by IWU-FI – 20 August 2021
After twenty years of occupation, the Americans left Afghanistan defeated. A new failure of imperialism in its role of “world gendarme”. It leaves a country in ruins. Power was left in the hands of the Taliban, an ultra-reactionary Islamic religious, political movement. A monster created by imperialism itself, which in the 1980s financed them to wage a guerrilla war against the invasion of the former USSR. After the invasion failed and the USSR fell, the US and the Pentagon lost control of them.
When the Taliban ruled between 1996 and 2001, it imposed a bourgeois Islamic dictatorship, a theocratic government brutally repressive foremost against women. Now the Taliban intend to liquidate the partial freedoms and rights of women. They will resist this, together with most of the Afghan people, especially in the cities, and in the other ethnic groups. Thousands took to the streets on 19 August to defend the Afghan flag on the day of national independence from the British, and the Taliban repressed them.
The images of desperate women and their daughters trying to flee at Kabul airport never cease to move the women’s movement around the world, who stand in solidarity with the Afghan resistance to the Taliban regime. Those who try to flee do so because the memory is still present of when the Taliban ruled in the 1990s, applying a radical interpretation of the Koran in which women could not go out on the streets without a male companion and without the burqa (which covers them from head to toe). They could not study or work outside the home. Among other atrocities.
In twenty years of imperialist occupation, both the United States and NATO have bombed the territory, killing civilians and systematically violating human rights. An intervention that has driven millions of Afghans from their homes and in the face of which the European Union has systematically closed its borders, outsourcing migration control to other countries, such as Turkey, and condemning millions to refugee camps with subhuman living conditions. Those who have got in have been denied their fundamental rights to exploit them even more. Representatives for imperialism, such as the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, warned that he aims to stop the obvious increase in the flow of migrants to Europe.
We denounce and reject this policy and stand for open borders with full rights. For all these reasons, the solution for women in particular and the Afghan people does not come from the side of US imperialism, which invaded and destroyed the country. But neither does it come from the side of the Taliban and their fundamentalist and misogynist movement.
With military control over the entire country, the Taliban Islamist movement intends to establish a theocratic state under its ultra-reactionary interpretation of Islam and Sharia law, which they would call the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. With the instrumental use of religion, it would impose a rollback of Afghan women’s freedoms and rights, which would reinforce the oppression and inequality inherent in the patriarchal social relations of capitalism. They will ban working outside the home, showing any part of their body or wearing make-up, speaking or laughing in public, joining sports activities, among others that they implemented when they ruled before.
We hope that the response of Afghan women will develop soon, as the Taliban will control their lives, work and bodies. We value the organisation and protest with demonstrations and marches in rejection of the loss of their freedoms and rights that are facing with admirable courage the armed presence of militiamen of the Taliban regime who are guarding the streets and are to impose the new ultra-reactionary order.
We call for international solidarity with the women and the Afghan people in their struggle against the new government to prevent going back to the repression of the 1990s and achieving their independence, equality, and freedom. Only a working-class government can move forward to socialism with full rights and can guarantee freedom for the Afghan people, their women, and their sex variants.
As socialist feminists, we embrace all forms of resistance and organisation of Afghan women against the Taliban. The struggle of Afghan women is also our struggle. We denounce the ultra-right and the right-wing in different western countries maintain strong support for fundamentalist evangelical and catholic religious movements that develop an ultra-reactionary patriarchal policy against women, which denies the political character of gender violence, questions and annuls sexual and reproductive education, dismisses gender discrimination in the workplace, rejects the legalisation of abortion, minimises and even justifies sexual abuse, opposes the recognition of reproductive work, ridicules the equal sharing of care work, and sustains paternal abandonment.
From the International Workers’ Unity – Fourth International (IWU-FI), we call on the whole international women’s movement to accompany this struggle and surround it with solidarity so that it triumphs against the theocratic dictatorship and all imperialist interference.
#WeAreAllAfghanWomen
