Being LGBTQIA+ in the Taliban's Afghanistan

According to the UN, almost 90% of Afghanistan's people are facing homelessness and hunger, living below the poverty level. Along with this grim statistic, much attention has been paid to the plight of women, journalists, and people who worked with US and NATO personnel in the last twenty-years of US engagement with the country. Yet there is one more area of concern: the life of LGBTQIA+ people in this war-torn, conservative-Muslim led country. Many who are part of the LGBTQIA+ community in Afghanistan are facing intimidation, torture, or death, simply because of who one is, and who one loves.

Neela Ghoshal and Lester Feder report in advocate.com (Jan. 26, 2022), about the story of "Ramiz" (not his real name) who live-in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. For three weeks after the Taliban took control, Ramiz, a gay man, lay low: "Finally, he had no choice: He had to pick up his salary. He made it through the first checkpoint without incident. At the second checkpoint, his luck ran out.

Armed Taliban officials shouted anti-gay slurs, hit Ramiz, and bundled him into a car. They took him to another location, where four men raped him. Eventually, they released him with a threat. 'Any time we want to find you, we will. And we will do whatever we want with you,' they said."

Or consider the story of Ali, another gay man. "Ali was hiding in an abandoned factory, sneaking out early each morning to buy food with the little money he had. He was anonymous threats by text message and had learned that his homophobic father, who was close to a senior Taliban official, was using his connections to hunt him down. 

Finally, there is the story of Ria, "a 39-year-old asexual entrepreneur who has long contended with rumors that she is a lesbian, said that after the Taliban’s return, armed men ransacked her businesses. Now she hides in a rented room with no door leading to the street. Najib, a transgender woman, told us she had not left her home for two months since Taliban members beat her at a checkpoint, threatening to stone her to death when she went out to buy bread." 

Senior Taliban officials are clear: they don't tolerate sexual and gender diversity. Local Taliban personnel have been given permission to brutalize LGBTQIA+ people. 

Here's a link to more of the story: https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2022/1/26/will-humanitarian-aid-reach-lgbtq-afghans-hiding

We, the international community, need to find ways to support those who are being tortured and intimidated, and possibly killed in Afghanistan. 

The UN World Food Program supports LGBTQIA+ people. Here's a link to their page: https://executiveboard.wfp.org/document_download/WFP-0000134479

There is also a "GoFundMe" page in support of LGBTQIA+ people in Afghanistan: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-queer-and-trans-afghans-in-afghanistan.

Ghoshal and Feder end their article with this warning: "It’s been said that LGBTQ+ people are the proverbial canary in the coal mine. That is, when LGBTQ+ rights or lives are threatened, more widespread, destabilizing violence lies in wait. The reverse is equally true: When LGBTQ+ people are left out of life-saving programming, their exclusion portends ongoing instability."

It is past time for us to act as individuals in LGBTQIA+ communities abroad, as well as our faith communities, and our foreign policy professionals. Pressure is being put on England's Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and should also be put on President Biden and the State Department in the US. Here's a link to the pressure campaign in England: https://attitude.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-urged-to-evacuate-lgbtq-afghans-at-risk-of-torture-of-death-in-open-letter-1/25708/

And we, in the Church, should be equally concerned for the lives of LGBTQIA+ people, as we are for the women and journalists of Afghanistan.