AFGHANISTAN - (NO) LAND IN SIGHT?

Tobias Matern in conversation with Fawzia Koofi

AFGHANISTAN - (NO) LAND IN SIGHT?

Three and a half years after seizing power, the Taliban are firmly in the saddle in Afghanistan. They are turning back the clocks, banning girls from schools and forbidding women to travel without a male companion.

Fawzia Koofi is one of Afghanistan's most renowned women's rights activists. She was a member of the Kabul parliament until 2018. As part of a delegation appointed by the now ousted government, she negotiated peace in her home country with the Taliban in Doha.

Koofi was born in Badakhshan province in 1975 as the 19th child of a tribal leader. She was enrolled at the medical faculty of Kabul University when the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan for the first time in 2001 and denied women the right to education. Her husband was a prisoner of the Taliban and died of tuberculosis after his imprisonment.

Koofi is the mother of two grown-up daughters, to whom she dedicated the book "Letters to my Daughters". After the Taliban came back to power in 2021, she left Afghanistan and continued her fight for Afghan women from exile in Europe. How does Fawzia Koofi envision the future of her country?

Fawzia Koofi, born in 1975 in Badakhshan province, Afghanistan, is a prominent Afghan politician, women's rights activist, and author

Tobias Matern, born in 1978, is head of international politics at the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. He studied political science in Berlin and attended the American University School of Journalism in Washington D.C. on a Fulbright scholarship. Matern has been with SZ since 2004. He was a correspondent for South and Southeast Asia based in Delhi and Bangkok during the height of the war in Afghanistan. He has interviewed and portrayed comedians, ministers, presidents, writers and psychotherapists in South Asia. He curated an exhibition on Afghanistan for the ‘Fünf Kontinente’ museum in Munich and published the book ‘Augenblick Afghanistan - Angst und Sehnsucht in einem versehrten Land’.