KABUL (SW) – Heather Barr, Associate Director of the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, says that “This is a desperately sad time” for Afghanistan and every day going forward, as long as the ban remains in place.
Ms. Barr further said that Nowruz should be a time of celebration and rejoicing for Afghan families and Afghan girls. However, according to her, “there’s a shadow that has been cast aside” because of everyone’s memory of how the Islamic Emirate promised to reopen girls’ secondary schools, and then it did not happen at the very last moment at the time of Nowruz.
“After the girls put on their uniforms, paid for their school supplies, and have gone to the gates of the school. That day was such a terribly painful Day,” Heater Barr told Salam Watandar.
The school bells rang on Wednesday for a new academic year with no signs of the reopening of girls’ schools above grade six. Officials of the Ministry of Education of the de-facto government, by ringing the school bell at the Amani High School in Kabul city, started the new educational year without the presence of female students.
This is the third educational year that female students above the sixth grade in Afghanistan are deprived of education.
“That is two and a half years in which girls have had to live without their dreams and Afghanistan has had to live without girls attending high school, leaving high school graduating, moving on, becoming doctors and engineers and judges and lawyers.” Heater Barr stressed, “All of the things that Afghanistan needs so badly.”
She mentioned that at this moment, this is not just the situation, where “the future of every girl in the country has been taken from her, but a moment, in which the future of the country has been taken from everyone.”
Ms. Barr added that there is no way that a country can prosper and develop, and have a bright future when half of its population is stopped from making the contributions that they can make and want to make because they have been denied education.
In a renewed push for girls’ education, Amnesty International and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) have once again urged the Islamic Emirate to prioritize this issue.
Amnesty International, on the occasion of the beginning of the new educational year in Afghanistan without the presence of girls, stated that denying girls access to education is futile.
Likewise, UNAMA has said that girls in Afghanistan have been deprived of access to education for over 900 days, emphasizing the detrimental impact of this ongoing restriction on Afghanistan’s future stability.
“UNAMA urges authorities to lift this unjustified and harmful ban. Education for all is indispensable for peace and prosperity.”
The Islamic Emirate had previously said that it is working on a plan based on which girls can return to school.
