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114 TALIBAN A VANISHED GENDER 115Tailors were ordered not to measure women for clothes, but learned tokeep the measurements of their regular customers in their heads. Fashionmagazines were destroyed. 'Paint your nails, take a snapshot of a friend,blow a flute, clap to a beat, invite a foreigner over for tea and you havebroken a Taliban edict,' wrote an American reporter. 15Until Kabul, the UN's disastrous lack of a policy had been ignored butthen it became a scandal and the UN came in for scathing criticism fromfeminist groups. Finally the UN agencies were forced to draw up acommon position. A statement spoke of 'maintaining and promoting theinherent equality and dignity of all people' and 'not discriminatingbetween the sexes, races, ethnic groups or religions'. 16 But the same UNdocument also stated that 'international agencies hold local customs andcultures in high respect'. It was a classic UN compromise, which gavethe Taliban the lever to continue stalling, by promising to allow femaleeducation after peace came. Nevertheless, by October 1996 the UN wasforced to suspend eight income-generating projects for women in Kabul,because women were no longer allowed to work in them.During the next 18 months, round after round of fruitless negotiationstook place between the UN, NGOs, Western governments and the Taliban,by which time it became clear that a hardline lobby of Taliban ukmain Kandahar were determined to get rid of the UN entirely. The Talibantightened the screws ever further. They closed down home schools forgirls which had been allowed to continue and then prevented womenfrom attending general hospitals. In May 1997 the religious police beatup five female staff of the US NGO Care International and thendemanded that all aid projects receive clearance from not just the relevantministry, but also from the Ministeries of Interior, Public Health, Policeand the Department of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.This was followed by a demand that all Muslim female humanitarianworkers coming to Afghanistan be accompanied by a male relative.Finally in July 1997 the Taliban insisted that all 35 UN and NGO agenciesmove out of their offices to one pre-selected compound at thedestroyed Polytechnic building. As the European Union suspended furthurhumanitarian aid, the UN and the NGOs left Kabul.The plight of Afghanistan's women often hid the fact that urban malesdid not fare much better under the Taliban, especially non-Pashtuns. AllKabul males were given just six weeks to grow a full beard, even thoughsome of the ethnic groups such as the Hazaras have very limited beardgrowth. Beards could not be trimmed shorter than a man's fist, leading tojokes that Afghanistan's biggest import-export business was male facialhair and that men did not need visas to travel to Afghanistan, they justneeded a beard. The religious police stood at street corners with scissorscutting off long hair and often beating culprits. Men had to wear theirshalwars or baggy trousers above the ankle and everyone had to say theirprayers five times a day.The Taliban also clamped down on homosexuality. Kandahar's Pashtunswere notorious for their affairs with young boys and the rape of youngboys by warlords was one of the key motives for Mullah Omar in mobilizingthe Taliban. But homosexuality continued and the punishments werebizarre if not inhuman. Two soldiers caught indulging in homosexualityin Kabul in April 1998 were beaten mercilessly and then tied up anddriven around Kabul in the back of a pick-up with their faces blackenedby engine oil. Men accused of sodomy faced the previously unheard of'Islamic' punishment of having a wall toppled over them.In February 1998 three men sentenced to death for sodomy in Kandaharwere taken to the base of a huge mud and brick wall, which was thentoppled over them by a tank. They remained buried under the rubble forhalf an hour, but one managed to survive. 'His eminence the Amir-ulMomineen [Mullah Omar] attended the function to give Sharia punishmentto the three buggerers in Kandahar,' wrote Arris, the Taliban newspaper.17 In March 1998 two men were killed by the same method inKabul. 'Our religious scholars are not agreed on the right kind of punishmentfor homosexuality,' said Mullah Mohammed Hassan, epitomizingthe kind of debates the Taliban were preoccupied with. 'Some say weshould take these sinners to a high roof and throw them down, whileothers say we should dig a hole beside a wall, bury them, then push thewall down on top of them.' 18The Taliban also banned every conceivable form of entertainment,which in a poor, deprived country such as Afghanistan was always inshort supply anyway. Afghans were ardent movie-goers but movies, TV,videos, music and dancing were all banned. 'Of course we realize thatpeople need some entertainment but they can go to the parks and see theflowers, and from this they will learn about Islam,' Mullah MohammedHassan told me. According to Education Minister Mullah Abdul Hanifi,the Taliban 'oppose music because it creates a strain in the mind andhampers study of Islam'. 19 Singing and dancing were banned at weddingswhich for centuries had been major social occasions from which hundredsof musicians and dancers made a living. Most of them fled to Pakistan.Nobody was allowed to hang paintings, portraits or photographs in theirhomes. One of Afghanistan's foremost artists, Mohammed Mashal, aged82, who was painting a huge mural showing 500 years of Herat's historywas forced to watch as the Taliban whitewashed over it. Simply put, theTaliban did not recognize the very idea of culture. They banned Nawroz,the traditional Afghan New Year's celebrations as anti-Islamic. Anancient spring festival, Nawroz marks the first day of the Persian solarcalendar when people visit the graves of their relatives. People were for-