After 9/11, the photo of three girls in miniskirts on the streets of Kabul in the 1970s has become a symbol of Western modernity lost by Afghanistan. It was also shown to former US president Donald Trump to convince him not to withdraw the army from the country: with the defeat of the Taliban, the country would recover a condition that had already belonged to it.
But is not so. “The image in question must be contextualized,” explains its author, Laurence Brun, in the video. “Fifty years ago it was an exception to meet people dressed like that. That’s why I took it. True, the cities were moving towards progress. But traditions persisted in the countryside, including the veil ”.
The video of Le Monde tells the story of the attempt to get the country out of backwardness and to grant equal rights and dignity to women, conducted from the end of the fifties, up to the civil war of 1978.
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