The Senate
Motion to Urge Government to Recognize the Erasure of Afghan Women and Girls from Public Life as Gender Apartheid--Debate Continued
May 21, 2024
Colleagues, I rise at this late hour to wholeheartedly support the motion presented by Senator Salma Ataullahjan, which reads as follows:
That the Senate call on the Government of Canada to recognize the erasure of Afghan women and girls from public life as gender apartheid.
The adoption of this motion, although non-binding, would send a strong signal to the Taliban, who want to erase women from public life in Afghanistan. There’s no doubt that Afghanistan is the worst place to live if you’re a woman, and that’s saying a lot.
Since Canada’s precipitous departure from Afghanistan in 2021, women have been hit the hardest by the clerics’ brutal changes. In addition to gender separation, women are being excluded from public life. Females are not allowed in high schools, universities and most employment sectors. They are required to wear the burka in public. They are banned from parks and gyms. The regime even shut down their last refuge, 12,000 beauty salons employing 60,000 women.
“Closing my salon means starving entire families,” said a depressed Afghan beautician who says she’s going crazy. What’s more, according to local sources, the suicide rate among women has skyrocketed. Under the circumstances, it’s impossible not to consider Afghan women as both literal and figurative prisoners of a totalitarian regime that grants them no rights whatsoever.
At first glance, it may seem counterintuitive to use the term “gender apartheid” to describe what is happening in Afghanistan. At first glance, the erasure of women is not the equivalent of apartheid, a loaded term that is codified in international law and that automatically brings to mind the racial apartheid that reigned in South Africa, the systemic racism that the international community fought against and finally put an end to.
Let’s take a closer look at the similarities between the two situations.
According to researcher Karima Bennoune, as quoted in Le Devoir, in the Afrikaans language, apartheid means separation or segregation. This American professor went on to say that, like South Africa, Afghanistan has enshrined intentional, systemic and pervasive discrimination against women in its laws. Such oppression is at the heart of the Taliban’s political ideology, just as apartheid was the ideology of South African governments from 1948 to 1990.
Let’s be clear from the outset. The concept of gender apartheid is not recognized in international law. According to legal experts, this is what needs to change, since current international law isn’t adapted to punish the systemic repression of women in Afghanistan severely enough. Meanwhile, the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, which came into force in 1976, criminalizes apartheid. Twenty years later, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court added that the crime of apartheid is a crime against humanity, making it one of the most serious crimes under international law. Unfortunately, gender apartheid isn’t on this list.
According to researcher Karima Bennoune, who wrote an elaborate paper in 2023 in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review:
Analogous to racial apartheid, gender apartheid is a system of governance, based on laws and/or policies, which imposes systematic segregation of women and men and may also systematically exclude women from public spaces and spheres. It codifies the subordination of women in violation of “fundamental principles recognized under international law,” as the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights characterizes the equal right of men and women to enjoy all human rights.
She continues:
Ultimately, as racial apartheid was for Black South Africans, gender apartheid is an erasure of the humanity of women. Every aspect of female existence is controlled and scrutinized. It permeates all institutions and spaces, public and private. There is no escape from gender apartheid. The solution cannot be the departure of half the population of the country.
We need to remember three things here. Broadening the concept of apartheid to include gender would require amending UN texts referring to racial apartheid, and that would require a major mobilization of UN member states. It would certainly be a landmark feminist transformation of international law, but there’s no consensus on such a change. That’s why the motion before the Senate holds such importance as a first milestone.
What’s happening in Afghanistan is next-level compared to the male-female discrimination we see in many countries. For example, in Senegal, the law prohibits violence against women. When I was there on a mission in 2017, as a Quebec diplomat, there were very few, if any, local shelters for women who are victims of intimate partner violence.
Third, some still argue that, unlike racism, gender discrimination is a religious or cultural issue. In Afghanistan, however, the repression of women is clearly a political issue, first and foremost. The Taliban interpret and exploit the religion of Islam to justify violating the rights of all women.
If we look to the past, what’s interesting is that, during the first Taliban regime in the mid 1990s, there was already an international campaign by American and Afghan feminists to describe what was happening in Afghanistan, including the public whipping of women and the punishment of Afghan women who were victims of rape, as gender apartheid. This debate first arose 30 years ago, and it continues to this day.
In 1998, the European Community Humanitarian Office drew a parallel with South Africa to launch the campaign:
We face a question of principle comparable to that of apartheid in South Africa before reforms there. We face apartheid based on gender, by which Afghan women are deprived of their right to choose how to live. There may well be some women who would choose to live according to the ultra-fundamentalist code of conduct imposed by the Taliban. At present, all are compelled to do so.
Let’s come back to today. More and more voices are being raised to rename the tragedy experienced by Afghan women. The UN special rapporteur on Afghanistan recently concluded:
. . . the cumulative effect of the Taliban’s systematic discrimination against women raises concerns about the commission of international crimes.
. . . the cumulative effect of the restrictions on women and girls . . . was tantamount to gender apartheid.
Shaharzad Akbar, the former chairperson of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission is more blunt:
If a government is unwilling to recognize half of the population, we should be unwilling to recognize them. If the same restrictions were applied to men, or on the basis of race, what would we do?
Recently, a group of women senators also heard directly from Afghan women refugees who were invited by Senator McPhedran. They implored us to not forget them and to publicly raise the issue. There is the same pressure on the House of Commons, where women activists from Afghanistan and Iran are urging the Canadian government to play a central role in increasing global awareness and garnering international support to eradicate gender apartheid.
If Canada decides to act on our motion and recognize that gender apartheid is happening in Afghanistan, it would be a powerful mobilization tool. It could convince other countries to go in that same direction. We cannot, and should not, forget Afghan women. Therefore, I encourage all of you to support this motion, because women’s rights are human rights. Thank you.
Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Motion No. 139 and to add my voice to those of my colleagues, led by the Honourable Senator Salma Ataullahjan, calling on the Government of Canada to recognize the erasure of Afghan women and girls from public life in Afghanistan as a form of gender apartheid.
Ottawa, as we know, is a city of remarkable memorials, as befits our national capital. For me, one of the most poignant and powerful isn’t in the parliamentary district: it’s the Afghanistan Memorial Hall, a 30-minute drive from here at the National Defence headquarters Carling.
If you haven’t yet had the chance to visit, let me tell you a bit about it. Tucked into the centre of the sprawling Carling campus, the memorial pavilion is a striking building: low-slung, sharp‑edged. Its front walls are slabs of highly polished black marble, buffed to such a shine that they reflect the sky above. On them are engraved the words “We will remember them.” Step inside, and the pavilion is filled with light. Floor-to-ceiling windows look out onto a forest wilderness, white in winter, lush green, as now, when summer finally comes. The hall is a tribute to the Canadians who died serving in Afghanistan: 158 military personnel and 7 civilians. It also recognizes and commemorates the U.S. service men and women who died while under Canadian command.
In the centre of the memorial is a large, rough rock — a boulder. Taliban fighters used this self-same rock as a roadblock to force a Canadian military vehicle off the road. The attack was successful, and fatally so. The Canadian soldiers decided that this particular boulder would never be used to kill another Canadian. They lugged it to their base in Kandahar, and it became the start of a makeshift memorial. A haunting cenotaph the soldiers built for themselves — for their own. The formal cenotaph is made from Afghan white marble and displays the names and photos, the birth dates and birthplaces, and the death dates and death places of the fallen.
Walking through the hall on my first visit there five summers ago took my breath away. I recognized and remembered so many of those names and faces from my days writing for the Edmonton Journal.
The first Canadians who died: Sergeant Marc Léger, Corporal Ainsworth Dyer, Private Richard Green and Private Nathan Smith. All four were members of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry based at Canadian Forces Base Edmonton. They were killed by Americans, not Afghans, in a friendly fire incident on April 17, 2002. I covered their massive public memorial service held at the hockey arena that the Edmonton Oilers then called home. Thousands of Edmontonians and Albertans turned out that bright April day, shocked and stricken by the horror of such pointless accidental loss. But those four deaths were only the first of many.
Over the years, the news stories continued, but the big public memorials gradually stopped. The losses of Canadians in Afghanistan slowly became — if not routine, then something that no longer surprised us. But in Kandahar, this grassroots memorial kept growing.
As I walked through the cenotaph, I saw the memorial plaque for Corporal Nichola Goddard, the young Calgary woman and officer in the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery who died on May 17, 2006. I saw the plaque for Michelle Lang, my colleague from the Calgary Herald, who was killed by a Taliban improvised explosive device while on assignment in Kandahar in 2009. Two brave Alberta women who sacrificed themselves to serve not just the people of Canada but the people — and perhaps especially the women — of Afghanistan.
There are so many Alberta names and faces: a powerful reminder of how deeply this war, so many miles away, touched and scarred my province and my city. Edmonton and Alberta took the war in Afghanistan personally. So many Albertans served in Kandahar in particular, and so many of my Edmonton Journal newsroom colleagues went to Kabul and Kandahar to bear witness, to bring back the stories of horror and death, but also of courage, compassion and hope.
The Afghanistan Memorial Hall is black, white and grey. As black and white as we thought the issues were in the wake of 9/11, and as grey as they seemed when Canada left Afghanistan in 2011.
By a strange twist of timing, I became an opinion columnist at the Edmonton Journal, rather than just a reporter, on September 10, 2001. The next day, the twin towers came crashing down, and the world we thought we knew blew apart. Suddenly, I was expected to have a lot of opinions about things that I, frankly, knew little about, including whether Canada should join the fighting in Afghanistan.
It seemed relatively clear to me, even through the fog of war, that American and British war efforts in Iraq were not supportable, but the issues in Afghanistan seemed very different. I never believed that it made sense for Canada to commit thousands of troops to the Afghan mission simply to punish the Taliban for their support of Osama bin Laden. As a young feminist, I had spent years reading about the grotesque oppressions the Taliban had inflicted on the women and girls of Afghanistan. The stories were horrific, and I was awestruck by the courage of the journalists — many of them women — who had brought those stories to the world.
Despite the human costs of war, despite the physical dangers and moral hazards of intervening in the affairs of a country that had defied and destroyed occupying forces from Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States over the years, I backed Canada’s mission in Afghanistan not so much to fight international terrorism, end the drug trade or even stabilize the region, but to liberate the women and girls of Afghanistan from Taliban oppression.
Perhaps that was naïve. Perhaps my optimism about the potential for Canadian involvement was tinged with a fair bit of neo-colonial White saviourism, but, for a time, the efforts of the world to free Afghan women from misogynist tyranny seemed to work. Afghan girls could once again go to school. Afghan women could walk the streets without male supervision and enforced dress codes. Women weren’t just allowed to work, they were allowed to take leadership roles as teachers, doctors, journalists, judges, politicians, artists and lawyers. Life in Afghanistan without the Taliban certainly wasn’t easy, but women were freed from the semi-slavery of the Taliban’s toxic fear and hatred of the female sex. The dictatorship of the “incels” seemed to be over.
And then, in February 2020, Donald Trump’s American government signed a peace agreement with the Taliban — an agreement reached without the consent or consideration of the Afghan government. If anyone had ever actually imagined that a deal between Trump and the Taliban would bring peace to anywhere, they were woefully mistaken. In August 2021, Kabul fell to the Taliban, and any illusions anyone had cherished that the “Taliban 2.0” were somehow a kinder, gentler version than the original model were quickly dashed, with Afghanistan’s women and girls being stripped of their rights and liberties and returned to second-class status. Actually, second-class status doesn’t begin to accurately describe the “un-personing” of Afghan women.
As a person of Jewish and German descent, I don’t draw parallels with the Nazis lightly, but it is the most apt analogy I can think of here. The Nazis used the term “Untermenschen” or “under men” to apply to Jews, homosexuals, Roma and Slavs — anyone they deemed subhuman. By stripping such people of their very humanity, they were able to rationalize their lethal oppression.
But if we look at the entire scope and sweep of human history, I’d argue that women were the original Untermenschen. We have been fighting for thousands of years, all over the world, to have our humanity and equality recognized. Misogyny is one of the oldest of hatreds. It is a near-universal one, practised by cultures and religious faiths all around the world since time immemorial.
For centuries — for millennia — men were explicitly taught that women were not only inferior but dangerous. Our sexuality was demonized, as was our intellect. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that women in North America and Western Europe were able to attain any kind of legal or political power, and it was only in 1929 that women in Canada were recognized as legal persons — as people. Indeed, it was not until the late 20th century that we achieved anything close to political or legal equality.
And the closer we come to being recognized as fully human, the more vicious the political and cultural backlash.
The Taliban’s particular form of weaponized misogyny, borne out of a deadly combination of fear and hate, is uniquely dangerous at this moment to the women of Afghanistan. However, it is also an infectious toxin and threat to women everywhere in the world, including Canada, because it models and normalizes the erasure of women from public life and civil liberties. We have only to look south to the United States to see what happens when a Supreme Court infused with fundamentalist Christian misogyny throws out decades of settled law to rule that women do not have the right to control over their own bodies or life-saving medical care. So much for the separation of church and state, equality under the law and rights that we thought were safe and sacrosanct.
I want to rage and weep when I think of the promises we in Canada made to the women of Afghanistan. I want to rage and weep once more when I think of all the Canadians who fought and died or were wounded, physically and psychologically, in the name of bringing peace, stability and liberty to Afghanistan and its women.
As the world turns a blind eye to the campaign of horror being waged against Afghanistan’s women and girls, we make a mockery of the sacrifice so many Canadians made for that country’s future hopes.
What of the rest of us? In a world where good journalism is disappearing, Canadian foreign correspondents are becoming almost figures of myth and the infotainment cycle spins as fast as a carnival ride, we cared about Afghanistan for a few weeks after Kabul fell. Then the crisis there was pushed aside by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; the Hamas terror attack on Israel; Israel’s reprisals in Gaza; and Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump and the three-ring circus of American electoral politics.
And while we look away or at our phones, the women and girls of Afghanistan, to whom we promised and pledged so much, suffer.
So yes, let’s call it gender apartheid.
But naming the evil is just the start. What matters more than what we call it is what we’re going to do to fight it and oppose misogynist political terror in Afghanistan and around the world.
Thank you, hiy hiy.
