On March 8, 2022, the streets of Kabul are packed with armed men.
They will not tolerate demonstrations for Women's Day.
A women's assembly meets clandestinely in a local.
They allow themselves to be filmed with their faces uncovered by the journalist.
They know that the Taliban intelligence services are watching them.
"I do it for my three little sisters, so that they don't end up being subjected," says one.
"If we hide in our houses, they win."
It takes courage.
Many countries dispute the title of worst place in the world to live;
for women there is little doubt: it is Afghanistan.
The only one that prohibits the education of girls from the age of 12.
The woman there must be invisible, covered from head to foot, her face too.
She cannot travel if she is not accompanied by a male from her family.
Almost all of those who worked have lost their jobs.
Many are forcibly married, adults or girls.
There are arbitrary arrests and disappearances.
Torture is frequent, and goes unpunished.
This invisibility of the woman helped Ramita Navai, a British reporter of Iranian origin, to tour the country on two visits between November 2021, three months after the hasty departure of the last US soldiers, and March 2022. , when the Taliban had consolidated their hold on the failed state.
She wanted to see if it was true, as they said, that the regime had moderated in search of international recognition.
The answer is a resounding no and it is narrated in the documentary
Afghanistan is no country for women
(in Movistar Plus+).
On her first visit, in November, what had been the Ministry for Women had already been renamed Virtue and Vice Prevention, but feminist graffiti was visible on its white wall.
There was still room for some kind of protest, like those of the fired female officials.
In March, on that wall there was only a large poster indicating how to wear the
burqa
.
Demonstration in defense of women's rights in front of the presidential palace in Kabul, in September 2021. STRINGER (Reuters)
The journalist passes through Kabul and peripheral cities such as Herat, where the repression is even more ferocious.
She knows women detained for "immorality" for months, without judicial intervention, any official record or communication to her families.
Even, and this seems to indicate that this dictatorship is still chaotic and sloppy, she goes into one of the detention centers in search of a missing young woman and finds her.
Several of them say that they have been tortured with electric shocks from taser pistols.
The reporter also collects testimonies about girls forced to marry the Taliban, in agreement with their families, taken out of prison or directly kidnapped.
She knows of victims of sexist violence who risk being jailed if they report it.
And, most valuable, Navai manages to get closer to the resistance, that of the women who show their faces in front of the camera (other interviewees ask that their faces be pixelated) and refuse to give up.
That they organize demonstrations by surprise, quickly crushed.
And that they have a network of safe houses to hide the persecuted women and their families while they find a way to get them out of the country.
Before she leaves, the journalist interviews a Taliban government spokesperson and tells him everything she has seen.
And he replies, without flinching or looking at her face, that nothing he says is true.
The reporter, like the viewer, will do well to believe more what she has seen with her own eyes.
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