Taliban University

By Human Rights Activist Batul Moradi

Like every day, I arrived at the library at 08:00 am. This is my place of work, where I practise the Norwegian language in a Southern Norway city, and where I live as an asylum-seeker from Afghanistan.

Our teacher tells us that soon our Norwegian will be so fluent that we’ll begin speaking it in our dreams. She doesn’t know that I am not even in Norway in my dreams. She and my colleagues don’t know that I am not completely in Norway. I live in two parallel worlds. For a few hours a day I am in Afghanistan.

My sister Khadija called me from Kabul. She spoke briefly. She said she is facing harassment and violence from one of her colleagues at the university where she teaches and this time, she wants to write about it publicly. She’s been dealing with this for more than ten years.

Then I fasten my shoelaces and return to Kabul with her while I am still behind my work desk at the back of the library and my colleagues are concerned about quarantines and the possibility of our library closing again. I have left.

Ten years ago, Khadija founded the Avicenna University with twelve other educated Afghans in Kabul. Today, this university is one of the most successful and academically-rigorous in Afghanistan. But over the past ten years, as the sole woman founder of the university, she’s had to tolerate many ups and downs. I’ve seen her in a state of constant battle with inequality, discrimination, gendered insults, and workplace threats.

She always worked more than everyone else and expected less of them. This is the norm for women who must do what they can to get counted in an environment defined by men. They must be relentless in their fight for their most basic and natural rights. The university allowed many benefits and perks for male university teachers that it wouldn’t for Khadija or other women. For instance, teachers were allowed to take out loans for buying houses and land, but when it came to Khadija she was told that a single woman doesn’t need a house. Therefore, ten years later all the men in the founding group came to own several houses and this sole woman still rents. She has even had to beg for her salary at times. The men have asked her: What do you need a salary for? You are a single woman.

I have seen how she has spent countless of her own hours working on different programs for the university without expecting summer or winter breaks. She has held down the fort during vacations so that the male teachers can travel. Her sacrifices have only led to further problems.

I remember in 2012, she lost her patience for the first time. She came home and cried. One of her colleagues had physically attacked and insulted her. Instead of holding him accountable, the university had asked Khadija to stay silent to protect the university’s reputation and promised that this would be the last time. But it wasn’t the last time. It happened again and again.

Female students were not safe either. They were in a more difficult situation than Khadija. Complaining about harassment and insults from teachers would only lead to punishment-even expulsion- for them. Some of them couldn’t even tell their families. One had told Khadija: I am engaged. If my fiancé finds out a teacher made a sexual request from me, he would definitely kill me.

I had asked Khadija to change her workplace, and she had said: It doesn’t matter. Wherever I go, this is how women are treated.

She was right. These interactions are not specific to this university. In Afghanistan, every educational space or workplace can be unsafe for women and raising your voice often leads to isolation, character assassination, and job loss. A prime example is that of Fatima Ahmadi, a policewoman who revealed her experience of sexual harassment by her supervisors in a video. Her official complaints had led nowhere, in fact the complaints had only led to more pressure and questioning. She lit her work ID on fire and said that she has endangered her life many times for the arrest of killers and robbers. Outside her work, criminals threaten her and she is not safe; at her workplace, she’s under pressure to appease the inappropriate requests of her superiors. A short while after the Ministry of Interior announced that they had investigated her complaint. Instead of holding the harassers accountable, they accused her of skipping work and having been fired for it.

Fatima was an example. Any woman who has lived in Afghanistan has experiences with violence and harassment and unfortunately, we have all learned that silence is our best course of action. Was it Fatima who was isolated and put on display or the men she worked with? Our society is so patriarchal that women survivors of violence are forced into carrying the shame. This shame leads families into silencing and even killing women for their reputation. An unknown percentage of women who become victims of sexual violence or rape are killed by their families. On the other hands, abusers know that people will choose to forget their violence. Our society is always ready to forgive violent men. Even when a man kills, his family marry one of their daughters into the family of the murdered person in order to keep the peace.

We have a long history of forgiving criminals and forgetting victims. This year, we freed five thousand terrorists to appease the American government that Afghanistan is not a threat to them. Now, in peace talks, the terrorists are sitting across from us and we are begging them to recognize us and allow us our basic human rights.

I leave the library. I wait for the light to change. The prime minister of Norway is a woman. Our governor is a woman. The head of the library I work at is a woman. Half of my colleagues are women. Many times I’ve had to be in a room alone with a man and I haven’t felt scared- something that always caused me anxiety in Kabul. But the thing that keeps me calm is not there. It is that there are lights for crossing the street. In Kabul, I was always stressed out at the unjust battle between pedestrians and cars.

For someone who has lived without safety hats and seat belts and insurance and lights, this moment of walking across the lines for pedestrians is lovely. I love the crosswalks. I love the lines and boxes that give dignity to human behaviours and relationships.

In Kabul, I couldn’t tell anyone about my debilitating fear, “Look at her. She’s afraid of crossing the street”.

Of course, for the people of my country who leave home every day hoping they will get to return home alive, my fear is small and childish. Even our children have more important fears. Just this month of October, there was a suicide attack or explosion every day in a corner of the country, killing civilians. The peace talks with the Taliban continue in Doha. COVID-19 and quarantine don’t even register. They don’t make us afraid. The women of Afghanistan are born in quarantine. They grow up and mature in quarantine. And they die in quarantine.

Khadija wrote about the insults and violence she has tolerated for years and the unsafe environment at the university. She also shared an audio file that included the gendered insults her colleagues hurled at her. Her colleagues reacted by asking her to prioritize the university’s reputation and threatened to sue her for financial harm to the institution by writing about harassment and violence in her workplace publicly. Even the head of the university who is one of the government’s representatives in the peace talks with the Taliban sent Khadija a voice message asking her to remove her post from Facebook. In it, he says, “violence is not one-sided. You must have done something to force them into violence.”

The Taliban shouldn’t worry too much. Their definition of violence is very similar to that of the government’s representatives.

The university’s administration suppresses any sign of dissent or questioning. When a student questioned violence against Khadija as a female professor, they locked him in a bathroom for five minutes and deprived him of the chance to take his end of semester exams.

Of course, Khadija receives energizing messages from students who have experienced similar things as well. She hopes that they will feel more courageous and tell their stories as well. This is what gives Khadija energy. Under public pressure, the university suspended the professor who has been the main culprit in harassment and violence against Khadija and apologized for the occurrence in a public letter.

Now, Khadija is pursuing her case through the legal system. The attorney assigned to her case has said that they always hear about harassment at universities but no one is willing to come forward with a complaint. This is the first complaint they have received.

I am in the library. As we begin a new day, I smile at my colleagues and others that I pass in the hall. The loudest noise I have heard here were fireworks on New Year’s Eve.

I wonder how the day will be for Khadija. She has to follow up on her complaint. I have been through this. It took me five years to get a sentence against my abuser and throughout that time, I had to tolerate harassment from lawyers, judges, attorneys, and police officers. I am more than five thousand kilometres away, but I still have nightmares about my experiences with the legal system in Afghanistan. No matter how much I stomp my feet, I can free myself from that work. And now Khadija is standing there. At the beginning of a long and winding road fighting within Afghanistan’s legal system- one of the most corrupt in the world. But I know that you have to walk this path. We must remind these smaller Taliban of the red lights and the lines in the sand.