Afghan Talks Kick Off In Doha Amid Anger Over Taliban’s Exclusion Of Women

Two days of UN-organized talks on international relations with Taliban-led Afghanistan were getting under way in the Qatari capital, Doha, on June 30, with the Taliban present for the first time -- but rights groups expressed anger over the hard-line fundamentalist regime’s exclusion of women and its refusal to discuss women's rights at the forum.

"The Taliban had a major role in creating the agenda of this meeting and who should be in this meeting,” Shahrazad Akbar, the former head of the Independent Human Rights Commission and currently executive director of the Rawadari rights organization, told RFE/RL's Radio Azadi, speaking from Britain.

“This in itself is a big problem and is giving power and legitimacy to the Taliban," she said.

Habiba Sarabi, a prominent women’s rights activist and former member of the negotiating team of the deposed Afghan government, echoed those remarks, saying, “Afghan women are half of Afghan society.”

“How can we say that women are not present in important decision-making meetings. When it is specifically related to Afghanistan, women should be present and women should also participate in those decisions,” she told Radio Azadi.

This is the third such UN-sponsored meeting on Afghanistan in Doha, but the first in which the Taliban has been involved. Along with UN officials, delegations from some two dozen nations, including the United States, are expected to attend.

The Taliban was not invited to the first Doha conference and set conditions that were rejected for its participation in the second gathering in February, including that it be the sole representative of Afghanistan at the meeting.

UN chief Antonio Guterres said the group’s demands were “unacceptable” and amounted to recognizing the Taliban as the country’s legitimate government, something the international community has refused to do.

Afghan women’s rights groups and supporters have held protests inside Afghanistan and in Europe over the Taliban’s participation and its exclusion of women at the gathering.

Zahid Mustafa, who has organized a protest in Amsterdam, told Radio Azadi that "our goal by these protests is that the United Nations has invited the Taliban to this meeting on behalf of Afghans. But we are protesting this and calling for a boycott of the Doha meeting."

Shukriya Barakzai, a women's rights activist and Afghanistan's former ambassador to Norway -- who was invited to the previous meeting -- expressed frustration with the UN organizers of the summit.

"The United Nations’ looking down upon Afghan women and representatives of civil society shows that, despite the fact that this meeting was organized by the United Nations, they are acting against their own procedures and values," she told Radio Azadi from London.

She did not say if she was invited to the current gathering in Doha.

Roza Otunbaeva, the head of the UN mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), has defended the failure to include Afghan women at the meeting, saying that women’s rights are certain to be raised with the Taliban. She said the group's inclusion in the talks does not represent a legitimization of its government.

The Taliban government, which took over after the U.S.-led international coalition left the country in mid-2020, is not recognized internationally, although Beijing has accepted credentials from a Taliban ambassador.

The United Nations has accused the Taliban of waging "gender apartheid" on women and girls since returning to power nearly three years ago, closing girls' schools and forcing women out of the workplace and out of public spaces.

Women's rights groups and civil society activists are expected to meet with international diplomats and UN officials on July 2, after the close of the official two-day talks.

But Sima Samar, the former head of Afghanistan’s human rights commission of the deposed Afghan government, said that was not sufficient action by the international community.

“They [the UN] have said they will meet the [Afghan] women on the sidelines after the end of the meeting on July 2,” she told Radio Azadi.

“If they care about women, why don't they meet with women before that, or why aren't women directly at the table, because the Taliban's desire is to erase women from all social and political issues in Afghanistan.”