In the final days of the Afghan republic – in defiance of a looming takeover by the Taliban – the Hazara journalist Mani sang revolutionary poems in public in Kabul about women, freedom and justice. Now she is on the run, waiting for the Australian government to grant her a humanitarian visa.
It’s three years since Australia pulled its final troops out of Afghanistan. Their presence over two decades saw the country emerge from the ashes of civil war, embrace a relative peace and a fragile democracy before falling back into the darkness of fundamentalism under the Taliban.
Now young women like Mani are bearing the brunt of this failed democratisation project. Like other Afghan women and their families, she is desperately seeking asylum in Australia – somewhere safe to live.
I’ve known Mani for years. She’s a brave journalist hailing from Afghanistan’s Hazara minority and has faced crippling oppression under the onslaught of Islamic State and the Taliban. She has been threatened and chased by the terrorists because of her profession, her ideals and her identity. But this young journo is holding on; punching back at the militants with her critical reporting. She told me that she is now running out of time, options and, most importantly – hope.
During Australia’s presence from 2001 till 2021, Mani had the chance to study and dream of a life filled with opportunities and equality.
Now, at 25, she feels abandoned and left to suffer at the mercy of a regime that has aggressively removed women from all areas of public life.
“I had a dream and I was committed to nurture values of freedom and equality in Afghanistan through poetry and journalism,” she told me via phone from an undisclosed location.
“But the world left us alone at the mercy of the wolves who have no shame in beating, silencing and killing women.”
When I asked why she chose Australia for her humanitarian visa application, she said the country had been a second home for her ethnic Hazara community, who have thrived and contributed immensely to the society. “I have always admired [Australian Afghan broadcaster] Yalda Hakim and want to be like her,” she said.
Girls of Resistance and Enlightenment remains her favourite poem; she it sang at many public gatherings in Kabul to warn against the Taliban’s takeover of the country:
Beating their chests for freedom
Holding on to wisdom
Enlightened like the sun
Chanting for liberty
Girls of love and freedom
Girls of resistance and enlightenment
The Taliban supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, has empowered his regime’s moral policing unit to ensure that women completely veil their bodies – including their faces – in thick clothing at all times in public.
This week the regime went further by introducing “frightening” laws that ban women from speaking in public. The laws label female voices as potential instruments of “vice” that need to be censored, regulated and silenced.
This means women must not be heard singing or reading aloud, even from inside their houses. “Whenever an adult woman leaves her home out of necessity, she is obliged to conceal her voice, face and body,” the new laws say.
Australia has condemned this latest effort to silence Afghan women and girls.
“We stand together with the women and girls of Afghanistan, and in support of their human rights,” the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, tweeted this week.
But is Australia really doing all it can to ensure that vulnerable and deserving women like Mani are getting a fair chance of life and a safe haven?
Mani submitted her visa application last year and only received a file number in February. “I haven’t heard anything [from the Department of Home Affairs] since then,” she told me. “I am in a desperate state of waiting while my options, resources and hope are fading.”
To halt the drastic erosion of human rights – and reverse this course towards the darkness in Afghanistan – Australia must indeed stand together with Afghan women and girls. This starts by expediting their humanitarian visa requests and giving them the freedom that they so badly deserve.
Only then can Australia say that it has ensured Afghan women are able to raise their strong voices – to never be silenced again.
Shadi Khan Saif is a Melbourne-based journalist and former Afghanistan and Pakistan news correspondent
