Astonishing bravery of the Afghan doctor who saved a girl from an honour killing
OUTSPOKEN: MY FIGHT FOR FREEDOM AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN AFGHANISTAN by Sima Samar with Sally Armstrong (Saqi £16.99, 352pp)
SIMA Samar’s account of life in Afghanistan today sounds like The Handmaid’s Tale, only much, much worse. If you’re a woman, then forget about venturing outside unless your husband or brother accompanies you. It’s not just your morals that are in peril, you also need an escort to stop you stumbling over potholes, thanks to the burqa covering your face.
A broken ankle is a real risk, especially given that a chronic lack of vitamin D from staying indoors has turned your bones brittle before their time.
Don’t think, though, that as a man you will have things easy. If your sister, wife or daughter is caught outside the house alone or, worse still, with some hair showing, then you can expect to get a visit from the authorities. It is your responsibility to police your female relatives. Expect to be beaten, fined or put in prison. You could even be killed.
The saddest thing of all, though, is that it hasn’t always been like this. As Dr Samar reveals in this stunning memoir, within her lifetime there have been periods when Afghanistan has functioned as something approaching a modern democracy with equal rights for all.
Following the defeat of the Taliban in 2001 by the American military, President Bush pledged to rebuild the broken country and safeguard its future. Diplomats and humanitarians poured in, bringing millions of pounds’ worth of development aid.
As minister for women’s affairs, Samar met them all, including Cherie Blair. She promised that her husband’s government would do all it could to help with healthcare and reproductive rights for women who, for the previous two decades, had been forced to exist as ‘slaves and baby-making machines’.
And it worked, at least for a time. During these years, and thanks to improvements in public health – the cause dearest to Dr Samar’s heart ever since she qualified as a doctor in 1982 — life expectancy soared from 47 to 63.
In addition, it was no longer unusual to see a woman reading the news, arguing a legal case or designing a new drainage system. In 2009 Samar was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, in recognition of the contribution she had made to the reconstruction of Afghanistan as a modern democracy.
All this is more extraordinary given Samar’s difficult start. When she was a toddler her father left to set up a new home with his second wife and their children in a nearby city — a cultural norm that struck rebellious Samar as profoundly wrong: ‘I was absorbing, as if by osmosis, some of the unfairness of being a woman.’
Although girls in her village did not go to school beyond the sixth grade (our Year 7), Samar’s father insisted on bringing the clever child to the city to continue her education.
Despite facing discrimination for being a member of the despised Hazara tribe, Samar entered medical school — although only after agreeing to an arranged marriage with a kind man called Ghafoor whom she did not love. Her father would not allow her to move away to study otherwise. It is not long before Ghafoor is rounded up in a midnight raid and never seen again. Samar flees for safety to her native village and sets up a healthcare centre. Some of her stories will make you weep.
ONE 16- year- old girl arrives, visibly pregnant. She confides that she has been raped but, without four male eye witnesses, there is no chance of being believed. Her fate is sealed: she will be killed to protect her family’s honour.
So Samar comes up with a clever solution. When the baby is delivered she takes the placenta to the waiting relatives to show them the ‘tumour’ that she has surgically removed from the girl’s stomach that was responsible for making her so bloated. Quietly Samar arranges for the adoption of the baby by another woman in distress — married but suffering with the stigma of being childless.
Another time a seriously ill teenager is denied a simple gynaecological procedure since it would involve rupturing her hymen, meaning that she would never be able to get a husband.
How heartbreaking, then, for Dr Samar to watch helplessly as all the advances made since 2001 are dramatically reversed.
She pins it to the moment in 2011 when Donald Trump started tweeting about pulling America out of Afghanistan. He called it ‘a complete waste’ of American money and lives. As President, he was as good as his word. In 2021, in a deal done by Trump and carried through by Biden, the US troops withdrew. Within weeks, the Taliban came storming back into power, funded by their huge profits from the opium trade.
Sima Samar is naturally bitter at the way that Afghanistan has once again been handed over to religious fundamentalists whose interpretation of Islam is a long way from her own moderate stance.
In many ways Outspoken is an easy book to read, like a gripping spy novel crossed with personal memoir. In other ways, though, it is heart-rending to see how easily democracy can be unravelled, progress reversed and all the freedoms we take for granted ground into the dust.