British Report on Taliban "Law" in Afghanistan

-Giles Whittell, The Times of London: August 25, 2001

The world’s strictest interpretation of Islamic law has sent much of Afghanistan back to the 19th century, at the latest. Nowhere else on the planet has a ruling party concocted so harsh a combination of war, repression and gratuitous blood-letting.

The list of what the Taliban have banned bears repeating. All moving images — including TV, video cameras and cinemas — are outlawed. So are leather jackets, chess, homing pigeons, brown paper bags (in case they are made from pages of the Koran), and all musical instruments except the tambourine.

Women are banned from the workplace, schools and universities, creating a de facto system of sexual apartheid. They may not venture outdoors without a full-face burka and a male escort from their own families. Men must wear short hair and long beards or have them trimmed to length by religious police with scissors.

Aid workers have noted increasing boldness by ordinary Afghans in flouting the Taliban’s rules, and less draconian enforcement of them as the regime has grown more confident in power. Yet this has not helped the unknown numbers publicly mutilated or executed since the Taliban took Kabul in 1996. Both genders risk amputation even for petty theft. Women face the threat of beatings if they show their faces on the street, and of public stoning if convicted of adultery. In November 1999 the first public execution of a woman took place in a Kabul sports stadium. Identified only as Zareena, she was taken there in a police truck after being convicted of murdering her husband with a hammer. She was shot in the back of the head with an automatic rifle after trying to flee in front of a large crowd.

An unending civil war has been used to justify even more grotesque atrocities. The Taliban death squads have reportedly murdered enemies of the regime in exile in Pakistan, and in late 1998 reports emerged of the slaughter of 8,000 Hazara Shia Muslims (the Taliban are Sunni) during a Taliban assault on the rebel-held northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

Hundreds suffocated after being packed into sealed metal containers in searing heat, their bodies dumped in the desert outside the city, according to Human Rights Watch. One witness described Taliban fighters systematically shooting Hazara men in the head, testicles and chest in as they conducted house-to-house searches on day two of the attack. Another described how one Taliban soldier became worried that he might be barred from paradise on learning that he had shot two of his own Pashtun compatriots by mistake. He was unconcerned at having also shot 28 Hazara men.

Despite the human cost of the Taliban’s rule, nothing has triggered more international outrage than its destruction earlier this year of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan. Carved out of a rock face in the 4th and 5th centuries, the bigger of the two was thought to be the largest standing Buddha in the world. Both had survived the rampages of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, but were reduced to heaps of rubble by tank shells, dynamite and rockets.

As the first British reporter to see the devastation left the site, a smiling Taliban soldier told him: "Go to hell."