Illiteracy is one of the most outstanding destructive legacies of the crisis prompted by decades of war. Afghanistani youth are especially affected as they spent their formative years in an environment of war, filled with violence and deprivation. The people of Afghanistan have not only been deprived of their civil rights; they have secured very little understanding of their civil rights, and on civil society discourse itself. Even amongst the literate people, despite their interest in daily political discussions and using concepts such as citizenship, civil rights, civil society etc., they don’t really have a true understanding of the concepts. Therefore, civil society discourse has remained unknown. [...]
Religious individuals and institutions consider civil society harmful to their beliefs and religious affiliations, due to their acceptance of learning ‘absolute truths’ they seek to impose on others. They don’t hesitate to discredit activists and women’s rights groups amongst the religious masses of Afghanistan. They justify discrimination against women through religious arguments, which has been accepted in a society that has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the world. Unfortunately, these issues exist within academic institutions as well. During my undergraduate degree at Kabul University, several times I witnessed professors of Islamic subjects labeling activists as promoters of moral corruption; activists are introduced as idlers wasting their time. To exemplify how effective this representation is, a female university student (S.S.) posted on Facebook stating, “unemployed people are civil activists” and in her next post “as the ratio of unemployment is higher among the ethnic Hazara, most of activists are Hazaras”. [...]
Third, the government violates the freedom of expression through strict censorship of media. According to the Human Rights Watch, Afghanistan’s media can’t cover “sensitive issues – including corruption, land grabbing, violence against women, and human rights abuses.” Journalists must, therefore, resort to self-censorship to minimize the risk to their lives. For instance, the government puts pressure on media not to cover the activities related to the ‘Enlightening Movement’. The movement’s only media is online social media (like Facebook and Twitter). However, most Afghanistan people don’t have access to the Internet, and thus information dissemination becomes an impossibility amongst most people. This demonstrates that not only does the government discourage freedom of expression, it also is a barrier – along with local militia and terrorist groups.
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