Fight for their RIGHTS
Memoir shows activist’s struggle to set women free in Afghanistan
It was a vicious attack on blameless youngsters — their only crime a desire for an education.
The explosions that tore into their West Kabul school on May 8, 2021 caused carnage: streets littered with the bodies of little girls, their schoolbooks and satchels strewn about them; limbs shattered into grotesquely incomprehensible angles; survivors torn between running for their lives and trying to help wounded classmates.
“Blood ran down the road like rainwater,” Sima Samar reports in her riveting new memoir, Outspoken. And the grief she experienced that day, both as a mother and a medical doctor, is palpable in these pages.
For years, she had fought for an Afghanistan in which it would be possible for children to pursue their dreams and believe in a better world free from the tyranny of the Taliban and other ruthless excesses of Islamic fundamentalism. Young women, a particular concern, were regaining their place in the sun.
Such was the promise that had taken root during the years of occupation by NATO forces which, led by the United States, had ended the country’s Taliban tyranny following 9/11. But now, two decades later and only months before the catastrophic withdrawal of these forces, the continuing fragility of Afghan democracy had become gruesomely evident.
“During the presence of NATO forces there was progress,” Samar tells Postmedia on the phone from her home in Texas. “Children were attending school, half a million of them. Midwives were being trained and sent to difficult areas in the country — and mother-and-child mortality rates had been reduced by 50 per cent. Also, for the first time, equal rights for men and women were enshrined in the constitution.”
Yet, this was not enough to armour Afghanistan against hatred and fanaticism. It explains why Samar — now 67, and a former nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize — felt compelled to write this book with Canadian journalist Sally Armstrong.
“The book is a small part of my personal life,” she says. “It’s about what I saw in Afghanistan during the involvement of the super powers in the country in my lifetime.”
The modesty of these words conceals a lifelong passion for human rights, especially women’s rights, and the fact that she was a revolutionary from an early age. Although her compassion for human suffering is an ever-running stream in this book, her moments of anger are cutting — especially when it comes to the Taliban with its primitive, pathological fear of literacy and especially women’s rights.
“They promised peace, but in reality they hijacked Islam for political opportunism to deliver a toxic mix of misogyny and misery, all in the name of God.” That’s an unflinching indictment from a woman who remains a practising Muslim. But now she’s adding a rider: even before the Taliban first took power at the end of the last century, following a disastrous Soviet occupation, there were forces who “used religion as a tool against women’s rights and the equality of men and women.”
In her view, “religion is something that should be very private between you and our god. When it is used as a tool to control the people, to dominate the people, it becomes political.”
Samar’s book gives the reader the opportunity to better understand the troubled history of Afghanistan as well as her own ruling passion to better the lives of Afghan women who, again under the Taliban, are denied access to the basics of living — health care, education and liberties that most countries take for granted.
Samar felt the first tremors of rebellion as a child and ended up as a crusading medical professional and an internationally renowned activist for women’s rights. Even when religious hostility and death threats forced her to pursue her cause from across the border in Pakistan, she remained undaunted: it was in exile that she was able to start founding schools and hospitals in both countries. And the day would come when she would be back in her homeland as minister of women’s affairs in Hamid Karzai’s first government.
“I have three strikes against me,” Samar tells us. “I’m a woman, I speak for women and I’m Hazara — the most persecuted ethnic group in Afghanistan.” As a schoolgirl — and there was an earlier period when Afghan girls could attend school — the prejudices against her ran deep. Not only was she a “stupid Hazara” but she was also Shi’ite, which earned her the enmity of her Sunni headmistress.
She was seven at the time. By the time she was eight, she had learned a great deal about power relationships in a household headed by a father who had two wives. Girls could play with dolls; boys could play games outdoors. A woman could only ride a horse if a man led it. Girls could learn about embroidery, cooking and cleaning; boys could ride bicycles.
The tragic history of a beloved older sister forced into an arranged marriage triggered a spark in young Sima’s life that would eventually burst into a lifelong flame. “What happened to her was one of the events that shaped my thinking about the conditions girls and women live with in my country.”
Hence her unsettling thoughts on the body-and-face-concealing burqa. She sees it as an instrument of repression.
“I think it’s against human dignity because you are covering a woman’s identity and are therefore denying her an identity. If a woman chooses to wear a burqa, I have no problem with that. Where the problem comes is when it’s imposed by others.”
Furthermore, let no one assume that this is a comfortable garment. “Imagine having seven metres of cloth around you so you’re entirely covered!” she exclaims.
Indeed, Samar minces no words when she gets to the subject of the Taliban’s obsessive imposition of the burqa. She writes of women in constant fear of falling because they couldn’t see properly through the mesh strip covering their eyes “Their own breath dampened the cloth in front of their mouths, and that moisture attracted the dust from the war-wrecked roads and made them feel as if they were suffocating in stale, dirty air.”
This was but one element of a Taliban-imposed culture in which girls were not allowed to attend school and women unable to go to work. If they left their homes, they needed a permit, they had to be in the company of a male relative, and they must wear a burqa.
Samar says the psychological damages of such strictures can be considerable. “No one can see me,” one woman comments in the book. “No one knows if I’m smiling or crying. I can’t see where I’m going. There are holes in the roads, it’s easy to step in one and fall down. There’s no one to help you up. No one in the world wants to help us.”
Samar sees this as gender apartheid — and a crime. She believes the outside world can and must help. “They should press for accountability and justice in order to prevent a country from claiming impunity for international crimes,” she says. “No one can be free from guilt in the commission of crimes against humanity.”