An Afghan women’s radio station becomes a Taliban casualty

KUNDUZ, AFGHANISTAN — As the Taliban fighters approached, the employees of Radio Roshani fled. They locked the door behind them, and the station kept airing pre-recorded programs, seemingly in defiance. On the afternoon playlist was a feature to encourage Afghan women to take part in politics.

It never played.

“The radio was silenced at 2 p.m.,” recalled the station’s director Sediqa Sherzai, who was listening to the programming shortly after escaping the compound.

By then, Taliban militants had taken control of the station.
When the Taliban briefly ruled this northeastern city last month, they not only targeted government officials and buildings. They also sought to reverse the hard-fought gains won by Afghan women since the austere Islamist regime was ousted 14 years ago after the 9/11 attacks. In doing so, they were trying to undermine the wider American and Western effort to foster gender equality in Afghanistan.

Backed by U.S. and Western funding, Radio Roshani produced programs on peace building and understanding the law, with roundtable discussions on religious issues and cultural taboos. But it was the station’s focus on women’s rights that drew the ire of the Taliban for years. So when its fighters entered this city on Sept. 28, Radio Roshani and other independent radio stations were on their hit list.

What unfolded in Kunduz, the first city seized by the Taliban since 2001, highlights a growing concern among humanitarian workers and civil society activists: With the U.S.-led coalition scaling down its military and aid presence, and the Afghan government and security forces struggling to fill the vacuum, billions of Western dollars spent since 2001 to transform Afghanistan into a modern state could come to naught, the gains reversed by a re-energized Taliban.

“The Taliban attacks directly affect the female journalists, but on a broader scale, it affects all women,” said Lida Yosufzai, an anchor at Radio Kayhan, which was also overrun by the Taliban. “We had literacy programs and other shows to help women. Now, everything has stopped.”

At Radio Roshani last month, a week after the Taliban pulled out of Kunduz, there was no transmitter, no mixer, and no computers. Even the microphones had been taken. The station looked as if a tornado had swept through. On the floor were reams of paper, headphones, CDs and a shattered television.

“All our money was invested into this station,” lamented Obaidullah Qazizadha, the station’s co-owner and Sherzai’s husband, as he looked at the destruction.“We were proud to play a role in empowering women.”

The radio station rose from humble beginnings
Inspired by an uncle who worked for the state television network under communist rule in the 1980s, Sherzai had grown up with dreams of becoming a journalist. But three months after she graduated from Kunduz University in the mid-1990s, the Taliban seized the province.

As in other parts of the country, they forbade women to attend school and to hold jobs. Women were required to wear head-to-toe burqas and could venture outside their homes only if accompanied by a male relative. So Sherzai launched an underground school for girls.

After the collapse of the Taliban in 2001, she continued to teach until a friend recruited her to work at a radio station in 2004, re-igniting her journalistic aspirations. Four years later, she decided to strike out on her own because she had “her own ideas about programs for women.”

She put together $6,000, and launched Radio Roshani with seven other journalists, all women. The funds bought a transmitter, a mixer and a desk-top computer. An antenna was placed atop a large crane outside the station. And they began operating. Six month later, they received a grant from a German provincial reconstruction team to buy more equipment, and later funding for programs came from the U.S. government.

The station hired committed young female journalists. Among them is Zuhal Nouri, 20, who honed her skills at several western-funded media training workshops. She’s also a law student focusing on women’s rights issues. She viewed journalism, she said, as “a duty to reflect the realities of society.”

Those “realities” were displayed in programs and Western-sponsored advertisements that encouraged women to join the police force or take part in elections. In live roundtable programs, human rights activists and local officials debated problems within the government and municipalities.

In one popular program, a religious cleric provided advice to women confronting problems within Afghanistan’s conservative tribal society. Listeners called in, recalled Sherzai, laying bare their predicaments: A family was forcing a woman to marry someone she didn’t love. A family was trying to sell their daughter to an older man.

“He told them, ‘Based on Islam, no one is allowed to force a girl to marry someone,’” recalled Sherzai. “He was liberal and open-minded.”

Such attitudes triggered numerous threats from the Taliban against the station. Nouri and others would be cursed during live programs. A few months ago, someone attached a bomb to the cleric’s car. He was instantly killed.

Hours after the Taliban seized control of Radio Roshani, Sherzai’s cellphone rang.

By then, she had fled to her house. A harsh-sounding male voice on the other end asked where she was in the city, she recalled. When she asked who it was, he informed her that he was from the insurgency. She hung up. The phone rang again. She shut it off.

Sherzai believes the Taliban fighters had found her phone number, listed in numerous documents on her desk, inside the station.
Two days later, Sherzai donned a burqa and grabbed her baby girl, Hejrat. They took a taxi out of Kunduz, traveling on back roads to avoid Taliban fighters. They arrived in Kabul a few hours later, joining hundreds of government officials, activists and journalists who fled Kunduz.

Today, Sherzai is determined to resurrect Radio Roshani. In recent days, she has borrowed a mixer and a transmitter from female journalist friends in other provinces. The radio has started to replay previously taped programs. Now, she’s making the rounds of the U.S. and other Western embassies and non-governmental organizations asking for funds to rebuild the station. Without foreign assistance, she said, “it’s impossible for us to restart our usual operations.”

“We don’t want the voices of women to be shut down,” she said. “We were encouraging other women to leave their houses, to work in public, to integrate into society. If we stop broadcasting, what kind of a message does this send to other women?”

Of the eight other female journalists who worked at the station, only Nouri and two others have returned to Kunduz so far, Sherzai said. Two remain in Kabul, and two others have sought refuge elsewhere in the country . One has decided to flee to Europe.

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