A release of the Spontaneous Movement of Afghan Women (SMAW), 8 March 2024

Afghan women need your support !

While the women of Afghanistan are burning in the hell of Taliban rule from August 2021 onwards, the great powers and the international community are engaged in concessions and open and secret deals with the Taliban. While more than 50 anti-women decrees have been issued and implemented by the Taliban in order to systematically deprive women of all their human and civil rights, the international community is still silent. While women’s civil protests for « bread, work, freedom » are brutally suppressed in Kabul and other provinces and protesting women are arrested, tortured and killed, the international community does not take any serious action to stop the atrocities of the Taliban. While hundreds of protesting women are currently under physical and mental torture in private and official prisons of the Taliban, and there is no information about the fate of some of them, no local or international body is trying to free them. While hundreds of women activists inside Afghanistan are facing the threat of death from the Taliban and are suffering from nutritional, health, educational and psychological problems in clandestine places, the countries that claim human rights do not pay attention to their asylum application.

Afghan women, who themselves are victims of several decades of war, understand with all their heart the pains and problems of people, especially women in Gaza-Palestine and Ukraine, and express their heartfelt sympathy on the occasion of International Women’s Day. The current humanitarian disaster in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, in which civilians and women and children are the main victims, must be ended immediately.

On the occasion of March 8th, International Women’s Day, the Spontaneous Movement of Afghan women (SMAW) once again calls on human rights institutions, women’s rights activists and all philanthropic women and men, contrary to the shameful indifference of their governments regarding the disastrous situation in Afghanistan, to continue their active solidarity with Afghan women. Due to security threats and the risk of death from the Taliban, the activists of the Spontaneous Movement of Afghan Women (SMAW) celebrate March 8 this year in most provinces of Afghanistan in clandestine houses. Protesting women, whether in Taliban prisons or in secret houses, do not give in to the Taliban’s oppression and pressure, they raise their voice for freedom and justice in every possible way.

The Spontaneous Movement of Afghan Women (SMAW) asks all its friends around the world to become the voice of the rights and freedom of Afghan women on the occasion of International Women’s Day, to ask their governments and representatives in the parliaments not to sacrifice the rights and freedoms of Afghan women for their political expediency. Ask them to make the reopening of women’s schools and educational centers, women’s work and civil liberties a precondition for any negotiation with the Taliban. The Taliban must stop suppressing, arresting, torturing and killing protesting women and release all the imprisoned women immediately.

Only you, human rights defenders, women’s rights activists, humanitarian women and men, are the hope of life and freedom from house arrest for protesting women under the threat of the Taliban, so that you advocate for their immediate asylum. Please take an active part in the asylum campaign for protesting Afghan women and don’t let hundreds of poor women lose their lives under the physical torture of the Taliban in prisons and hundreds of others in home prisons from mental torture. Afghan women need your help and support in this dire time.

• International Women’s Day, united struggle for peace, equality and freedom!
• Long live the solidarity between the women of Afghanistan and all over the world!

Spontaneous movement of Afghan women (SMAW)

Kabul, March 2024

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