Background and History of Afghanistan:
Human Rights under the Taliban

The people of Afghanistan have suffered extensive human rights violations in the course of the past twenty two years. The Soviet invasion and occupation from 1979 to 1989, aided by Afghan communist military and civilian collaborators, brought mass killings, torture, imprisonment, the largest recorded refugee outflow in history, and a land scourged with landmines. During the civil war, fueled by regional countries’ support for various factions following the collapse of the Soviet-backed regime in 1992, the nation witnessed extensive abuses by the various armed factions vying for power. Amnesty International has documented horrific abuses including abduction, rape, torture and killing of women and children by members of various warring factions. The virtual destruction of Kabul from rocket shelling, aerial bombardment and mortaring, indiscriminate use of force, torture and killing in detention of both civilians and combatants, the use of antipersonnel landmines, and the arbitrary exercise of authority principally through military force characterized Afghanistan for much of this period.

As dire as the human rights situation has been, the Taliban regime brought the country to a deeper level of desperation and horror. The Taliban imposed strict “Islamic” sanctions for common crime and regularly carries out floggings, executions (including by beheading or stoning) and amputations, which the public was summoned to watch. Due process was absent, the Taliban’s Shari’a courts operated arbitrarily, and authority is maintained through tyranny and terror.

Every Friday the Taliban terrorized the city of Kabul by publicly punishing alleged wrongdoers in the Kabul sports stadium requiring public attendance at the floggings, shootings, hangings, beheadings, and amputations. Thousands of people including women and children witnessed the public executions (stabbing and beheading) amputations and flogging of alleged wrong-doers.

But, the aspect of Taliban rule that most deeply affected the life of women is the Taliban’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the holy Quran with regard to the role of women. Their interpretation of Shari’a (Islamic law) forbid women to work outside the home, attend school, or leave their homes unless accompanied by a husband, father, brother, or son. Taliban were the first faction laying claim to power in Afghanistan which targeted women for extreme repression and punished them brutally for infractions. No other regime in the world has methodically and violently forced half of its population into virtual house arrest, prohibiting them from showing their faces, seeking medical care without a male escort, or attending school. It is also difficult to find another government or would-be government in the world that has deliberately created such poverty by arbitrarily depriving half its population of jobs, schooling, mobility, and health care. Such restrictions are literally life threatening to women and their children. Zohra Rasekh, a researcher for Physician for Human Rights, when visiting Kabul in 1998 saw a city of beggars -- women who had once been teachers and nurses were moving in the streets like ghosts under their enveloping burqas, selling every possession and begging in order to feed their children.

The Taliban’s abuses are by no means limited to women, men and ethnic minorities are also routinely targeted. Thousands of men have been taken prisoner, arbitrarily detained, tortured, and many killed or disappeared. Men were beaten and jailed for wearing beards of insufficient length (that of a clenched fist beneath the chin), subjected to cruel and degrading conditions in jail, and suffered such punishments as amputations and stoning. Men were also vulnerable to extortion, arrest, gang rape, and abuse in detention because of their ethnicity or presumed political views.

Throughout the time they ruled Afghanistan, the Taliban soldiers continually engaged in violations of human rights and humanitarian law including forced displacement of the civilian population; deliberate burning of houses; summary executions of non-combatants, including women and children; arbitrary detention; massacre of civilians, forced labor and forced marriage of women; as well as abduction and rape of women. Reports by Human Rights Watch and UN agencies indicate that in August 1998, after capturing the city of Mazar-i Sharif, the Taliban troops opened fire indiscriminately in streets and market areas killing and injuring hundreds of civilians. Also for days, the Taliban security forces conducted house-to-house searches, detaining Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara men and teenage boys. Thousands, mainly Hazara’s, were shot, some in execution style. Scores of Hazara and Tajik men were suffocated as they were locked in large metal containers to be transported to jails outside the city of Mazar-I-Sharif.

Subsequent attacks in Bamyan and Shamali Plains, in 1998 and 1999, resulted in massive involuntary and forced displacement of the civilians, in particular, women and children. Widespread firsthand accounts from Southern Shamali valley indicated that the Taliban fighters and their Pakistani and Arab counterparts were engaged in property destruction, burning of homes, farms, crops and livestocks, forced deportations, family separations, abduction and rape of young women, and arbitrary killings.

Although the Taliban were the only group that systematically committed human rights violations, grave violations of the laws of armed conflict were committed in varying degree by Taliban opposition groups. Indeed, it was during the struggle for power between the Rabbani government and Gulbeddin Hekmatyar and other factions that reduced Kabul to rubble during the civil war period of 1992-1995 and caused literally thousands of civilian casualties. That period also witnessed rampant human rights abuses by the warring parties before Taliban was on the scene: abduction, rape, torture, killings, disappearances, and arbitrary arrest was common.

NEXT: United States Policy in Afghanistan (1989-2001)