Speech by Said Wase Sayedi at a demonstration in Berlin on February 26, 2022

My name is Said Wase Sayedi, and I have been an activist for the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan for almost 15 years. For many years, I worked with a dedicated team to advocate for the rights of girls and women, giving them a voice so they could stand up for their rights. But when the Taliban took control of the country, everything we had fought for for years vanished in an instant. Since their takeover, conditions for women have deteriorated drastically. Women and girls are denied access to higher education, they have been deprived of their basic rights, and they are no longer treated equally in society. It has become dangerous for women's rights activists, and thousands have been forced to flee the country, including myself. I cannot live under such a despicable dictatorial regime that publicly hangs its opponents and tortures women simply for standing up for their fundamental human rights.

I thank the Kabul airlift, my colleagues at Terre des Hommes , and all the people who have demonstrated for evacuations since August 15, when our beloved country fell into the hands of the Taliban. However, we must not forget that, in addition to the evacuees, hundreds and thousands of other activists in Afghanistan are in grave danger and have been left helpless.

Since the Taliban seized power, numerous civil society activists and women's rights advocates have been forcibly evicted from their homes without any apparent reason, and no one knows where these activists are being held, whether they are alive or dead. Their only crime was standing in the street demanding their basic rights of "food, work, and freedom.".

Furthermore, journalists and media activists are flogged and threatened in a medieval manner to prevent them from writing against the dictatorship or reporting critically. Artists and musicians who are popular have been publicly beaten, their instruments smashed in public, and they have been forced to declare they will no longer sing. 

Unfortunately, the Taliban have resumed random checks of activists' homes in recent days. I am worried about my colleagues who are still in Afghanistan and left helpless. I hope that no one has been killed, imprisoned, or tortured for standing up for their rights. If the Taliban discover that activists have already been evacuated abroad, they threaten their families to increase pressure and silence them. They, too, desperately need help.

Therefore, as friends of women's rights activists, human rights activists, journalists, media, social and cultural activists, we urge the German government not to forget them. The lives of these people and their families are in grave danger. They have the same right to support and evacuation as I do, even if they did not work for German organizations.