Afghan women's protest movements and civil activists have reacted in a joint statement to the recent speech by Saida Mirziyoyeva, daughter of the President of Uzbekistan, at the UN General Assembly. They have called on Uzbekistan to make any political and economic engagement with the Taliban government conditional on respect for human rights, especially women's rights.
While appreciating Uzbekistan's progress in women's political participation, the activists expressed deep regret that Ms. Mirziyoyeva made no mention in her speech of the "catastrophic situation of women and girls" in her neighboring country. They emphasized that for over five years, Afghan women have been deprived of their most basic rights, such as education and work.
The statement reads that silence in the face of "gender apartheid" on one side of the Amu Darya river while supporting women's rights on the other is an undeniable contradiction. The Afghan activists criticized Tashkent's purely economic and security-focused view of the Afghanistan issue, warning that this approach risks normalizing systematic human rights violations.
According to the activists, "no trade or energy project can create sustainable stability while half of a country's population is erased." They asserted that in the face of gender apartheid, silence does not mean neutrality but rather siding with the existing situation.
The movements called on Uzbek officials to openly condemn the educational and employment restrictions imposed on women by the Taliban and to urge the international community to recognize "gender apartheid" as an international crime.
Saida Mirziyoyeva, who is also her father's chief of staff, had said in her UN speech that a purely security-based view of Afghanistan and considering it a source of threat is not a solution, and that isolating the Afghan people would only worsen the problems. In response, Afghan women activists said that the systematic suppression of women is not an internal issue but a threat to the stability of the entire region and should not be sacrificed for geopolitical interests.
Source: Statement by Afghan women activists
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