(15c) Testimony by a woman who was a journalist in free Afghanistan

Female Afghan journalist - end of career in her homecountry

Short introduction

Zahra Joya is a female journalist who reported on Rukhshana Media about the unfair treatment of and violence against women by Afghans during a time when the Western forces were still in the country. She had to leave Afghanistan after the return of the Taliban. She lived in the capital Kabul although travelled throughout her country to report on women's treatment. 

She describes it wasn't easy to be a female journalist, even not in the USA occupied country, as men assumed a woman doesn't speak but she did, although she had to demand again and again the right to ask questions at press meetings; you may expect the male journalists would understand after a few press meetings she too wants to ask questions. Now she and family had to flee the country as Taliban fighters were looking for her. Mrs Joya is one of many strong woman, even as a girl when she dressed like a boy, with support of her parents, to be able to go to school and thus to become a female journalist in a women-hating country. 

She spoke with the Guardian about the horror in her country whereby she find it hard to believe the Taliban returned to power. Here some extracts of the interview that speak for themselves although sometimes I add a comment or summary in italic and between brackets as [text].

A testimony

.... "By the time she returned home [after work] in the afternoon, however, men with guns were on street corners and her sisters were shut inside their house, shaking with fear. In just a few hours, normal life had been obliterated." ... "It was like a bad dream. Even on that day, it just seemed impossible that the Taliban could come to power so quickly, wipe away 20 years and drag us all back to the past."

... "All my life, I thought I was part of creating a new Afghanistan;' ... "I never in my life imagined I'd end up a refugees".

"She feels a deep grief over the eradication of women from public life in Afghanistan." [Indeed, the Taliban announced a ban of girls going to secondary school while women are no longer allowed to have public sector jobs when men can do them.]

"To believe the Taliban's propaganda, that they are somehow different this time around, is to betray the millions of Afghan women and girls who have lost their chance to have anything but a life of domestic servitude and illiteracy," ... "I think of everything that I and so many other women fought so hard to achieve and it has all disappeared. We lost everything."

... "I would have to argue with colleagues and people on the street, who would be telling me to go home and that I should be ashamed for being out in public asking questions. I would always say: ‘I am a journalist and I have the right to be here.’”

... "she was also working as the deputy director of communications at the Kabul municipal government." ... "to show that women ... could be active in public life".

"When I was born, the elders in my family were so sad and ashamed that my parents had a daughter,” ... “They didn’t think I had any value at all."

"When Joya was a child, there was no school for girls anywhere near her village, so for five years Joya dressed as a boy to get her education." ... “I was lucky, because my parents supported me. They made me boys’ clothes and ...".

About the Taliban, she says "They were people who wanted you to fear them, but our job was to resist,” “I lost my best friend to a Taliban attack. Everything I stood for was in opposition to their ideology. To me, they had nothing to do with the Afghanistan that we were building.” [Indeed, an Afghanistan with opportunities for everyone that the Taliban destroyed.]

"She founded Rukhshana as Afghanistan’s first feminist news agency, where local female journalists reported on the reality of life for women and girls across the country. The purpose was to provide a counternarrative to the wider Afghan media." “For Rukhshana reporters, it was an opportunity to tell the stories male editors would never consider newsworthy.”

"Rukhshana was openly critical of the Taliban militants and documented their campaign of murders and attacks on women in public life in the months before the US and UK troop withdrawal. Scores of women – police officers, judges, journalists, activists and politicians – were assassinated in shootings and car bombings."

[Yes, it is a disgrace that even certain intelligent people celebrated the return of the Taliban whose track record concerning women was known.]

"But on the day that Kabul fell to the Taliban, Joya and her reporters suddenly became moving targets. Three had already gone into hiding the week before, as their provinces fell. Joya’s work for the government in Kabul, and her ethnicity, put her further at risk."

“If I stayed in Afghanistan, I really believe they would have killed me,” she says. “Maybe not straight away, but eventually.”

"When I got outside, I could see the Taliban’s white flags everywhere. There were no women on the streets; it was like we’d all just been wiped out." ... “Suddenly, it didn’t matter if I was a young woman in 2021. My fate was no different from the fate of a woman who lived in Kabul in 1996. For many years, my eyes freely looked at the hills of Kabul, taking in its mud houses and wildflowers. I could not accept having to see the world through the prison bars of a burqa.”

"In her final days in Afghanistan, she heard that the Taliban had come looking for her and so went into hiding." [After she received a notice by the UK's government, she and her family decided to leave and go to the airport.]  "At night, the panic and terror of the people around her grew overwhelming. “Seeing that level of helplessness and humiliation, I burst into tears."

[Eventually she managed to show a British soldier her evacuation order and she could board a plane. In London she continues Rukhshana Media and now also makes an English version.]

"In the past week, she has covered the murders of female police officers across the country and how single mothers face losing custody of their children under Taliban rule. Her reporters in Afghanistan have either been evacuated or are in hiding."