Meryl Streep’s Powerful Speech at the United Nations: “A Squirrel Has More Rights Today Than a Little Girl in Afghanistan”

The United Nations General Assembly continues its course and a few hours ago one of its collateral events had a special guest: Meryl Streep who, accompanied by activists, raised her voice to denounce the situation of women in Afghanistan. During the presentation of the documentary The Sharp Edge of Peace, which features the four women who negotiated with the Taliban regime after the US withdrawal in 2021, Streep stressed that the current situation for Afghan women is a “slow suffocation.” She noted that, after the passage of the latest Taliban laws, a cat, a squirrel or a bird have “more rights” than Afghan girls and women today: “A cat can sit on the porch and enjoy the sun, it has more freedom than Afghan women. It can chase a squirrel in a park. And that squirrel has more rights than a girl has today in Afghanistan, because the Taliban have banned women from public parks. A bird can sing in Kabul, but women cannot sing in public. It’s incredible, it’s unnatural (…) Half the population lives as if they were prisoners.”

The actress also recalled the degradation of freedoms that Afghanistan has suffered in the last century and how its situation is a warning to the rest of the world: “In 1971 I graduated here in New York,” she explained, “and in the same year women in Switzerland obtained the right to vote. A right that Afghan women had already enjoyed for more than half a century. They obtained this right in 1919,” a year before the Americans and decades before the French. She also explained that in the 1970s, most public workers in Afghanistan “were women, they were doctors and teachers. There were women lawyers, there were women professionals of all kinds, and then the world abandoned them.” So the Taliban “deprived them of their education and their work, their freedom of speech and movement, to the point of effectively imprisoning half the population.”

Streep, accompanied by Wardak Asyluma former Afghan diplomat and founder of the Afghan Women’s Network, who promoted the event together with Indonesian, Irish, Swiss and Qatari politicians (who called the situation in her country a “gender genocide”), called for “gender equality” in Afghanistan. She invited the international community, the Sunni Muslim community and “all those who have relations with the Taliban” to intervene, before opening the documentary, directed by her compatriot Royal Sadat and produced by the director Leslie Thomas. “It has been one of the greatest honors of my life,” the director concluded, “to have the privilege of being here with these extraordinary women, who give us courage and remind us that fundamentalism and fear can turn civilization upside down from within.”