PARIS — For Afghan refugee cyclist Masomah
Ali Zada, it will be a bittersweet moment. For the first time in five years,
she will take part in the
Afghanistan Women’s Cycling Championships on Sunday,
but not in Kabul.
اضافة اعلان
Instead, the 26-year-old will race in southwest
Switzerland, reunited with dozens of Afghan cyclists who now live in different
countries.
Since the hardline Taliban returned to power last
year and restricted women’s freedoms, Ali Zada says “sport is dead” for Afghan
women.
The Taliban have banned women from playing sport,
barred women from many government jobs and forbidden secondary school education
for girls.
But Ali Zada, who has lived in France for the past
five years, has not given up and continues to represent her country.
A special moment for Ali Zada came last summer when
she took part in the Tokyo Olympics where she hoped to be a beacon for women
forced to leave their country or to abandon their sporting dreams.
She was the first Afghan female cyclist to compete
in the games as part of the Refugee Olympic Team.
But “the Taliban ruined what I experienced in
Tokyo”, she tells AFP.
Unable to enjoy her Olympic adventure, she spent the
rest of the summer with a heavy heart as she followed minute by minute the
events unfolding in Afghanistan, with Kabul falling in August 2021 and the
Taliban put back in charge.
When she was growing up, her family, part of the
historically oppressed Shiite Muslim Hazara community, were forced to live in
Iran like millions of other Afghans.
It was there she learned how to ride a bike before
joining the Afghan national team at the age of 16 when the family returned to
Kabul.
After years of being physically attacked for daring
to don sportswear, suffering insults for simply riding a bike and having stones
thrown at her, she sought asylum in France in 2016. The pressure on her to give
up had become too strong as her victories multiplied.
The situation has since worsened in Afghanistan.
“Every day, women lose a new right,” she said,
adding that many are put in prison or forced to leave the country.
Since their return, the Taliban have imposed
restrictions that aim to force women to live under a fundamentalist version of
Islam.
Girls can no longer go to high school and while
women can still attend university, that will be difficult in the future since
girls today will not have the necessary classes to go on to higher education.
“Dreaming big for girls today is just being able to
go to school. Just going to school. So sport is completely dead for women,”
says Ali Zada, who is currently studying at Polytech Lille University.
Ali Zada, who has
joined the International Olympic Committee Athletes’ Commission, believes “the
world has become silent” in the face of the repression of Afghan women.
“We abandoned women in Afghanistan. Everyone who
says they defend human rights, all those who say they defend women, they
haven’t done anything,” she says.
She hopes the race on Sunday, and the media interest
that it will garner, will “raise the alarm” to “wake the world up”.
A total of 49 female cyclists from Canada, France, Germany,
Italy, Singapore, and Switzerland will take part in the 57km race in the Swiss
city of Aigle and the surrounding Vaud canton, where UCI has its headquarters.
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