Paris CNN —
“I know where you are and I’ll give it to the highest bidder,” one person wrote to her.
“I’ll cut off your head."
“Where do you want me to rape you?” another message read.
Days after Afghan taekwondo champion Marzieh Hamidi dared to suggest that her country’s men’s cricket team did not represent her, Marzieh Hamidi, an athlete forced into exile due to the Taliban’s ban on women’s sports, spoke out. His cell phone was flooded with more than 5,000 calls and messages.
“Taekwondo gives me an identity as a woman,” she told CNN. “It makes you feel more powerful in society.”
Hamidi, a 21-year-old refugee now living under police protection while facing death threats in Paris, has become a champion for equal rights for Afghan women. It’s a campaign disproportionately carried out by female athletes in this country.
“In Afghanistan, women are not allowed to be women,” she added. “They don’t exist.”
Maniza Talash, a British woman, was disqualified from this year’s Paris Olympics after she wore a cape that read “Free the Women of Afghanistan" during a breakdancing competition.
She was removed from the contest for making a “political protest.”
“With these three words I spoke to the whole world and asked you to take practical action for the women of Afghanistan. We do not want anything special in this world. We just want basic human rights,” Maniza told CNN.
Sprinter Kimia Yusofi, the country’s flag bearer for the Tokyo 2021 Games, also avoided a similar suspension after publishing a handwritten note reading “Education, Sport, Our Rights” after a sprint race. .
While Afghanistan’s men’s teams are able to participate in international matches almost freely, the country’s women’s teams are excluded from the sport, forced to compete without official support or forced into exile to represent refugee teams.
Hamidi told CNN how he encountered the Afghan men’s team while competing as a refugee at the Taekwondo World Championships in Azerbaijan last year.
She said she was kicked out of her country’s national team and treated like a foreigner by her former teammates.
“To me they are a Taliban team, not an Afghan team,” she said, directing similar accusations against Afghanistan’s cricket team, saying that following its ban on apartheid-era South Africa, Afghanistan’s sport He called for the team to be expelled from the Olympics. Era.
“At the same time they are coming (to international competitions), the Taliban are killing a lot of women in Afghanistan,” she said.
CNN has contacted the Afghanistan Cricket Board and the country’s Taekwondo Federation for comment.
According to Richard Bennett, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Afghanistan, this happened as the Taliban “stripped women and girls of their rights in the name of Islam.”
“Governments have eliminated or created conditions in which women and girls are unable to participate as full human beings in society,” she said, adding that recent legislation “has prevented such discrimination, segregation, exclusion, “We have institutionalized a state of denial of humanity.” Dignity of women and girls. ”
It is this glaring gap in women’s rights, which Hamidi and others refer to as gender apartheid, that led her to use the hashtag #LetUsExist to draw attention to the suffering of women in the country.
Apartheid is a crime against humanity, but it is currently only based on race, not sex or gender, Bennett said. The term gender apartheid was first used by Afghan women in the late 1990s during the first Taliban regime.
Despite the dire situation for women in Afghanistan, the Afghan men’s team is able to compete on the international stage, as is the hugely popular cricket team.
Cricket is widespread in Afghanistan, and despite the Taliban banning women from playing cricket, the country’s national team (whose emblem still bears the tricolor of the government ousted by the Taliban) ) is a source of national pride for many.
Hamidi told CNN that Afghanistan’s men’s cricket team “does not represent Afghan women.”
Comments like this one, in which an Afghan male cricketer accused the Taliban of “normalizing” the Taliban in an interview this summer, sparked a firestorm of hate online.
Female athletes are easy targets for Taliban supporters, especially those in the country’s diaspora.
Hamidi’s lawyer, Ines Dabau, told CNN: “Apart from her political opinions, they are concerned about the fact that Marji Hamidi is a woman, speaks in public, and dresses in a Western style.” “I’m criticizing things like that,” he said.
This threat has evolved since the Taliban’s oppression of women in the 1990s.
“The Taliban, who are currently in power in Afghanistan, are very technologically savvy and even more media savvy,” said the UN’s Bennett.
Arriving in France in the wake of the collapse of the Afghan government in 2021, she has had to build a new life overshadowed by fear for her family and Taliban retaliation for her defiance of restraints on Afghan women’s rights.
On Instagram and in real life, she exudes a rebellious thirst for life and dreams of becoming an Olympian.
However, Hamidi now lives under constant police protection due to persistent harassment and threats of death and rape. Taliban supporters robbed her of any semblance of a normal life.
“They have a very sophisticated public relations system and probably a surveillance system that could penetrate into foreign countries as well,” added the UN’s Bennett. “If there are no consequences and there is no backlash against this, misogynists all over the world will take notice.”
Weeks after the initial threat, Hamidi is still receiving terrifying messages.
In early October, he received a message from an Instagram user saying, “I only have three months left until I have the money ready. Then I’ll go directly to Paris and behead them there.”
The calls and messages Hamidi received were from numbers across Europe, many in English.
Mr Hamidi’s lawyer, Mr Dabbou, is trying to show the coordination behind this campaign of hate.
The Paris public prosecutor’s office confirmed to CNN that an investigation has been launched into the threat, led by France’s specialized agency for hate crimes and crimes against humanity.
“There are actually calls on her Instagram profile to insult her, threaten her, threaten her,” Davour told CNN.
Many threaten outright violence against young athletes, but some seem harmless. GIFs of Afghan cricketers remain uncommented on many of Hamidi’s posts and appear to have no connection to the content of the posts.
“Participating in harassment may actually be very small-scale,” Dabau said, adding that “knowingly accepting (participating in) behavior that is harmful to someone’s health is considered harassment under French law.” That’s the case,” he said.
When he first received the threat, Hamidi said he felt like he was back in Kabul. But despite these threats, she is alone in France and shows no signs of giving up her fight.
“They want us to be invisible in Afghanistan,” she said. “I want to show them that we are strong.”
