EuropaWorld 25/5/2001 Afganistan: Are these the Last Months of the Taliban?

News from Afghanistan this week appears to confirm that the regime is getting tougher; hard line attitudes are prevailing over reasonableness. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, the giant statues cut into the rock face, was just the first of a series of tough actions that began in earnest when the Security Council decided to tighten sanctions against the Taliban but not their enemies. Since then there have been reports of civilian massacres, restrictions on international monitoring, harassment of humanitarian actions, and the forced closure of the UN's regional offices. The Taliban could be accused, with some justification, of seeking out actions and policies designed to outrage world opinion; in reality it is probably a last desperate act of a regime imploding on itself. It is a sorry tale.

The latest act is the chilling edict issued to the country this week requiring Hindus - and for that matter any other religious minorities - to wear some identifying mark to show their religion. The Taliban - who of course are Muslim fundamentalists - have protested that this edict will defend their religious minorities: identifying them to the religious police who would otherwise be driving them towards the mosques at prayer time. The badge - which may turn out to be the requirement to dress in yellow since this is the traditional colour of the Hindus - is meant, say the Taliban, to protect. Well, as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Other societies that have been grave abusers of human rights - the Nazis especially - would regularly ascribe the most disarming of motives to their grossest and most wicked actions. No wonder that the Hindus would prefer to do without this particular piece of discriminatory 'protection.'

Not all that long ago there used to be sizeable populations of non-muslims in Afghanistan. But today fewer than 2,000 Hindus remain in Kabul, together with a few hundred Sikhs. Christians, Jews and Buddhists have long since followed the majority of the Hindus who have been driven out by religious intolerance. That same intolerance, promoted by the religious police, has also helped to drive literally millions of Afghans to seek shelter in Iran, in Pakistan and in countries further afield.

These religious police were, incidentally, formerly known by a title that could have come straight out of comic opera. They are the former officials of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice and they had their very own and peculiar ideas as to what constituted virtue and vice. They were, and are, the shock troops of the Taliban's religious revolution with almost absolute and arbitrary power to deem what is and what is not correct behaviour.

Needless to say they are all men and much of their fervour seems to derive from the very worst kind of misogyny. As with the religious minorities, the religious police protest they are only protecting women against possible exploitation and ill-treatment. But as with the religious minorities their actions only succeed in grave discrimination and abuse of dignity and human rights.

Not long ago the religious police entered a hospital, attacking the workers with whips and forcing it to close. The 'crime' had been, apparently, a simple one: that in the busy routine of caring for the sick, men and women were insufficiently segregated at mealtimes while female nurses had not always been totally covered from top to toe as they went about their work. For this they were beaten. The Muslim Holy Book - the Koran - does not endorse this treatment of women, indeed it expressly preaches tolerance.

We can but hope that this new hard line phase of the Taliban's revolution is the prelude to its collapse. Ultimately the Taliban elders must know their dream is unsustainable. They must have come to the conclusion that is impossible to keep a country and its people, however devout, isolated from the rest of the world. The effect of this isolation is apparent: the Afghan economy is in shambles while the population is wracked by hunger and malnutrition. Moreover, maintaining the isolation demands military resources on an increasing scale.

Tightening the screws on the population may keep the regime in power for a few more months but ultimately all revolutions consume their own children. Mullah Omar, the reclusive leader of the Taliban, must know this too.