Two years on, the world has failed us
As the school year begins for many globally, the same cannot be said for Afghan girls. 19-year-old education activist, Aydin Sahba Yaqouby, pens an open letter to the leaders of the world who have not acted to protect the rights or hear the demands of Afghan girls.
A week ago, I began my senior year of high school 10,000 miles from my home in Afghanistan.
On that usually exuberant first day, a heavy shadow trailed me to school; I knew I was on a path that no girl my age in Afghanistan was walking. I was one of very few Afghan girls in the world legally entering a classroom that day.
Confusion fogged my brain, and I didn’t know if I was supposed to feel lucky or miserable. All I knew was that with every step I took toward that classroom, the mountain of guilt I carried grew.
Anyone can understand the guilt I feel. I can enter a classroom, and my sisters back home cannot. I can greet a friend joyfully upon seeing her for the first time since summer break, while my classmates back home are prisoners in their own homes. I am working on college applications and looking forward to my final year of high school, and no girl my age in Afghanistan has done that in two years. I am a teenager living a very simple life — a life every girl deserves to have — and I struggle to enjoy it because my sisters back home live in hell.
I said above that I believe anyone can understand these feelings of guilt, but sometimes I wonder if that’s true.
Many people in positions of power vowed publicly that this would never happen. They promised loudly to protect us. They swore on all things holy that we’d be safe. But they lied.
I can barely manage my own guilt: I cannot imagine theirs.
Since the Taliban takeover of Kabul in August 2021, girls above Grade 6 have been officially banned from attending school, meaning no girl has graduated from high school in Afghanistan since then. Not one. Of this brilliant generation of girls, none have been allowed the most fundamental human right: education.
This is catastrophic for my country, but it also reverberates across the globe: it obliterates the progress towards gender equality women and men worldwide have struggled and died for, for centuries. This is clearly an “us” problem, not a “them” problem.
“What has happened? Why have you [women leaders] put aside your commitment to a world in which all girls and women are safe?”
But this truth that is so clear to me – a young girl torn from her home, working hard in a foreign land to build her own future while fighting for her sisters who currently have none – seems entirely lost on world leaders.
So today I want to ask them: Where are you?
The United Nations states unequivocally that “women’s full and equal participation in all facets of society is a fundamental human right,” yet world leaders have failed to uphold these values. It might be out of political convenience, the false belief that this is a “cultural” issue or perhaps it is simply preventing them from acting. Rather than the global outrage I hoped to still be hearing — two years after Afghan girls lost their freedom — today there is silence. I hoped the collective strength of the world would right the terrible wrongs I was witnessing, but instead, I see timidity, with some nations even establishing ties with our oppressors.
So, I ask again: Where are you?
And to women leaders specifically: You have been a source of inspiration and hope to millions of girls like me. Watching you lead has helped us envision a more just world in which we have a voice and a role. I have seen you raise your voices and your fists. I’ve always assumed that you share the same sense of responsibility I feel for women who are not free, including my Afghan sisters.
But these days, I cannot hear you. What has happened? Why have you put aside your commitment to a world in which all girls and women are safe?
Leaders of the world, the girls of Afghanistan — and the youth of this planet — are looking to you.
Do not let us down.
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