Tyranny of the Taliban

A visit to the capital of Afghanistan's extremists regime reveals a harsh world of suppression and despair

Time World Vol. 150 No. 15/October 13, 1997
By Christiane Amanpour

Kabul -- We were standing in Kabul's only hospital for women when the purist authorities of the Taliban decided they did not want any pictures taken. Screaming and shouting at us, they grabbed our TV cameras, all our tapes and even our briefcases. Several armed Taliban enforcers slapped a cameraman, while another rammed his rifle butt at visiting aid workers. One raised his hand toward Emma Bonino, the European Union Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs, there to investigate the Taliban's treatment of women, and would have struck her but for an aide's intervention. The next thing we knew, a truckload of armed men were escorting us to the central police station. After several hours, they freed us and returned our cameras but refused to give back the tapes. "Now I know," says Bonino, "what the people of Kabul have to live with every day."

The Taliban does not seem eager for the outside world to see how it has been ruling Afghanistan since its fanatical fighters stormed into the capital of Kabul a year ago. Here the young, often illiterate "students," who developed their extremist interpretation of Islam in the refugee camps of Pakistan during the 1979-89 war against the Soviet occupation, are a law unto themselves. In 1996, when my CNN team witnessed the beginning of their enforcement of their version of Koranic law, I challenged Taliban "ministers" to explain, and they told me all women's rights would be restored "once the security situation improves."

One year later, the security situation remains dangerously unsettled. The Taliban has consolidated its hold over two-thirds of the country but is still fighting to extend its harsh rule over the entire nation. In the past year, the women of Afghanistan have endured extraordinary hardship, and last week's incident proved that the Taliban has no intention of easing the stern commandments that have virtually locked women away in a modern purdah.

From the day they marched into Kabul, the Taliban's adherents have sought to eradicate women from public life. In a land where the women have had to work while the men fought, the regime has barred females from taking any job outside the home or even leaving their houses without a male relative to accompany them. Girls have been thrown out of school. Foreign-aid agencies have been forbidden to offer any of their services or assistance directly to females.

Today Afghan women cannot even expect proper medical care. Three weeks ago, the Taliban decreed that female patients could no longer be treated at any of the main hospitals in Kabul and would be completely separated from male patients and medical personnel. We discovered that sick women are being sent to a crumbling old building that has no windowpanes, no running water, no proper operating room and barely enough electricity to power lightbulbs. The patients are tended by a meager female-only staff.

In our two-day stay in the capital city, we watched agents for the Preservation of Virtue and Elimination of Vice enforce an endless list of edicts and absurdities at gunpoint, with rifle butts, with the backs of their hands. Women are forbidden to wear high heels or white socks because they are considered a sexual lure. Music is banned: cassettes are often snatched out of cars, the tapes stripped out and hung on signs as a warning. Kites may not be flown, and most forms of public entertainment, like movies, are not permitted.

The toll such measures take on Afghan women is impossible to assess. Several told us how dispiriting it is to be thrown off a bus or forced to sit in the back. We heard reports of an increase in the suicide rate among females, and that many have sunk into despair and depression. For Afghanistan's tyrannized women, there is no escape from an unsparing, medieval way of life.