Country Context

AFGHANISTAN

Afghanistan has been in conflict for the past 40 years. In the 1980s, the war between the Taliban and a Soviet-backed central government left 1.5 million to 2 million dead and more than 7 million people displaced.[i] After the U.S.-led military invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the United Nations convened four different anti-Taliban ethnic factions in Bonn, Germany, on November 27, 2001, to create a transitional government. Excluded from the Bonn conference, however, the Taliban quickly reconstituted itself and transformed into a formidable insurgency over the course of a few years.[ii] By the time the United States withdrew its last troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, the war had claimed more than 47,000 civilian casualties, 66,000 Afghan military and police, over 51,000 Taliban fighters and 6,000 U.S. personnel and contractors.[iii]

Following a mass forced migration after the U.S. troop withdrawal, in September 2021, the Taliban revived their previous regime, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.[i] Since then, they have dismantled the Afghan constitution, the parliament, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, electoral institutions and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) established pursuant the 2001 Bonn Agreement.[ii] The Taliban

also banned secondary and post-secondary education for women and girls, reinstated rules requiring that women cover their faces and travel with a guardian and have enforced about 40 regulations curtailing women’s access to basic rights and services.[iii] The regime has decimated free space for media, civil society and political associations and continues to accommodate transnational terrorist networks including the Islamic State Khorasan Province, which has continued to conduct deadly attacks on ethnic and religious minorities.[iv] A national armed resistance continues to clash with Taliban units in different areas,[1] pushing the country ever closer to a civil war.[v]

Memory

Memorialization has not been a feature of transitional justice work in Afghanistan. Only a handful of organizations worked on memorialization before the August 2021 Taliban takeover. Since then, the space for CSOs, human rights groups, the media and political associations has dramatically shrunk.

CSOs that previously engaged in memory work have had to pause their initiatives or continue them from exile or online. The Afghanistan Centre for Memory and Dialogue, which pioneered the Memory Box initiative to collect more than 15,000 personal items of conflict victims over the past decade, temporarily ceased activities in August 2021.[i] The Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organisation (AHRDO) instead has shifted its focus to exhibit Memory Boxes in exile, through a virtual Victims’ Memorial Museum,[ii] and the 2022 “Afghanistan Memory Boxes—Against Oblivion” exhibition at the August Bebel Institute in Germany.[iii] The Social Association of Afghan Justice Seekers is another human rights organization that continues to collect photographs and compile biographical information about war victims as an instrument of memorialization for advocacy, justice and accountability.[iv] Artlords, a grassroots organization that uses arts and culture to combat forgetting and promote peace and tolerance, held its first exhibition of artworks and murals in exile in October 2022, after their founders took refuge in the United States.[v] The Hazara Genocide Archive is an online information portal that documents targeted attacks on Hazara-Shia communities in Afghanistan and Pakistan.[vi] Many organizations working on memorialization efforts are still in a recovery process more than a year after being forced to close their operations.

Justice

The prior Afghan government persistently foiled transitional justice efforts, and its closest ally, the United States, prevented a full ICC investigation of international crimes allegedly committed in Afghanistan, including by the U.S. military.[i] In March 2020, the Appeals Chamber authorized the opening of an investigation in Afghanistan. However, to frustrate the process, Ashraf Ghani’s government requested the deferral of the investigation, arguing they were already investigating the crimes in question.[ii] On August 2022, the ICC prosecutor concluded that the deferral was unsubstantiated and authorized resuming investigations of the situation in Afghanistan in October 2022.[iii]

Other international entities are also collecting information about human rights violations to be used in future potential justice and accountability processes. The UN HRC has designated a special rapporteur for Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, who submitted his first report on September 9, 2021. The report highlighted collective punishment against certain communities (in Panjshir, Baghlan and Balkhab), underscored violence against women, torture and ill-treatment of prisoners and described attacks on the Hazara-Shias as “bearing hallmarks of international crimes.”[iv]

CSOs have also been documenting human rights violations in Afghanistan since the Taliban retook control. AHRDO has documented violence against journalists, human rights defenders, religious taxation and displacement.[v] The Afghan Civil Society Forum Organisation has monitored and documented violence against human rights defenders[1] and helped many to resettle in other countries.[vi] The Afghanistan Human Rights Coordination Mechanism, a coalition of national and international human rights organizations formed in January 2022, is working to improve information sharing between organizations and protect human rights defenders working in the current environment, which is extremely dangerous.[vii]

Education

The education sector in Afghanistan was “devastated by more than three decades of sustained conflict” and has significantly deteriorated since the Taliban took control.[i] In December 2022, the Taliban banned all women from attending university and working in NGOs, prompting several international agencies to suspend operations in the country.[ii] Girls’ secondary schools remain closed in 24 provinces, depriving 850,000 girls of education.[iii] Enforcement of a strict dress code, gender-segregation, physical and psychological harassment and violence have impacted girls at universities and other higher institutes of education. Taliban education officials have also re-prioritized their approach to religious education by converting dozens of schools, universities and job training centers into madrasas.[iv]

Fear of persecution exacerbates the situation further. One estimate suggests that half of working academics have either left or considered leaving the country.[v] A more devastating trend is visible in student enrollment. In the western part of the country, enrollment has fallen by 70 percent, and in Nangarhar’s private universities by 60 percent.[vi] A private university in Kabul has lost 90 percent of its students.[vii]

Notes

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Recommendations

  • Civil society groups should continue memorialization initiatives in exile or in virtual spaces, recognizing that the Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan has only increased the need for memory work that centers the perspectives of victims and survivor communities.    

  • The international community should provide full support for the renewed investigations by the ICC on human rights violations from all sides of the conflict, including U.S. forces.

  • International organizations should support Afghan-led efforts to support Afghan youth, particularly girls, by funding community-based education efforts, supporting remote and overseas studies through funds and scholarships, upholding communities fighting for rights and supporting ongoing human rights monitoring efforts.       

  • The international community, particularly Muslim-majority nations, should redouble efforts to pressure the Taliban to ensure the right of women and girls to work, attend school and exercise all their fundamental human rights.