Activist for Afghan women

Sima Wali, who fled her native Afghanistan before the 1979 Soviet invasion and devoted the rest of her life to aiding the women who remained behind through years of war, deprivation and Taliban oppression, died Sept. 22 at her home in Falls Church, Va. She was 66.

The cause was multiple system atrophy, a degenerative neurological disorder, said her nephew, Suleiman Wali.

As leader of the Washington-based nonprofit organization Refugee Women in Development, Wali became one of the most visible activists for the rights of Afghan women.

She spoke before the United Nations and U.S. officials, played a critical role in the formation of the Afghan Ministry of Women’s Affairs after the fall of the Islamist Taliban regime in 2001, and helped direct international funding to the country’s women, children and refugees.

The late Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor and Democratic congressman from California, once lauded her for “pioneering culturally specific approaches in assisting refugee women to resist trauma and violence.”

After the Taliban, which seized power in 1996, drew international condemnation for its brutal subjugation of women, Wali often acted as a cultural interpreter for Westerners seeking to understand the perils facing the country. She defended Islam, blaming the Taliban’s violation of women’s rights on a grotesque distortion of the faith.

“Everybody is talking about the burqa,” she told Agence France-Presse in 2001, referring to the headto-toe veil the Taliban forced women to wear. “That is the least of my problems,” she said, listing concerns that included access to medical care, education and work. She described women who committed suicide by drinking battery fluid because they were so ill, hungry and oppressed.

Wali was one of the few women to participate in U.N. peace talks on Afghanistan held in Bonn, Germany, in 2001 after the U.S.-led invasion dismantled the Taliban regime.