Last October I wrote this article – The Arc of History – about the protests by women in Afghanistan, in Iran and in Ukraine about what was happening to them in their countries.
All three countries have rather dropped out of the news in recent months. But the cruelty (often a particularly sexual cruelty) to – and oppression – inflicted on them continues and gets worse. In Iran, the authorities have deliberately aimed at faces, often blinding young women in one or both eyes. In Afghanistan women have been publicly whipped in the street. Women in Ukraine have had their children kidnapped and sent to Russia, a war crime for which the ICC have issued arrest warrants against Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Commissioner for Children’s Rights in Russia.
Despite all this and worse, women, many of them young – and some men – are continuing to protest and defy the authorities responsible.
- In Iran earlier this month, its Supreme Leader and the police’s commander threatened women with arrest if they took off their hijabs. The response was a lot of women publicly going out without their hijabs, often accompanied by male friends and relatives. One heartening aspect is the increasing number of men who have joined women in protesting against these diktats and fighting back against the morality police. Dishearteningly, however, months of protests have not loosened the regime’s grip on power nor its insistence on controlling its female population in this way or its brutality to those it arrests – including the summary hanging of those it deems guilty, after grotesquely unjust trials.
- In Afghanistan, women continue to protest (see the picture above from a filmed protest in Kabul earlier this month) against their total obliteration from public life and from any ability to earn a living or have an education. The cruelty inflicted is only matched by the hypocrisy of Taliban leaders, many of whom are sending their own daughters out of the country to get the education they are denied at home.
There is not much to be hopeful about. Perhaps the only conclusions we can draw so far are these: – - Dictatorships willing to behave oppressively and caring little for censure, whether domestic or foreign, can keep going for a very long time indeed.
- Rights, once won or granted, can be taken away or lost. We must never be complacent – even in the West – especially about rights for women, which always seem to be something which have to be negotiated for, as if their grant was an immense favour to women and not something they are entitled to as of right.
- Those who continue to protest, at great personal cost to themselves and their families, are immensely courageous. “We will fight. We will die. But we will take back our rights.” is what those women in Kabul are chanting.
Whatever we can do to support them, however little it may be, we should. Even if it is no more than reminding ourselves and others that they are still there, still protesting, and letting them know that they have not been forgotten. It is not much, frankly. But it is better than silence.
