What do you want people to know about Afghan women and the Uzbek community in Afghanistan?
I come from a long line of empowered and educated Afghan women. My great-grandmother was an educator, my grandmother was an educator, my mom was a teacher. Afghan women are unstoppable, highly ambitious, and have a lot of zeal and passion for progress and for community building.
I also come from an ethnic minority in Afghanistan that’s an indigenous group to Afghanistan. I’m an Uzbek. I’m from northern Afghanistan. That’s usually known as a diaspora community in Afghanistan, but they are indigenous to Afghanistan. They’re historically persecuted. They faced a lot of forced displacement, and these patterns of forced displacement continue under the Taliban right now. There are alarming reports about rape and sexual abuse of these women in Taliban prisons, as well as destruction of their ancestral homes and destruction of their families.
These historical processes and the ongoing human rights violations, against Uzbek women in particular, have compounded their marginalization and oppression under gender apartheid. Gender apartheid often operates and intersects with interlocking layers of oppression, which takes the struggle of these women a step further.
The struggle of these women includes a struggle for categorical inequality that has existed historically in Afghanistan and continues to exist right now under the Taliban and under worsening conditions. Their fight is not only for education and freedom of movement, but another layer of fight that stems from the historical oppression that’s ongoing under the Taliban.
Can you share a bit about your story and what has influenced your work as an advocate?
My family immigrated to Central Asia after I was born, and we came back after 2001 immediately to rebuild the community and rebuild our homes. I lived in Northern Afghanistan. I was raised in Northern Afghanistan in Mazar-i-Sharif. I went to school there in Mazar-i-Sharif. Our houses were demolished. As you know it was a large Uzbek-dominated neighborhood, and our house was demolished and we had to– it was a case of basically forced displacement. We were forced to displace to Kabul. And that sort of shaped my work in human rights, equality, and the research that I’m currently doing on forced displacement in Afghanistan.
Also, as I previously said, my grandmother, my parents their work in education, scholarship, activism, and humanitarianism. My grandmother used to work, and she was the only woman in her family among the siblings. They did not give her any inheritance. She fought for it. She got it, and she built a school. She went door-to-door in her village, and she built a school. And she was the vice principal of that school and later my mom became a teacher. Later that school had 3,000 students. It became a high school after, it was initially a small school, and later it started graduating over 3,000 girl students each year.
Now, those girls don’t have any access to education. But she continued working. She did a lot of humanitarian work, and she navigated those challenges under the first Taliban rule.
My work has really been inspired by women in my life, by my Afghan sisters that continue to resist, the experiences that I’ve had as an Uzbek woman in Afghanistan, and this discrimination I have felt in the classroom.
Human rights are often disconnected from counterterrorism policy. Why is this a shortsighted approach?
I’ve been reflecting about this today as well, and as I said, we live in times of historical amnesia. Of course, [the] Taliban are a huge international security issue, and security is very important. I think to see human rights separate from security or counterterrorism is also profoundly shortsighted, because I think they are very intertwined.
If we overlook human rights and human dignity, we’re automatically overlooking the grievances, struggle, and the ongoing resistance of women in Afghanistan, as well as the minority population. We risk making the same mistakes, I would say.
There’s a growing trend of travel influencers visiting Afghanistan. What is your message to those who overlook and even enable the Taliban’s abuse of the Afghan people?
It’s extremely dangerous. I think it’s morally wrong. It’s our human responsibility to depict what’s happening in Afghanistan rightly, and I think it’s important to sit with your privilege. I think we’ve had Afghan influencers do the same. The thing is that they are American passport holders or European passport holders. It’s important to sit with your privilege or anyone who’s watching this.
I have friends who are liking these posts, and I message them and I tell them, “Please don’t like these posts. This is endorsing the wrong narrative. This is not what’s happening on the ground.”
Which is very unfortunate among the younger generation here in the US or Europe as well, because they usually look at this through this lens of an anti-imperialist critique, or these people are showing an indigenous culture to us. Of course, Afghan people are extremely hospitable. It’s a beautiful community. It’s a beautiful culture, and these influencers are doing that as well.
But at the same time, where are women in your videos? Are they going to national parks? And why is the Taliban giving you a safe haven? Because they want you to act as a walking platform for their propaganda.
What gives you hope?
What gives me hope is connecting with my community, with Afghans in Washington, D.C.
I used to work with [the] Afghanistan Policy Lab at Princeton University, and I did research with young people, on [the] youth and future generations in Afghanistan, and their rights and their visions for Afghanistan. One of the questions that I asked in interviews was, “Are you optimistic about the future of Afghanistan?”
Several people, particularly women, they challenged me. Young activists or young people in Afghanistan and diaspora that were recently exiled after 2021, they told me, “If we are optimistic, we’re siding with the Taliban. We would be giving them a lot of credit, so we are hopeful.” It poignantly reminded me of the words of Rebecca Solnit, a feminist scholar, that hope locates itself within activism, and I’m paraphrasing, but optimism locates itself in non-involvement. They told me that they were hopeful, but they were not optimistic. They made a differentiation between those two terms and concepts, which was very interesting for me especially as a scholar-activist of human rights.
Since then, I’ve been very hopeful because there is ongoing activism on the ground. Women are resisting. Young people are resisting. Youth are resisting for a better future for Afghanistan and in exile a lot of them are doing the same work. So that gives me hope.
