As school resumes in Afghanistan, will all girls be allowed to go?
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
In Afghanistan, schools are expected to reopen this week after a long winter break. In the seven months since the Taliban took over, most girls above the sixth grade have been barred from school. But the Taliban have promised to change that. As NPR's Fatma Tanis reports, not everyone is convinced.
FATMA TANIS, BYLINE: Fifteen-year-old Maryam from Mazar-e-Sharif remembers the first day she went to school after the Taliban took over her country. We are not using her last name so she can speak freely.
MARYAM: (Through interpreter) The Taliban entered our class, and most of the girls ran to the back of the classroom and turned around. They didn't want to see their faces. They don't want to see the Taliban.
TANIS: She says the Taliban came in every day to check that all girls were wearing headscarves and gloves to cover their hands. Her assigned seat in class was in the very front in the first row, but she refused to leave her seat like her classmates.
MARYAM: (Through interpreter) I didn't want them to know I was afraid of them. I just sat there and refused to look at them.
TANIS: Maryam says she's one of the few lucky older girls who've been able to go to school since the Taliban takeover. She lives in Balkh, the only province that has kept schools open for older girls. But for the vast majority of the country, girls above the sixth grade have not been allowed, and the inconsistency is because the government in Kabul have left decisions on schools to provincial Taliban officials. Meanwhile, in Kabul, 17-year-old Fatima Sadat dreams of being a psychologist, but she hasn't been to school in seven painful months, she says, and has been so worried about her future.
FATIMA SADAT: (Through interpreter) We were all afraid that the Taliban close the schools and do not want to open them again. Also, we were not given any books to study, so we were left to our own fate.
TANIS: But despite Taliban assurances that schools would open for all girls, students are unclear about whether they can actually go to school on Wednesday, the official start of the semester. And Afghanistan's Taliban-run education ministry did not respond to NPR's repeated requests for clarity.
SADAT: (Through interpreter) Every teacher that we ask, they say we do not know and let's wait and see what happens.
HEATHER BARR: I think we're still not going to know until the morning of the 23rd whether the schools actually are open or not.
TANIS: That's Heather Barr, the associate women's rights director at Human Rights Watch. She's based in neighboring Pakistan and focuses on Afghan women and girls. Barr says there's a risk that the Taliban might only open schools in big cities.
BARR: There's the potential for some kind of photo-ops at the same time that schools in rural areas, you know, may not get the same treatment.
TANIS: She says when it comes to girls' access to education in Afghanistan, the issue is bigger than just schools being open. Class attendance for girls in provinces where schools were open dropped significantly after the takeover. That's because, Barr says, the daily tensions with the Taliban have had a psychological effect on girls and their families.
BARR: Everybody knows that the Taliban don't really want you to go, and that's going to make people feel unsafe.
TANIS: And under the Taliban, there are few opportunities for women to work.
BARR: Why would you study? Why would you and your family make enormous sacrifices for you to be able to complete high school, go on to university?
TANIS: Barr says while the Taliban do not seem to have changed their policies on women much since they were last in power in the '90s, they do seem to be more responsive to international pressure. However...
BARR: It's really frustrating in this moment where this is the most serious women's rights crisis that's happened in the world since the last time the Taliban took power. And the response from the international community seems to largely be a bit of a shrug.
TANIS: And with global attention on Afghanistan waning over the months, it seems unlikely that things will get better for Afghan women and girls. Fatma Tanis, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF EL TEN ELEVEN'S "FANSHAWE")
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