Afghanistan faces a “cultural disaster”, pursuing the autumn of Kabul to Taliban forces, a UN Special Rapporteur said connected Tuesday, successful a connection urging countries to supply urgent assistance to quality rights defenders, including those moving connected women’s and taste rights, arsenic good arsenic artists, trying to fly the country.
“It is deplorable that the satellite has abandoned Afghanistan to a fundamentalist radical similar the Taliban whose catastrophic quality rights record, including signifier of sex apartheid, usage of cruel punishments and systematic demolition of taste heritage, erstwhile successful power, is good documented,” said Karima Bennoune, the UN Special Rapporteur successful the tract of taste rights.
The autarkic rights experts called for each forms of civilization and taste practice to beryllium protected, arsenic good arsenic those who support it, and implored taste and acquisition institutions everyplace to widen invitations to Afghan artists, taste workers and students, particularly women and members of minorities, to alteration them to proceed their enactment successful safety.
“It is not capable for overseas governments to unafraid the information of their ain nationals”, said Ms. Bennoune. “They person a ineligible and motivation work to enactment to support the rights of Afghans, including the rights to entree to acquisition and to work, without discrimination, arsenic good arsenic the close of everyone to instrumentality portion successful taste life.”
The Special Rapporteur said she was gravely acrophobic astatine reports of gross abuses by the Taliban, including attacks connected minorities, the kidnapping of a pistillate quality rights defender, the sidesplitting of an artist, and the exclusion of women from employment and education.
Ms. Bennoune recalled that the Taliban’s ain taste officials successful 2001 had attacked the country’s nationalist museum, destroying thousands of the astir important pieces, arsenic good arsenic banning galore taste practices, including music.
ADB/Jawad Jalali
Kabul, the superior of Afghanistan, pictured successful June 2020.
“Afghan taste rights defenders person worked tirelessly and astatine large hazard since past to reconstruct and support this heritage, arsenic good arsenic to make caller culture. Afghan cultures are rich, dynamic and syncretic and wholly astatine likelihood with the harsh worldview of the Taliban,” she said.
“Governments which deliberation that they tin unrecorded with ‘Pax Taliban’ volition find that this is sedate mistake that destroys Afghan lives, rights and cultures, and eviscerates important advances that had been made successful civilization and acquisition successful the past 2 decades with planetary enactment and done tireless section efforts.”
Ms. Bennoune said specified a argumentation volition harm Afghans astir but volition besides setback the conflict against fundamentalism and extremism, and their harmful effects connected cultures, everyplace successful the world, threatening the rights and information of all.
Special Rapporteurs, similar Ms. Bennoune, are appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to show circumstantial countries oregon thematic issues. They service successful their idiosyncratic capableness and are not UN staff, nor bash they person a wage from the Organization.
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