 'Beneath the Veil'
 Ever since the Taliban took control
of most of Afghanistan in 1996, the group has imposed its harsh version of
Islamic law on the country. In "Beneath the Veil," journalist
Saira Shah traveled to Afghanistan to see the effects of the Taliban's
rule on her father's homeland.
She discovered public executions, allegations of human rights violations like massacres and torture, and a place where women are forced to beg because they are prevented from working. But she also found that the first voices of protest come from the most repressed, including an opposition group that uses hidden cameras to film the executions. Saira Shah's journey into the heart of Afghanistan reveals a country of desperate poverty, much of it brought about by the deliberate policies of its fundamentalist Islamic government, the Taliban. Women are deprived not only of education, medicine and freedom, but often of the very means of survival. Starting in the vast refugee camps of Pakistan, she made her way into Afghanistan itself, where she found unimaginable brutality but also extraordinary bravery. |
Shah first visited refugee camps in Pakistan, where millions of Afghans initially fled to escape the war following the 1979 invasion by the Soviet Union. They are now seeking relief from famine, drought and the Taliban's harsh rule.
The United Nations estimates there are some 1.2 million Afghan refugees in camps in Pakistan and 800,000 in Pakistani cities, down from more than 3 million during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. However, there are still a total of 2.6 million Afghan refugees, making them the world's largest refugee group for the 19th year in a row. In the Pakistani camps, many of the refugees are children.
Shah met with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), an underground group of Afghan feminists who are using hidden cameras to document the actions of the Taliban. In Pakistan, Shah attended a demonstration by the group, which turned into a mini-riot when Taliban supporters launched a counterdemonstration.
After a two-month wait for visas, Shah crossed into Afghanistan with a film crew. Their first stop was the southern city of Qandahar, where they were immediately detained by the secret police known as the Ministry of Enforcement of Virtue and Suppression of Vice. Charged with filming illegally, they were later released.
"I would have felt foolish if I hadn't been so scared. Dressed in high-heeled plastic shoes and veiled in a garment with more than a passing resemblance to a tablecloth, I hobbled across the border into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan with my foreign passport and $3,000 strapped under my bra. What I was doing was entirely illegal. For me, however, going undercover into Kabul wasn't just the only way to get the story — it was a personal odyssey.
Though I was born and bred in Britain, as I child I was constantly told that I came from another world: my father's country, Afghanistan. Now I was relinquishing my protected status of foreign reporter to enter, for a brief time, the Kafkaesque world of ordinary Afghans. A world I had faintly glimpsed from the vast and squalid Afghan refugee camps that line the Pakistani border.
'I saw a girl wearing white shoes,' one woman told me. 'The Taliban came and said to her: "White is the colour of our flag. You have dishonoured our flag." So they beat her.' The woman used to be a schoolteacher. She finally fled Kabul when the Taliban forbade female teachers to go to work.
In another camp, a boy of about 10 years old told me how the Taliban hunted him with dogs. His transgression: a haircut they considered decadently Western. Another little girl hid in a bread oven and watched the Taliban kill her father for his wristwatch and waistcoat. This was extraordinary brutality even by the standards of Afghanistan's bloody history.
When I first visited the country in the 1980s, Afghanistan was already at war. The people were struggling against a superpower: the Soviet Union. I saw refugees who were too proud to beg and a people who displayed heroism and humour in the face of incalculable misery. In my idealism, I didn't realise the extent to which those values were already being eroded. As society began to break down — 10% of the country was displaced, two million people killed — so did the values that had held a fragile social system together.
More than a decade later, the Kabul I arrived in still bears the scars of the country's seemingly endless war. After the Soviets left, the various military opposition groups fell upon each other. It was a war of warlords who had forgotten how to do anything but fight. In the process they trashed Kabul."
In Kabul, Shah and her crew were detained again for trying to film confiscated cassette tapes displayed at a police checkpoint. The Taliban has banned secular music as "un-Islamic." But to their surprise, instead of being arrested, the local intelligence chief invited Shah and the crew to tea. The chief also took them on a tour of the district that he oversees, saying if Taliban opponents enter his district, he can find and arrest them within minutes of their entry.
Shah also visited a soccer stadium where public executions are held, some which have been secretly filmed by RAWA. The footage shows the prisoners paraded around the field, before being hung from the goalpost or shot in the head at close range. The Taliban's spokesman said the executions are bringing "order and security" to society.
In Kabul, Shah left her crew behind and proceeded alone, posing as an ordinary Afghan woman but continued to film with a hidden camera underneath her burqa, a body-length veil that adult women in Afghanistan are required to wear. She visited a filthy hospital for women with few doctors. The Taliban don't want women to work as doctors, but they also don't want male physicians to see women and there are few female doctors left in the country. The country now has one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world.
Shah also met up with her RAWA contacts, who took her to an illegal beauty parlor and one of the group's riskiest activities -- a school for girls.
The Taliban control most of the country, except a small part in northern Afghanistan held by an alliance of different ethnic groups and former mujahedeen, guerrilla fighters who fought the Soviets in the 1980s. Both the alliance and the Taliban have been accused of human rights violations.
Shah interviewed people in villages, who accuse the Taliban -- mostly ethnic Pashtuns -- of killing unarmed civilians belonging to different ethnic groups. Three young girls said they saw their mother killed in front of them.
Some of the restrictions imposed by Taliban on women in Afghanistan
The following list offers only an abbreviated glimpse of the hellish lives Afghan women are forced to lead under the Taliban, and can not begin to reflect the depth of female deprivations and sufferings. Taliban treat women worse than they treat animals. In fact, even as Taliban declare the keeping of caged birds and animals illegal, they imprison Afghan women within the four walls of their own houses. Women have no importance in Taliban eyes unless they are occupied producing children, satisfying male sexual needs or attending to the drudgery of daily housework. Jehadi fundamentalists such as Gulbaddin, Rabbani, Masood, Sayyaf, Khalili, Akbari, Mazari and their co-criminal Dostum have committed the most treacherous and filthy crimes against Afghan women. And as more areas come under Taliban control, even if the number of rapes and murders perpetrated against women falls, Taliban restrictions --comparable to those from the middle ages-- will continue to kill the spirit of our people while depriving them of a humane existence. We consider Taliban more treacherous and ignorant than Jehadis. According to our people, "Jehadis were killing us with guns and swords but Taliban are killing us with cotton."
Taliban restrictions and mistreatment of women include the:
Apart from the above restrictions on women, the Taliban has:
And so on...