{"id":231624,"date":"2021-04-20T23:46:22","date_gmt":"2021-04-20T20:46:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/the-afghan-women-canada-failed\/"},"modified":"2021-04-20T23:46:22","modified_gmt":"2021-04-20T20:46:22","slug":"the-afghan-women-canada-failed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-afghan-women-canada-failed\/","title":{"rendered":"#The Afghan women Canada failed"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#The Afghan women Canada failed<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Adnan R. Khan: With the U.S. withdrawal looming, the Afghan government is attempting to curb women\u2019s rights. Meanwhile, Canada is more interested in playing whack-a-mole with terrorism than doing the hard work of helping a country devastated by it\n <\/div>\n
\n Rada Akbar\u2019s personal nightmare began late last year with what seemed, at least at first, like prank calls to her cellphone. Unlike the usual phishing calls a woman might receive in Afghanistan, where lonely men randomly dial a mobile phone number and hope a female voice picks up, these calls were from women\u2014and they knew her name.<\/p>\n

For Akbar, a 32-year-old artist and outspoken proponent of women\u2019s rights, the calls were chilling. For many young Afghans like her, 2020 was not the year a deadly virus swept through their country but the year they became the targets of an unprecedented assassination campaign. COVID-19 hunted Afghanistan\u2019s elderly and vulnerable; the Taliban and other extremists were hunting its youth.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe killings intensified around the end of the year, to the point where they would kill as many as five people in a day,\u201d Akbar tells me by telephone from Kabul. \u201cI was warned that there were women working for ISIS, or the Taliban, or criminal groups who were following targets for months.\u201d<\/p>\n

When two women posing as tutors managed to get past the security guards posted at Akbar\u2019s apartment complex and showed up at her front door asking detailed questions about her life\u2014Is she married? Does she live alone?\u2014Akbar felt the walls closing in. By early January, she was so terrified that she had locked herself away at home and abandoned work on her next exhibition, Abarzanan<\/em>, meaning \u201csuperwomen,\u201d slated to open in March. It was supposed to be the third instalment of the yearly exhibition, celebrating the strength and power of Afghan women. But this year, Akbar felt powerless, and her strength had been drained.<\/p>\n

By early February, she had left Afghanistan for India.<\/p>\n

Akbar was not alone in seeking an escape from Afghanistan\u2019s suffocating war. Since the U.S. signed its withdrawal agreement with the Taliban in February last year, violence against Afghan civilians has escalated. According to a recent United Nations report, civilian deaths, particularly the targeted killings of journalists, intellectuals, professionals and civil society leaders, many of them women, spiked in September, after the Afghan government opened peace negotiations with the Taliban. This year, more than 60 people have been assassinated.<\/p>\n

Many of the victims belong to Afghanistan\u2019s new generation of leaders and activists. I wrote about this group back in 2017, when they were taking the lead in Kabul\u2019s municipal government and setting up their own civil society organizations and businesses. They were hopeful and energized; and they were pleading with the international community not to abandon them. Today, many of them have left Afghanistan, or are planning to leave. On a near daily basis, I hear about another businessperson or young Afghan scholar arriving in Istanbul. Every week, there is a gathering where these young people tell stories about the threats they face, about the sticky bombs attached to the undercarriages of cars, about the friends they have lost.<\/p>\n

The assassination campaign follows a pattern, one journalist (requesting anonymity because she plans to return to Kabul) told me. Like the communists who took power in Afghanistan in 1978, and the warlords who took power in 1992, the Taliban are eliminating the country\u2019s young intellectuals and activists. \u201cThere are not many of us in the country,\u201d she said. \u201cSo they just have to kill a few hundred and the rest will go either silent or flee.\u201d<\/p>\n

The implication is that the Taliban are convinced they have won the war and are now eliminating any potential opposition. It\u2019s what anyone who has followed Afghanistan\u2019s trajectory closely has been warning would happ<\/a>en after the Trump administration signed its ill-conceived withdrawal agreement with the Taliban. If it wasn\u2019t for that deal, many of the young Afghans I talked to believe, there would be no assassination campaign.<\/p>\n

With the May 1 deadline for the U.S. withdrawal looming, the prospect of even more violence has put Afghanistan\u2019s future leaders and activists in a state of near panic. Recent attempts by the Afghan government to curb women\u2019s rights are seen as a test of how much room it has to manoeuvre in its negotiations with the Taliban over a future power-sharing agreement. And it seems girls\u2019 education and women\u2019s rights are negotiable.<\/p>\n

That fact is particularly frustrating for me, as a Canadian who spent years in Afghanistan listening to Canada\u2019s military commanders and diplomats talk about how they were in the country to help Afghanistan\u2019s women and girls. But since Canada\u2019s withdrawal in 2011, its attention has ricocheted from Iraq to Mali, proving that the Canadian government is more interested in playing whack-a-mole with terrorism than doing the hard work of helping a country devastated by terrorism ensure terrorists never take root on its soil again.<\/p>\n

Canada may have given up on Afghanistan, but young people like Akbar haven\u2019t. After two weeks in Delhi, clearing her mind and building up her courage, she returned to Kabul, determined to complete her exhibition. It launched on March 8 and ran for two weeks at Kabul\u2019s iconic Darul Aman Palace. Akbar decided to dedicate the exhibition to eight Afghan women who have been killed in recent years. In a video installation, she delivers a speech to those killed by the Taliban and other extremists, each lost life represented by an empty chair cradling a picture of the deceased and a burning candle.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world no longer seems to be shaken as our human bodies collapse, one after the other,\u201d she tells her spectral audience. \u201cI wish I could tell you we are living better lives. I wish I could say humanity is kinder, more compassionate, more loving. I wish we never lost any of you. I hope you are resting in peace, because we are still not living in peace.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

This article appears in print in the May 2021 issue of<\/em> Maclean\u2019s magazine with the headline, \u201cThe women Canada failed.\u201d Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here<\/a>.<\/em>
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