Afghanistan’s Taliban-run Ministry of Higher Education has said female students will not be allowed to enter universities in the country until further notice.
A letter, confirmed Tuesday by a spokesperson for the Ministry of Higher Education, orders Afghan public and private universities to immediately suspend access to female students, in accordance with a cabinet decision.
“All of you are advised to immediately implement the mentioned order suspending women’s education until further notice,” reads a letter addressed to all government and private universities, signed by the Minister of Higher Education, Neda Mohammad Nadeem.
Ministry spokesman Ziaullah Hashimi, who tweeted the letter, confirmed the order to several news agencies, including AFP and The Associated Press.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric called the decision “troubling”.
“This is clearly another broken promise from the Taliban,” Dujarric told reporters on Tuesday.
“We have seen since their takeover…a shrinking space for women, not just in education, but access to public spaces,” he said.
“This is another very troubling decision and it is hard to imagine how a country can develop, can meet all the challenges it faces without the active participation of women and their education.”
The announcement came as the United Nations Security Council met in New York on Afghanistan. Both US and UK envoys to the UN condemned the decision at the council meeting.
“The Taliban cannot expect to be a legitimate member of the international community until they respect the rights of all Afghans, especially the human rights and fundamental freedoms of women and girls,” he said. US Deputy Ambassador to the UN Robert Wood.
“Feel This Pain”
The Taliban have defended their decision, saying such restrictions were imposed to preserve the “national interest” and “honour” of women.
Several Taliban officials said the ban on secondary education was only temporary, but they also offered a litany of excuses for the closure – from lack of funds to the time needed to reshape the curriculum along Islamic lines.
It also restricted women of most job fieldsordered them to wear clothes from head to toe in publicand banned them from parks and gymnasiums.
The confirmation of the academic restrictions came the same evening as a UN Security Council session on Afghanistan, during which the UN secretary-general’s special representative for Afghanistan, Roza Otunbayeva, said said the school closures had “undermined” the Taliban administration’s relationship with the international community. .
“As long as girls remain excluded from school and the de facto authorities continue to ignore other stated concerns of the international community, we will remain in a kind of stalemate,” she said.
Meanwhile, Obaidullah Baheer, founder of the Let Afghan Girls Learn campaign, said the decision felt like “a recurring nightmare that spans generations”.
“The Taliban chose the day and time when the UN Security Council was discussing Afghanistan to announce something like this,” Baheer told Al Jazeera.
“There are tensions within the Taliban…even the people who oppose this decision have been very passive,” he said.
“We continued to rely on the Taliban to reform internally – it didn’t work,” Baheer said, adding that the international community’s reactions to the Taliban have only “appeased” and “emboldened” them. “.
The decision was made as many university students are taking end-of-term exams. The mother of a university student, who asked not to be named for security reasons, said her daughter called her in tears when she heard about the letter, fearing she could no longer continue his medical studies in Kabul.
“The pain that not only me… and [other] mothers have in our hearts, could not be described. We all feel this pain. They worry about the future of their children,” she said.
The country is reeling from a humanitarian crisis, more than half of which population facing hunger. amid Western-imposed sanctions, as well as freezing humanitarian aid and nearly $10 billion in Afghan central bank assets.
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