Disqualified Afghan refugee deserves praise

If Manizha Talash was at home, the Taliban would probably stone her.

So what’s a little DQ from the Olympics?

The young woman, so gloriously free of the brutal and barbarous regime that has resumed power in Afghanistan, made her point as a refugee, as an escapee, as a person of individual will and human rights.

In the sport of breaking, of all things. Which would get her broken into a thousand pieces at home, certainly lashed by a morality police squad.

Afghanistan, land of muzzled girls and burqa’d women, would punish the athlete known as “b-girl Talash” for the audacity of doing sports, much less the insolence of breakdancing, even though her performance kit covered pretty much the entirety of her body. Not the face, however, which the Taliban prefers sheathed and always with head covered.

On Friday, b-girl Talash was disqualified from the first ever Olympic breaking competition for the purportedly provocative and verboten act of making a political statement whilst on the playing field of the Games. Which, in the view of the pinhead World DanceSport Federation — the sport’s governing body — violated Rule 50 of the Olympic charter forbidding political protests or messaging. Disqualified for “displaying a political slogan on her attire during the PreQualifier battle.”

What a shirty, shoddy thing to do. Her crime? Spreading open her cape during a pre-qualifier round to reveal this slogan, a message to the country of her birth and to the world: FREE AFGHAN WOMEN.

That is most emphatically not a political slogan. It’s a declaration, a plea, for the one half of humanity that the Taliban has all but erased from existence, since the fall of Kabul after the chaotic withdrawal of American forces, when the religious mediaevalists skittered back into control of the war-beleaguered country.

Girls can’t go to school beyond primary grades. Women can’t work in most professions, other than some education and health-care jobs. Females can’t leave home unless accompanied by a male relative as chaperone. Can’t walk into a public park or a gym.

A recent UN report described Afghanistan as the most repressive country in the world for women and girls, deprived of virtually all their rights.

Yet somehow Talash’s cri de coeur was interpreted as a political gesture by the dance federation. Or, since we’re not entirely sure where the blame lies, possibly the International Olympic Committee, which never misses a chance to do the wrong thing.

Talash is in Paris as a member of the Refugee Olympic Team, an undertaking initiated by the IOC for Rio 2016 and of which it is very (justly) proud. Then what can they possibly make of this, to justify the expulsion?

The woman, extending her arms to exhibit the message on her bright blue cape, sent a communique out into the cosmos. Her Dutch opponent — who won the pre-Q battle handily — raised her hands and applauded.

Talash was born and raised in Kabul and discovered breaking on social media. She is considered Afghanistan’s first B-Girl, and began training with a crew in the capital. “There were 55 boys and I was the only girl,” she told Al Jazeera.

But, with her younger brother, she fled Afghanistan when the Taliban returned to power in 2021, two decades after the regime had been ousted in a U.S.-led invasion after 9/11. Following a year in Pakistan, Talash was granted refugee status in Spain and that’s where she was, working in a hair salon, when a friend helped her connect with the refugee team.

The breaker didn’t speak to reporters after her competition, whisked through the mixed zone. A man accompanying her did say: “What she did on stage I think is enough.”

Afghanistan actually has a team at these Games — under the auspices of the exiled Afghanistan Olympic Committee, which flies the country’s old flag, not the Taliban ensign.

Sprinter Kimia Yousofi, one of three females on their six-member squad, saw her Olympic journey end quickly, eliminated with a lastplace finish in her 100-metre preliminary heat.

It had gone largely under the radar, but Yousofi — who was born in Iran to parents who fled Afghanistan during the first Taliban usurping of power in a devastating civil war — also made a statement on behalf of Afghan womankind. She turned over her bib to reveal, in handwritten script, this message (repeated here exactly as written): “EDUCTION” and “OUR RIGHTS”.

“I feel a responsibility for Afghan girls because they can’t talk,” Yousofi said after her event. “I’m not a politics person, I just do what I think is true. I can talk with media. I can be the voice of Afghan girls.”

There is no indication that World Athletics or the IOC has taken any punitive action against Yousofi, although they were made aware of her gesture.

“This is my flag. This is my country. This is my land,” she said.

In the land ruled by the IOC Lords of the Realm, the tall foreheads should have turned the other cheek for b-girl Talash, too.