The Afghan Women Who Wrote Their Own Rights — The Diplomat

In 2000, five or six of the women who had gathered in Dushanbe to iterate their rights crossed into the Panjshir Valley to see Ahmad Shah Massoud. He signed their declaration. Today, a girl in Afghanistan cannot go to school past the sixth grade. Her older sister cannot enter a university, a park, or a beauty salon. Her mother cannot travel far without a male relative, cannot hold most jobs, and under a 2024 Taliban law, even her voice is not to be heard in public. The United Nations counts 2.4 million Afghan girls shut out of school, and its experts call the system a gender apartheid. None of this is new. Twenty-six years ago, the Taliban ran most of the country, and the rules for girls and women were nearly identical: no school, no work, no leaving home without a mahram (a male chaperone), the chadari (an Afghan burqa), a beating in the street for a woman who showed an ankle. The world mostly looked away. Less remembered is what Afghan women did about it. In June 2000, the year before the September 11 attacks, about 300 Afghan women gathered in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and wrote down their own bill of rights. They called it the Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women. It is one of the most…