Afghan Supreme Court Bans Television

Afghan nationals filed lawsuits against cable television

After the Taliban regime was crushed in Afghanistan, more than three million children, including over one million of girls, started going to schools last year. When the Taliban was the ruling movement, Afghan girls were allowed to study at mosques until they reached ten years of age. Taliban fundamentalists did not let girls and women go to secondary schools at all, not to mention colleges and institutes.

However, Islamic canons still play the first fiddle in Afghanistan, no matter if the Afghan government likes it or not. Seventy percent of all Afghan people (women are the majority) can neither read, nor write. This was said by NNI news agency, which quoted Chris Lom, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration. As he said, illiteracy does not allow women to have good jobs, which eventually results in miserable existence. The International Organization for Migration and the Afghan Ministry for Women's Affairs starts the implementation of the educational program for women. Women will have an opportunity to obtain the basic economic knowledge with the help of that program.

It is also worth mentioning that ethnic Tajik and former commander Ismail Khan, who controls the Afghan province of Gerat, does not allow boys and girls to study together. Men are not allowed to teach girls, not even in private schools. Girls are actually deprived of their right for education, since there are not many female teachers there. This ban has been instituted on the ground of the contradiction in the Islamic canons, which say that men can not teach women and girls. Until recently, girls liked to attend foreign language and computer classes in the Gerat province. The classes were taught by men. Now girls are not allowed to go there.

The members of the Afghan government do not want to stop at this point. The Supreme Court of Afghanistan ordered to ban the cable television on the entire territory of the country. This was officially stated by a spokesman for the Supreme Court of Afghanistan on Monday. It was particularly said that the people, who filed a lawsuit at the Supreme Court, claimed that they had seen topless girls and raunchy movie scenes on television. The minister for information, who banned female singers’ appearances on the national television stated that anti-Islamic channels would be banned in the country.

There are at least five cable television companies working in Kabul. They allow the Afghan people to watch dozens of foreign channels. Their broadcast was stopped yesterday. The only cable operator in Jalalabad has already been banned, when a court ruled that broadcasting foreign movies totally contradicted to Islamic traditions. By the way, that broadcast was controlled by three censors, who did not miss the scenes, where clothes would unveil even a smallest piece of a woman’s body.

Dmitry Litvinovich
PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Dmitry Sudakov