Press Release – March 8, 2025: It’s Time to Break Free from Patriarchy Worldwide

The current century must be the time in which women, in every part of the world, take their fate into their own hands and fight together to free themselves from patriarchy.

We women of CISDA who for over 25 years have worked alongside the Afghan women of RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan), know that their struggle is nothing but a piece of the struggles of women who in every corner of the planet rebel against oppression and patriarchy in all its forms.

Under the regime of the fundamentalist Taliban, Afghan women are today among the most oppressed in the world: they cannot study, work, leave the house alone, and when they go out they must cover their bodies from head to toe. A true gender apartheid that aims to systematically annihilate women and their will to fight, which is an example of courage and resistance.

Everywhere, fundamentalism creates gender apartheid. Afghanistan, since the late 1970s, has suffered foreign interference from international and regional powers that have financed and armed fundamentalist groups to support their colonial hegemony.

We fight with them, but we also know that as long as there is even one woman enslaved and oppressed, no one will be free.

We live in a desperate time, in which the capitalist and patriarchal system is making the militarization of society, wars, climate change, dehumanization and genocide of entire populations, migrants and racialized people seem inevitable. Fascism, now rampant throughout the Western world and beyond, has women as its first target, who are asked to reduce their role to that of breeding and free or exploited and underpaid labor.

This desperation, especially for us women, must be transformed into a common struggle against violence, femicide, fascism, genocidal policies and wars, all pieces of the same design of a system in deep crisis.

Against gender apartheid in Afghanistan and everywhere in the world.

Against all fundamentalisms that imprison women