Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai on December 5 likened restrictions the Taliban has placed on women in Afghanistan to the treatment of Black people under apartheid in a lecture in South Africa organized by Nelson Mandela's Foundation.
Yousafzai survived being shot in the head when she was 15 in her native Pakistan by a gunman after campaigning against the Pakistani Taliban's moves to deny girls education.
Media reports say Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai said Tuesday that the world needs to recognize and confront the “gender apartheid” against women and girls imposed by the Taliban since they seized power in Afghanistan more than two years ago.
She reportedly urged the international community to take collective and urgent action to end the “dark days” in Afghanistan. Yousafzai was awarded the peace prize in 2014 at the age of 17 for her fight for girls’ education in her home country, Pakistan. She is the youngest Nobel laureate.
Two years earlier, she survived an assassination attempt by the Pakistani Taliban — a separate militant group but an ally of the Afghan Taliban — when she was shot in the head on a bus after school.
The 26-year-old activist spoke to The Associated Press (AP) after delivering the annual Nelson Mandela lecture in Johannesburg on the 10th anniversary of the death of South Africa's anti-apartheid leader and Nobel laureate.
Yousafzai is also the youngest person to give the lecture, following in the footsteps of past lecturers, including former President Barack Obama, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres and philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
She dedicated her speech to Afghan women and girls, hoping to re-focus the world’s attention on their oppression amid the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
“Afghanistan has only seen dark days after it fell to the Taliban,” Yousafzai said in the AP interview. “It has been two and half years and most girls have not seen school again.”
Yousafzai appealed to the United Nations to “recognize the current state of Afghanistan as a gender apartheid” and cited recent reports of “women being detained, put into prisons and beaten and even put into forced marriages.”
Yousafzai also described as “heartbreaking” Islamabad’s new policy of forceful deportations of Afghans who are in Pakistan illegally, saying that deporting them would put the lives of women and girls who are forced to go back at risk.
She also called for an immediate cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war and decried that “so many children's and women’s lives (have been) lost” in besieged Gaza.
Since their takeover, the Taliban have banned education for girls beyond the sixth grade and imposed severe restrictions on women, barring them from work and most public spaces and seeking to implement their strict interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia.
