YALDA HAKIM: the future for Afghani girls
For TV's Yalda Hakim, Australia is the lucky country that saved her family from Afghanistan. Now 10 years after her irst assignment in Kabul, she returns to her homeland to help girls shape their future.
As the aircraft entered Afghan airspace – the familiar landscape of snow-capped mountains appearing outside the window – I was gripped by that strange feeling I always get when I return to the country of my birth. I’m reminded of the circumstances which led to my family eeing Afghanistan in the dead of night 35 years ago – of my parents locking up their home in Kabul, promising never to return to a country that was descending into a catastrophic war that would go on to claim a million lives.
They ed east to the Pakistan border, guided through the mountain passes by a smuggler, relying on the kindness of strangers to evade capture. It was a journey that would take 10 days on foot. Of course, I have no memory of these events. I was just six months old, strapped to my mother’s back, as my older brother and sister marched along with my father, who had promised them that a great adventure lay ahead.
Arriving in Pakistan with little more than the clothes on their backs, my parents began building a new life. My mother, a midwife, started working for a German NGO, providing maternal healthcare for the Afghan refugees living in camps on the Pakistan border. My father, who had studied in Prague on a scholarship, set up an architectural rm in Peshawar. But these were all temporary arrangements. He was desperate to move his young family to the West.
After almost three years of reaching out to every possible contact, he got lucky. An Iranian-born Australian architect named Syed Sibtain and his journalist wife Nancy agreed to become our host sponsors. Syed had initially discouraged his wife from lling out the application form, telling her they couldn’t keep inviting Afghan families who were eeing the war to Australia. She ignored his advice. My rst contact with Australia was when Syed showed up at our front door in Islambad, having decided to come meet the people whom his wife had committed to help emigrate. For me, as a small child, this was when I learned what generosity meant. For my father, his dream had nally come true. Soon we found ourselves in a new country. This was now home.
I threw myself into life in Australia with the kind of unabashed gusto for the place that new immigrants so often feel. I was a proud Sydney girl. But even as we embraced Australia – and Australia embraced us – Afghanistan remained part of our lives too. My father would often say everyone comes from somewhere, everyone has a story to tell. I was taught never to forget where I’d come from and always to be grateful for the opportunities afforded to us in Australia, a lesson that weighed ever more deeply on me as I grew older and learned about the horrors that were consuming the land of my birth.
I was 12 years old when the Taliban took control over much of Afghanistan. Women had been banned from work, con ned to their homes. Girls were denied an education. They could face public lashings, stoning and even death if they dared to break the rules. This could easily have been my fate, I remember thinking at the time. And with this realisation came a resolve to do whatever I could to help those who weren’t so lucky and remained trapped under medieval tyranny in Afghanistan. My family and I would often travel to Canberra, to take part in demonstrations demanding that Islamabad stop supporting the Taliban.
It was at some point around this age that I also decided to become a journalist. I wanted to tell the stories of people whose plight was otherwise unknown, to provide a voice to those who were being silenced, and to hold accountable those in positions of power for abuses of that power.
Eventually I got my big break and went on to become a reporter and then a TV presenter for SBS’s Dateline. Initially I travelled across Australia to tell stories about remote Aboriginal communities. Later I began venturing abroad. Whether it was rebel-held Benghazi during the height of the Libyan uprising, or the birth of the