Stop to TV series and soap operas with actresses and Islamic veil for journalists on video. The Taliban still tighten the shirts for women already almost completely deprived of schools, universities and jobs in contact with the public. With the new guidelines issued today by the ministry for the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice, the moderate face that the ‘Koranic students’ have tried to sell to international public opinion since the seizure of power in August is becoming increasingly faded. last after the hasty withdrawal from the country of the Americans and the international coalition.
“These are not rules, but religious directives”, said the spokesman of the ministry Hakif Mohajir without specifying the punishments in case of violations or giving details. “Televisions must avoid showing soap operas and rose water series in which women play,” says a document from the ministry directed to the media which also asks that journalists wear the Islamic veil, without specifying whether it is a question of a simple scarf, already usually worn on TV, or something more opaque.
Afghan TVs are also asked to avoid programs “that go against Islamic and Afghan values” and that insult religion or “show the Prophet and his companions”. A squeeze, that of today, which aims to impose the Taliban order on the media which in the twenty years of Western presence in the country have multiplied, also giving ample space to women. Impossible, today, to return to Afghanistan in the 90s when cinema and television were forbidden as well as all forms of entertainment, judged immoral, and the possession of a TV or a video recorder could also mean the scourging in public for the unfortunate who he was trying to free himself from the Middle Ages in which the Taliban had precipitated the country.
But if the form is apparently milder, the substance doesn’t change much for women. Unicef denounced the risk of an increase in child brides also due to the fact that school doors are still closed almost everywhere for them. And a few weeks ago, Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai appealed to the Taliban to “let the girls go back to school as soon as possible”. An unheard appeal by a regime that has already repeatedly shown its obscurantist face by forcing the many women who refused to plunge back into the nightmare of a primitive world to flee or go underground.
The memory of the less fortunate, such as Mahjubin Hakimi, a beheaded young volleyball player and Frozan Safi, a 29-year-old activist and university professor riddled with bullets in the face, reminds us of who the Taliban really are.