Life under the Taliban

Business Daily

BBC

Business

4.4 • 816 Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2021

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Gaisu fled the Taliban when she was 18. Now she's fleeing again. Speaking to the BBC's Tamasin Ford, Gaisu recounts being engaged to the son of a local warlord at age 6, fleeing to the United States at 18, and then returning as a civil servant after the Taliban were toppled. She recounts her time as the only female journalist at a local radio station as a teenager, how she butted heads with the Taliban and how her mother inspired her to be a feminist from a young age. We'll also hear how in the post-Taliban era Gaisu worked to get more women into public and government roles. And she tells Tamasin how she feels now, seeing the country come fully under Taliban rule once again, and women once again disappearing into the margins of society.

(Image credit: A woman in Afghanistan in 1996. Image credit: Getty Images.)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Tamerson Ford.
0:12.2	Welcome to this special edition of Business Daily from the BBC. The Afghan woman requests other women to develop a solidarity to fight this chaotic moment
0:40.8	in Afghanistan, to not let the Taliban control everything based on their well and wishes.
0:47.3	This is Gai Suhary, a commissioner of the Afghan civil service.
0:51.6	Six days ago, she fled Afghanistan. It just happened too quick. I never expected
0:58.2	it. I don't think anybody expected it. I mean, I had some money in the bank. I couldn't take it out.
1:04.0	When I left the country, me and my husband had only $100. You have only $ a hundred dollar right now, right? The bank stopped.
1:12.9	In one side, Taliban were fighting on the air. On the other side, the British and the European
1:18.1	Union countries were fighting on the air. I was in the middle. It was extremely dramatic.
1:23.4	And 12 hours, no water, no food, nothing on the street.
1:28.0	Gaisu wants to use her name and her voice to speak out for the people of Afghanistan.
1:33.9	But as a women's rights activist, she knows she's a target.
1:38.2	She can't reveal where she is now.
1:40.5	Gaisu spent the last six years working to increase the number of women in the Afghan civil service.
1:46.7	Before she fled, she had reached their target of 30%.
1:50.7	But it wasn't an easy road to get there.
1:53.9	This is Gaisu's story.
2:10.6	My early childhood is probably more disastrous than what I actually experienced in my adulthood in Afghanistan. During the Taliban, we had hidden schools because we were not permitted to have schools in that time, but we had
2:18.6	hidden schools.
2:19.7	They allowed these schools to be opened until sixth grade, and I was in sixth grade, and I
2:24.0	went to the public school, but the rest who, from sixth grade to 12th grade, were in the
2:29.4	hidden houses, and they continued their studies.
	...

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