One year since fleeing the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, several women recounted their lives in Belgium in a report by Flemish broadcaster VRT.
Last summer, the Afghan government and army fell like a house of cards and the extremist Taliban rebels took power in Kabul. While they promised at the time to respect the rights of women and minorities, unlike during the first regime in the 1990s, this has since proven to be an empty promise.
Since the Taliban took to power, leading to a large-scale exodus of people from the country, people from Afghanistan have made up the largest percentage of applicants for international protection in Belgium almost every month.
'Women mean something here'
Razia Arefi was one of the many people who arrived in Belgium.
When living in Afghanistan, she was the head of Mothers for Peace in Afghanistan. These services had to shut down when the Taliban took to power, and together with ten other colleagues, she was able to get to Kabul airport.
"It was really dangerous there because they shot at people and used tear gas," she recalled. In October 2021, she was recognised as a refugee. This way she could bring her husband and her son over from China, while her daughter came to Belgium from Pakistan.
Every day, Arefi closely follows the situation in her home country and is saddened by the life that women have to lead there. "The rights that women have here are unprecedented to us,” she said. “Women mean something here." Arefi already speaks Dutch well and will start working as an HR Consultant in the autumn.
Equal future
Another woman included in the report, Fatema Hosseini, gave sewing lessons to Afghan women to help them take care of themselves before fleeing the Taliban.
With her three children, she arrived in Belgium on 23 August 2021 and was given shelter in an asylum centre where she spent the first night in a room where the bedbugs crawled out of the mattresses. One year later, she and her children are settled and integrated into the local community where they now live.
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She still cries for her motherland, and for the lost opportunities for the women she left behind. "The women there are having such a hard time and
there's nothing we can do anymore," she said.
Her mother, brothers and sisters stayed behind in Afghanistan, however, she does not want to return, and instead hopes to work as a seamstress in Belgium, as making and adjusting clothes is her great passion. "I believe that my children can find a safe future here where men and women are treated equally."
