05 Mar 19 | Awards, News and features
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ArtLords is a grassroots movement of artists and volunteers in Afghanistan who encourage ordinary citizens, especially women and children, to paint the issues that concern them on so-called blast walls: walls the country’s rich and the powerful have built around themselves to protect them from violence while the poor fend for themselves.
Three decades of war have changed Afghanistan’s social fabric dramatically. Violence and pressure from groups ranging from terrorists to government forces to drug lords has stoked fear in the population, fuelling self-censorship. Journalists, activists and artists have been threatened and killed. The ArtLords themselves have been threatened and accused of being spies.
According to Reuters, “some city streets have been turned into concrete canyons”. The ArtLords, whose name is in opposition to the warlords and drug lords at the root of many of Afghanistan’s problems, have turned these walls into canvases. Recurrent themes painted by citizens include anti-corruption, women’s rights and polio eradication.
In their most famous artwork, called I See You, the group painted eyes on the walls of the National Directorate of Security as a warning to corrupt officials. The painting mysteriously disappeared a few days after being completed, sparking public outcry.
Another mural takes a dig at the rich and powerful, depicting a black SUV with its windows tinted, and reads “What are you carrying, that your windows are black? You don’t have a license plate and don’t stop for searches.” Other paintings celebrated women who died serving Afghanistan and victims of random violence.
Their work has turned a symbol of fear, tension and separation into a platform where social issues can be expressed visually and discussed in the street.
The team has been threatened many times – they’ve been accused of becoming infidels, being CIA spies, standing against Sharia Law. ArtLords have also been indirectly targeted by the government because of their attempts to call out corrupt officials – and the government has whitewashed at least one of their murals.
ArtLords has completed over 400 murals in 16 provinces of Afghanistan, partnering with NATO, UNICEF, embassies and being covered widely in Western media. In March 2018, for International Women’s Day, ArtLords painted a tribute to Professor Hamida Barmaki, a woman human rights defender killed in a terrorist attack six years ago.
ArtLords is also collaborating on murals with the support Canadian Embassy in Kabul, UNICEF and the National Endowment for Democracy on themes such as tolerance, empathy and respect.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”104691″ img_size=”full” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/01/awards-2019/”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]
Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards exist to celebrate individuals or groups who have had a significant impact fighting censorship anywhere in the world.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1551800428751-ed837da4-cccd-5″ taxonomies=”26925″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
04 Apr 18 | Awards, Fellowship 2018, News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/Ev3C9EZqY48″][vc_column_text]Fereshteh Forough is the founder and executive director of Code to Inspire, which opened its first coding school for girls in Afghanistan in November 2015, and aims to address the low levels of female education and paltry levels of economic participation by women in the labour market. 
This is a widely recognised innovative project that helps women and girls learn computer programming. The aim is to tap into the commercial opportunities offered by the online world to liberate women in Afghanistan and offer them economic independence.
Afghanistan is still a male-dominated country where ordinary women find it difficult even to socialise or trave, let alone work, use technology or be economically independent. Women are also discouraged from working where men are present and experience sexual harassment if they do.
Forough believes that with programming skills, an internet connection and using bitcoin for currency, women in Afghanistan can be independent, transform their society and create wealth and economic opportunity.
“Some of the girls had never touched a computer, been online – nothing,” said Forough. “Today, they are able to create web pages and a some are now going out and talking to women-based companies and offering their expertise to them, to help them create websites. This is a real act of resistance in a country where women are still being pushed back for accessing the internet and computers.”
Only 21% of Afghan women receive secondary education according to a UNICEF study and in Afghanistan there is only a 16% female participation in the labour market.
Afghanistan is still economically and politically unstable and parts of it are dangerous and violence-prone, which presents many hurdles to entrepreneurs who want to drive change like Forough, and the women and girls she teaches and helps get jobs.
However Forough is used to challenges. She herself was a refugee. Born to Afghan parents in Iran, she returned to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, and took a position teaching computer sciences at Herat University after studying for a Masters in Germany.
Forough has received support from abroad for Code to Inspire, particularly from the USA with Google, GitHub, but she is still working on a relatively small scale. She needs more support to expand and build her vision round the country franchising the model to other larger cities such as Mazar-e Sharif and Kabul. Forough also wants to organise the first Afghan women hackathon at a national level.
Forough was a 2013 TED Talks speaker and took part in the 2015 Clinton Global Initiative.
In 2017, Code to Inspire enrolled about 20 girls for new graphic and design classes, and later on in the year another group of 60 girls took classes in unity (a gaming software), mobile applications and full stack development.
“It doesn’t matter where you are or what you are, what you have or don’t have,” said Forough. “You should never be afraid to do what you believe in and that’s what Index of Censorship Award means to me, to raise my voice and share my story freely”.
See the full shortlist for Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards 2018 here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row full_width=”stretch_row_content” equal_height=”yes” el_class=”text_white” css=”.vc_custom_1490258749071{background-color: #cb3000 !important;}”][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_custom_heading text=”Support the Index Fellowship.” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:28|text_align:center” use_theme_fonts=”yes” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2Fsupport-the-freedom-of-expression-awards%2F|||”][vc_column_text]
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06 Mar 15 | Afghanistan, Asia and Pacific, mobile, News and features
Last year, authorities in the east of Afghanistan decided to shut down a cemetery. The problem was that this particular cemetery was not just a final resting place; it had taken on a second function as a marketplace where women in the city could meet and trade. With the closure, the financial lifeline the women had created for themselves, was cut. There were some protests, the story was covered in a local newspaper, and that was it.
Afghan media has experienced a significant growth spurt over the past years. In 2000, the country was home to 15 news outlets; in 2014 the figure was just shy of 1,000. Hidden within these numbers is another slowly expanding subcategory. Of around 12,000 working journalists in Afghanistan today, some 2,000–2,500 are women, up from an estimated 1,000 in 2006. The truly vital role these women play in Afghan society is too often overlooked.
In a country where traditional cultural norms still hold significant sway, strict limitations on contact between the sexes continue to be enforced in many areas. As a result, there are spaces only female journalists have access to, grievances only female journalists can be told and important realities of women’s lives that only female journalists can report on. Where women media workers are few and far between, such stories — like in the case of the cemetery closure — go underreported, or are buried entirely.
“Covering and focusing on women’s issues is always my favourite, and when I produce programs and make reports on these issues, I really like it and think I’ve done something important,” Radio Sahar Station Manager Humaira Habib told Index. Radio Sahar is part of Parwana (butterfly), a network of radio stations dotted around Afghanistan, which focuses on stories that impact women and their rights and needs. And from the managerial to the executive level, they are all-female operations.
Habib says she made the decision to go into journalism in 2002, and was influenced by the plight of women under the Taliban. “I thought journalism was a good tool to reach to all the aims and goals, and to solve the problems and challenges of women. I think media plays a very important role in informing citizens,” she explained. “This was the reason I decided to study journalism.”
But while the long view seems to suggest the number of Habib’s female compatriots will continue to grow, serious challenges and setbacks remain the reality in the shorter term.
Part of the problem is that the same traditional norms that make female journalist’s contribution especially valuable, still present a significant barrier to many women joining the media industry. As reporter Zarghona Salihi told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, journalism is widely viewed as “immoral work” that carries with it social stigma for women.
“Parents don’t permit their daughters to become journalists [in particular] because female journalists soon turn popular and that puts them in lots of troubles,” news radio host Haseena Ahmadi told Voice of America.
Another, more direct and overt challenge is the seemingly worsening security situation for media workers in general, and the particular threats faced by women. Since 2001, 49 journalists have been killed, and attacks went up 64 per cent from 2013 to 2014, according to a recent report from Human Rights Watch. What’s more, they face a multi-pronged assault — from the government and local authorities, as well as from war lords and the Taliban. Meanwhile, impunity for such crimes persists.
Women must deal with all this, and then some. “Female journalists face particularly formidable challenges. Social and cultural restrictions limit their mobility in urban as well as rural areas, and increase their vulnerability to threats and attacks, including sexual violence,” the Human Rights Watch report states. Since 2010, three female journalists have been killed, including 26-year old Palwasha Tokhi, stabbed to death outside her house in September last year. The Afghan Journalists Safety Committee says that “dozens have been intimidated to stop working”. In 2013, Shaffiqa Habibi, director of the Afghan Women Journalist Union, estimated that 300 professional female journalists had stopped working due to safety concerns.
“The big challenge that journalists face here is the security problem. That really hurts us,” agrees Habib. In 2004 she was threatened by authorities and told she could never again work as a journalist in the western province of Herat. But she fought back, and today continues to hold a senior role at a radio station in that province. As one young journalist told International Media Support: “I have been threatened by the Taliban, corrupt authorities, warlords and even the government. But none of these threats will ever stop me from what I do.”
The struggle, however, doesn’t end by challenging traditions and braving a volatile security situation. Female journalists in Afghanistan are also facing a problem familiar to women all over the world: they’re simply not getting the chances their male counterparts are. On this point, international media has failed Afghanistan’s women reporters. While Amie Ferris-Rotman was working as Reuters’ Afghanistan correspondent, she realised that none of the foreign news outlets hired Afghan female correspondents, in any capacity.
“I found this hypocritical,” she told Index. “We put out a plethora of stories on women’s rights and the awful hurdles Afghan women face, yet we did not take the extra step to hear their stories in a professional context.”
Pointing to the continued prevalence of separation between the genders, she argues that by not giving a platform to female Afghan journalists, we are missing the full story. The journalists, meanwhile, are denied good networks and professional opportunities to further their careers. To help rectify this situation, Ferris-Rotman has set up the Sahar Speaks programme, to offer training and mentoring by peers from around the world to Afghan female journalists, with the aim of helping them produce stories to be published by international outlets. As she has written about the project: “Imagine how rich and nuanced the other side of the Afghan story can be, if told by its own women, not by Afghan men or foreign reporters.”
Abdul Mujeeb Khalvatgar, the director of media freedom advocacy group Nai, which is behind the Parwana network, believes it to be very important that Afghanistan’s female reporter pool continues to grow. Certain topics, he explains, are still considered by some to be taboo for men to cover. He mentions literacy rates among women, violations against women and how women are treated both in rural and urban areas as examples of stories that “raised the need of having women journalists to report”.
Habib stresses the importance of increasing the number of female reporters outside the bigger cities, where many women’s issues that male journalists have limited access to, go uncovered. This is a “serious problem” she says, adding that “we need to train girls from those places to at least learn basic journalism to cooperate with local and national media”.
Despite the challenges, Khalvatgar, who has been nominated for an Index award for his media freedom campaigning in Afghanistan, is confident that there is enthusiasm among women to work in the sector. He points to his experience of visiting journalism schools and seeing a higher number of female than male students, as one indicator. “There are a lot of hopes and wishes among women to become journalists,” he says.
Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani vowed during his 2014 election campaign to uphold freedom of expression and protect journalists against abuse. Whether he will stick to his promise down the line, so the enthusiasm Khalvatgar speaks about can truly be harnessed, remains to be seen. What is clear, is that without more women feeling encouraged and safe enough to join Habib and her colleagues in their work, important stories will continue to go untold.
This article was posted on March 6, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
