An Australian journalist mentioned she was compelled by the Taliban to tweet retractions of her correct articles and instructed she’d be despatched to jail if she didn’t comply.
“I left Afghanistan at the moment after three days of cat-and-mouse with Taliban intelligence brokers, who detained, abused, and threatened me and compelled me to situation a barely literate retraction of reviews they mentioned had damaged their legal guidelines and offended Afghan tradition,” Lynne O’Donnell, a veteran Afghanistan correspondent, wrote in an article for International Coverage this week.
“If I didn't, they mentioned, they’d ship me to jail. At one level, they surrounded me and demanded I accompany them to jail. All through, a person with a gun was by no means far-off.”
Earlier this week, two uncharacteristic messages had been despatched from O’Donnell’s Twitter account, apologizing for articles she wrote final 12 months about Taliban extremists forcing ladies and women in rural districts into marriages and intercourse slavery as they reclaimed rule over Afghanistan final 12 months.
She mentioned the Taliban had additionally taken situation with an article she wrote concerning the violence and persecution confronted by LGBTQ individuals in Afghanistan.
“This was a premeditated try at character assassination and an affront to Afghan tradition,” the tweets from O’Donnell’s account learn. “These tales had been written with none stable proof or foundation, and with none effort to confirm situations by means of on-site investigation or face-to-face conferences with alleged victims.”
O’Donnell mentioned she had returned to Afghanistan this week, virtually a 12 months because the withdrawal of U.S. troops cleared the way in which for the Taliban to grab management.
“I needed to see for myself what had turn out to be of the nation since I flew out of Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021, hours earlier than the Islamists started what many residents now discuss with as a ‘reign of terror,’” she mentioned.
“Removed from reaching their aim of intimidating and undermining me, they confirmed me what I went to search out—their true face,” she wrote. “Their brutality, vanity, and lack of humanity. Their self-righteousness, intolerance, and misogyny. Their incompetence and their utter lack of capacity to rule. Afghanistan has fallen prey to terrorists who haven't and can't make the transition from preventing pressure to governing physique.”
The Taliban has more and more cracked down on press freedoms in Afghanistan within the 10 months because it seized energy. A United Nations report launched Wednesday mentioned the arbitrary arrests and detention of journalists, human rights defenders and different dissenters had had a chilling impact on freedom of the media and civic activism, and that journalists had more and more resorted to self-censorship to deal with the brand new surroundings.
Learn the article in International Coverage.
Post a Comment