Taliban Closure of Domestic Abuse Shelters Leaves Thousands at Risk, Experts Say
Munaza Shaheed
VOA News
December 11, 2021
WASHINGTON — Fahima Sarfaraz, an acid attack survivor who briefly stayed in a shelter to avoid domestic violence, is concerned for her friends and other women who used to live with her in the group home in Kabul, Afghanistan.
“Taliban have closed down all the women’s shelters in the country,” Sarfaraz told VOA. “I stayed in one of the shelter homes briefly because I felt safe there. All the women who stayed there felt safe. I am very concerned about those women because they used to tell me stories about their life, how they were abused and beaten up by their family members. Honestly, I do not know if those women would be even alive.”
The acting Taliban government has shuttered 32 shelter homes in Afghanistan since Aug. 6, veritably eliminating the last sanctuary for Afghan women fleeing domestic violence and abuse. These shelters, which were supported by international donors, had long provided a safe haven to thousands of victims of domestic violence, mental torment and abuse.
After the last of them had closed, most of the former residents were forced to rejoin their abusive families.
“Once a woman leaves home in Afghan society, she can be killed for honor, and no one will question the killer,” Sarfaraz said.
Kevin Schumacher, deputy executive director of the U.S.-based Women for Afghan Women (WAW), told VOA that members of the acting Taliban government physically went to the shelters, closing them one by one.
“They verbally and physically abused our staff, shouted at them and threatened to skin them alive,” he said. “We tried to negotiate, argue and reason with them, but it did not work.”
Due to the mass closures, many WAW clients have been reintegrated into their families — some of their own volition, and others, Shumacher said, because they “had no way out.”
“This is so unfortunate, because these women are the survivors of domestic violence. They were girls who were forced into marriage at a very young age despite their consent,” he said. “Many of these victims have experienced physical, psychological sexual abuse and torture.”
Since the closures, Schumacher said, WAW has lost communication with the victims and is concerned about their safety and survival.
“These shelter providers were part of a larger [system of equality],” he said. “We had … family guidance centers across the country. Families used to come to us with any issues that they’ve had. We tried to mediate and … resolve the issues through psychological counseling, social counseling, and jirga [tribal council] or family conversations. And if none of this worked, then we provided them with shelters for protection.
“And when the person was moved to the shelter,” he added, “we would provide … legal services in collaboration with the government, with the Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Women’s Affairs and the prison authorities.”
Thousands will suffer
In a recent report, Amnesty International expressed grave worries about these victims of domestic and gender-based abuse.
“Women and girl survivors of gender-based violence have essentially been abandoned in Afghanistan,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary-general, in the Dec. 8 report. “Their network of support has been dismantled, and their places of refuge have all but disappeared.”
Victims of abuse, along with “shelter staff, lawyers, judges, government officials, and others involved in protective services,” now live with the day-to-day risk of violence and even death, says the report, which calls upon the international community to provide immediate and long-term funding for protective services and survivor evacuation.
Thousands of women and children are likely to suffer, said Heather Barr, associate director of Human Rights Watch’s women’s rights division.
“It’s a tragedy because women’s rights activists fought hard for so many years, for the last 20 years, to build the system that would mean that women and girls who would face violence would have somewhere to take refuge,” she told VOA.
“They fought hard for the passage of elimination of violence against women, and all of these systems disappeared in one day on August 15th, 2021,” she said, referring to the day Kabul fell to Taliban forces.
“It is a very painful situation,” said Durani Jawed Waziri, ex-spokesperson for former President Ashraf Ghani. “The Taliban did not only [fail to] include any women in their interim government Cabinet and eliminate the ministry of women’s affairs, but they even banned the age 12 to 18 girls to go to school and get education.
“Taliban have not changed and will not change,” added Waziri, who also used to work with the attorney general’s office as an adviser to eliminate domestic violence.
“While I worked with these women who lived in the shelter homes, I saw how helpless they were,” she said. “Most of these women were victims of physical violence; their husbands had cut off their noses, their ears. I saw women who had mental issues and had been raped on the streets and were pregnant. They had nowhere else to go to. I have been thinking about those women. I do not know where they might be or under which circumstances they might be living.”
Abdul Wassey, the Taliban’s head of international nongovernmental organizations in Afghanistan, declined to comment when VOA’s Deewa Service reached him by phone.
This story originated in VOA’s Deewa Service.
Afghan Farmers Continue Growing Opium Poppy as Taliban Sends Mixed Signals on Poppy Eradication
Roshan Noorzai
VOA News
December 11, 2021
Farmers in Afghanistan say that they will continue to grow poppy amid uncertainty over the Taliban’s poppy eradication policy.
“We have no choice but to cultivate opium poppy,” said Noor, 52, a farmer living in a remote village in the western Farah province. For safety reasons, he did not want his full name revealed.
A father of 10 children, Noor said his family will go hungry without the opium poppy crop.
“I am not sure how I will be able to provide food to my children until the harvest. We do not have food for a month, even. The prices have skyrocketed, and people cannot afford buying food,” he said.
A report released in October by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization warned that the number of people facing acute food insecurity in Afghanistan will increase to 22.8 million, 55% of the population by March 2022 when compared to 18.8 million from September to October 2021.
Afghanistan is turning into “the world’s largest humanitarian crisis,” according to a World Food Program report stating, “continuing drought, escalating displacement, the collapse of public service, and a deepening economic crisis have driven the entire country to the precipice.”
Noor, who has been growing opium poppy for several years now, said that wheat, the main crop grown in the province, is less profitable and not as easy to grow as poppy.
“Poppy takes only six months and it needs less water, as we are experiencing a drought. And there is not much money in growing wheat,” he said.
An added incentive to growing poppy this year was the spike in opium prices in August after the Taliban took power in the country.
A report by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) released last month said “prices doubled from May 2021 levels — as an immediate reaction to the changed political situation. This may have been an indication of uncertainty over the future of the market rather than a shortage of opium.”
Afghanistan is the largest producer of opium in the world. In 2020, about 85% of opium production worldwide was grown in the country, UNODC reported last month.
Opiates in Afghanistan generated some $1.8 to $2.7 billion in income, which is 6% to 11% of the GDP, in 2021.
Taliban stance
In his first press conference in August, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid vowed that the group will curb opium poppy cultivation and trafficking.
“We fully assure our compatriots and the world that Afghanistan will no longer be the center of opium and poppy (production),” he said, and asked for help globally to provide other sources of income for the farmers.
The U.N.’s FAO is supporting wheat farming and is “distributing wheat cultivation packages for Afghanistan’s winter wheat season across 31 out of 34,” and is calling on “greater and immediate support for agriculture production.”
Sayed Ali, 64, a farmer in the Chaparhar district of the eastern Nangarhar province, said opium poppy fields yield five to six times more than wheat or corn.
“Even in the areas where opium poppy was not grown in the last 20 years, farmers have grown poppy this year. This is the source for our livelihood. There is no market for other products,” Ali said.
In an interview last month, Mujahid said, however, that Afghans are facing “an economic crisis, and stopping people from their only means of income is not a good idea.”
The Taliban banned poppy cultivation in the 2000-2001 growing season. They were then ousted by the U.S. and its allies in late 2001. But they benefited from poppy cultivation and the opium trade in the last 20 years, as it was one of the main sources of funding the insurgency.
According to a June 2021 U.N. report, opium poppy cultivation and trade was one of “the most significant sources of income” for the Taliban. In 2020, the Taliban earned an estimated $460 million from the opium poppy cultivation and trade.
Noor said the Taliban not only benefited from the opium cultivation but forced farmers to pay taxes.
“They come during nesh (time of collecting the opium gum) in early April and collect taxes. They take one seer (100 grams) of opium per laborer (who collects opium). And on the top of that, they take 3 kilograms per 4-inch well and 1.2 kilograms of opium per 2-inch well,” said Noor. “They will beat us, throw us in the car, and take us to the jail if we do not pay them.”
He added, “Right now, they do not tell us anything about eradication.”
Possible backlash
Ali said some residents in the district have been cultivating poppy since the early 1970s.
He recalled the Taliban’s ban on poppy cultivation in 2000.
“I and other farmers stored opium and sold our opium gradually to buy food,” he said. “The Taliban might be able to impose a ban on poppy cultivation this time, but people will starve, and it is possible that there could be a backlash.”
Khan, 35, a retail shopkeeper in Musa Kala in the southern Helmand province, who goes by his first name only, told VOA his livelihood depends on opium.
“It will definitely have an impact on my life. If there is no opium, the economy will weaken and my shopkeeping will halt,” said Khan, a father of five children. “I will have to migrate to somewhere else if opium poppy is banned.”
International response
“I think there has been too much attention to eradicating farmers’ poppy fields, which actually is the least criminal element of it,” said William Byrd, senior Afghanistan expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
In a report in August, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said that since 2002, the U.S. has spent about $9 billion in counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan, however, the cultivation of opium poppy has increased in the country.
The trading side of the opium is where the money is generated, said Byrd, adding that regional level policy is needed to target drug traffickers. The regional countries “are very shy about going after them,” Byrd said.
He said that tracking down and confiscating the drug money that goes into banks in the region should be another area of focus, and added that any solution to fight the war on drugs in Afghanistan needs to be “gradual and sustainable.”
From teacher to shoe-shiner: Afghan economic crisis spares few
Al Jazeera: In the biting cold of a Kabul autumn, Hadia Ahmadi, a 43-year-old teacher who lost her job after the Taliban seized Afghanistan’s capital in August, sits by the roadside trying to earn the equivalent of a few cents polishing shoes. Click here to read more (external link).
Finding Afghanistan’s exiled women MPs
BBC: Afghanistan’s women MPs fled for their lives when the Taliban took power – with only nine of 69 women MPs remaining, in hiding, in the country. Now scattered across the globe, many want to continue fighting for women’s rights and aim to set up an Afghan “women’s parliament in exile”. The largest group, numbering 22, are in Greece. There are also groups in Albania, Turkey and the US. Click here to read more (external link).
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US Central Command head says number of al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan ‘probably slightly increased’
McKenzie (file photo)
The Hill: “What we would like to see from the Taliban would be a strong position against al-Qaeda,” he told the AP, but also noted that “I think there are internal arguments inside the Taliban about the way forward.” Click here to read more (external link).
Germany promises to take in 25,000 Afghans – EU document
Ariana: Germany has pledged to admit 25,000 Afghans deemed most at risk following the Islamic Emirate if Afghanistan (IEA) takeover in Kabul from about 40,000 such people that European Union states are to accept, according to a letter by a senior EU official. Click here to read more (external link).
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1TV Afghanistan Dari News – December 10, 2021
Explosions in the West of Kabul – Details Not Yet Available
8am: Residents of Kabul reported three explosions in the western part [Hazara] of the city. Two explosions took place at around 3:25 pm on Friday (December 10th). Shortly afterward, a third explosion occurred in the same neighborhood. The exact number of casualties is unknown. However, Taliban officials said two civilians were killed and three others were injured in the first and second blasts. Click here to read more (external link).
Afghan Athletes Call For Fair Dispersal of IOC Funds
Tolo News: “We call on the Afghan Olympic Federation to distribute the money to those players and athletes who deserve it. The athletes are living in bad conditions,” said Waisuddin Ghawsi, a coach at the boxing federation. “The money should not be embezzled. There should be a distinction between the real and fake athletes,” said Abdul Ahad Amiri, a Paralympic Games player. Click here to read more (external link).