Half-time and thousands of tiny cellphone lights are swaying in time to Coldplay’s “A Sky Full of Stars” on a mild winter night at Brisbane Stadium for Australia’s World Cup match against Nigeria.
Sitting across two rows, not far from the pitch, are players from the exiled Afghan women’s national team, who know what it’s like to represent their country and dream of doing so again – if only they were recognized as a national team by the sport’s governing bodies.
Now, she’s urging FIFA, the sport’s highest authority, to allow the girls and women to run onto the pitch again to represent Afghanistan. “The concern now is that is that this could be the beginning of a broader crackdown that would drive women out of the private sector in the same way that they’ve already been driven out of jobs in the civil service and in international NGOs and in the United Nations,” said Heather Barr, association director of HRW’s Women’s Rights Division.
“So we are very much about accelerating and closing that gap and making up for the institutional neglect of the times where women’s football was incredibly banned in some regions and some continents. It’s our obligation to close that gap,” she added. Behram Siddiqui, secretary-general of the Afghan Football Federation, told CNN FIFA had contacted the body about the Afghan women’s team and the federation had told them it was against its rules for the women to play through a club.
Gender equality is one of the eight social causes being promoted by the 2023 Women’s World Cup, through a partnership with UN Women, and on messages displayed on team captains’ armbands and on flags and screens around the pitch. They wear black and red, their national colors, but play in the women’s state league – and earlier this month took part in the Hope Cup, a competition for refugees.
“Every time there’s an international game, and Afghanistan doesn’t feature in the draw, their hearts break,” he said.“This superficiality is not atypical for international governing bodies. There’s a lot of tokenism. There’s a lot of symbolism – but there’s not a lot of action,” he said.
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