Afghan women open library to counter growing isolation

KABUL, Aug 24 (Reuters) – Afghan ladies’s rights activists opened a library in Kabul on Wednesday, hoping to supply an oasis for girls more and more lower off from training and public life beneath the ruling Taliban.

Since taking on Afghanistan a 12 months in the past, the Islamist Taliban have mentioned ladies shouldn’t depart the house and not using a male family member and should cowl their faces, although some ladies in city centres ignore the rule.

Secondary faculties for ladies largely stay closed after the Taliban went again on guarantees to open them in March.

“We’ve got opened the library with two functions: one, for these ladies who can’t go to high school and second, for these ladies who misplaced their jobs and don’t have anything to do,” mentioned Zhulia Parsi, one of many library’s founders.

A Taliban spokesman didn’t instantly reply to a Reuters request for remark.

The library’s greater than 1,000 books consists of novels and movie books as effectively non-fiction titles on politics, economics and science. The books had been principally donated by academics, poets and authors to the Crystal Bayat Basis, an Afghan ladies’s rights organisation which helped arrange the library.

A number of ladies’s activists who’ve taken half in protests in latest months additionally helped set up the library in a rented store in a mall that has a lot of shops catering to ladies.

In March, the Taliban made a U-turn on a promise to open ladies’ excessive faculties. Most teenage ladies now haven’t any entry to lecture rooms and 1000’s of girls have been pushed out of the workforce as a result of rising restrictions and Afghanistan’s financial disaster, worldwide improvement businesses say.

The Taliban say they respect ladies’s rights in accordance with their interpretation of Islamic regulation and that since March they’ve been engaged on a means of opening ladies’ excessive faculties.

Western governments have stepped up their condemnation of the Taliban’s widening elimination of girls from public life. Many Afghan ladies have expressed frustration and known as for Taliban authorities to respect their rights.

“They can not annihilate us from society, in the event that they annihilate us from one subject, we are going to proceed from one other subject,” Mahjoba Habibi, a ladies’s rights advocate, mentioned on the library’s inauguration.

Reporting by Mohammad Yunus Yawar; writing by Charlotte Greenfield;
enhancing by Mark Heinrich

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