Yalda Hakim, the Afghan-Australian anchor working for the BBC who made headlines this week when she was called live on air by a spokesman for the Taliban, has spoken out about the conversation, telling the ABC that she holds no trust in the group’s promise they will maintain women’s rights.
Appearing on Q&A’s Afghanistan special last night, Hakim shared details about a conversation she had previously with a Taliban frontline commander which contradicted the line being pushed during her impromptu interview earlier this week.
“It was very similar to what I have heard the Taliban say before. They’ve said it to me on-air, they’ve said it to me face-to-face when I travelled to Doha — that women would have their rights, there wouldn’t be any revenge attacks or reprisals,” Hakim said of her conversation this week.
Suhail Shaheen, who made the shock call to Hakim on Monday, claimed that the women of Afghanistan are “…Muslim and will be happy to live within the framework of our law.”
“It is their basic right to have access to education and access to work, that is maintained, they can have those rights, there will be no problem with that.”
But Hakim said that this conversation directly contradicted another conversation she’d had while working on the ground of her home country only months earlier. Here, she’d had a conversation with a Taliban commander who told her unequivocally that the group’s intention was to “return to the kind of rule we had in the 90s.”
“I asked him a series of questions and he said to me we want to return to the kind of rule we had to in the 90s,” Hakim said.
“So, when I asked about for example, if a woman was accused of adultery, now adultery based on whose judgments, he said ‘of course we would have stonings, we would have public executions and would use soccer stadiums to do that kind of thing. There would be amputations on hands and feet, if someone were to commit the crime of theft’.
“He said this is all laid out in the Koran. This is all part of Sharia law and if you want to live within it, great, if not you’ll face the kind of reprisals you’ll need to.”
Hakim’s assessment aligns with recent conduct of the Taliban despite their claims of a “new and peaceful” governance. The group allegedly shot and killed a woman on the streets of Kabul this week for refusing to wear a Burqa in public.
Women in Afghanistan fear that the group’s swift resurgence will ultimately result in them being unable to study, pursue a career or enjoy any of the liberties fought hard for over the past two decades.
Like Hakim, Diana Sayed, CEO of the Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights, believes the ideology of the Taliban hasn’t shifted, referring to their public promises of change as “all talk”.
“What they’ve got is a very sophisticated PR (public relations) machine now and they have got social media at their disposal,” she said on Q&A.
“Just because they have a spokesman and they’re able to use Twitter doesn’t necessarily erase the ideology — their sense on women’s rights, on how they will continue to persecute other minority groups and others at risk in the country.
“I don’t trust anything that they are actually now spinning.”