Samar Outspoken

My Fight for Freedom and Human Rights in Afghanistan
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-0-86356-884-8
Verlag: Saqi Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

Sima Samar has been fighting for justice all her life. Born into a polygamous family, Samar agreed to an arranged marriage to continue her own education. Once she had qualified as a doctor, she took off into rural areas - on horse, donkey, even on foot - to treat people who had never received medical help before. As the situation worsened, Samar found herself working in increasingly adverse circumstances, and in grave personal danger. After Samar's husband was disappeared by the regime, she faced a choice: to accept the injustices she saw around her or to keep driving for a better Afghanistan. From selling her own hand embroidered bed quilt to pay for her degree, to becoming Vice President in an office with no heating and only beach chairs, Samar has worked tirelessly for human rights in Afghanistan - the worst country in the world to be a woman. In Outspoken, Samar writes unapologetically and unflinchingly about the colossal internal and international political failures that have engulfed Afghanistan over the past five decades - the corruption, tribal tensions and hijacking of religion. But it is also a powerful story of loyalty, diplomacy and integrity; a vision for a brighter dawn.

Sima Samar is a globally renowned women's and human rights activist and doctor from Afghanistan. She established the Shuhada Organization that operated more than one hundred schools and dozens of hospitals and clinics in the country. She served as Minister of Women's Affairs of Afghanistan and is the former chair of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. She was formerly the UN Special Rapporteur for human rights in Sudan. She is currently a visiting scholar at Tufts University's Fletcher School

Autoren/Hrsg.

Samar, Sima

Leseproben

One

EYEWITNESS

IT BEGAN AS A SPARKLING MAY MORNING on an otherwise ordinary day. The weather was perfect, sunny and warm with a light breeze blowing springtime into Kabul. The blossoms had drifted off the trees, making way for leaves to burst onto the branches. It was approaching the end of Ramadan, the holy ritual that requires prayers and fasting for thirty days, so the anticipation of Eid, the celebration that marks the end of fasting, was on everyone’s mind. Families and friends would gather to pray and give thanks and to savor traditional foods like steaming platters of Kabuli pulao, ashak, bolani, lamb kabobs, delicious sheer pira and, of course, each other’s company. For a country that had experienced so much bloodshed and so many setbacks, this rebirth season of spring could have been seen as a sign of deliverance. But on that day—May 8, 2021—at 4:27 p.m., when the first explosion tore into the Sayed Al-Shuhada school in Dasht-e-Barchi, a neighborhood in West Kabul where members of the Hazara ethnic minority live, my hopes for the future were dashed and my heart broke—again.

Although I could not have predicted it at the time, this was in fact the beginning of the end of the Afghanistan I had helped to rebuild. The events of May 8—the who, the why and the what—go a long way to describing the wrongs that need to be righted if my country is to see a new beginning.

The warning that day came by way of a beeping from my cell phone. I was in the midst of a meeting at Gawharshad University, where we were discussing a hopeful future, including a new research department and the enhancement of the program for women’s empowerment. A horribly familiar chill crept up my spine when I saw the message that flashed on my screen—. In such a crowded part of the city I knew there would be bloodshed, but I hoped that the casualties would be few and the wounds minor. Still, it was impossible to forget the terrible attacks Dasht-e-Barchi had already experienced: at the education center, the sports club, the wedding hall, the maternity hospital, and several mosques. Casualties had been high.

The discussion at the table blurred as I kept checking my phone. The second text appeared minutes later with words that struck me like shrapnel: , , . By now everyone at the table was staring at their phones. Dasht-e-Barchi is the district where the Hazaras live, where men work menial jobs as laborers so they can scrape together the funds needed to bring their families from the central highlands of Afghanistan, which is the traditional home of the Hazaras, to the city and the promise of education for their children.

When the third text hit my screen, it felt as if the story was unraveling like Afghanistan itself. The first report was that it was a rocket attack on the Sayed Al-Shuhada school. Then a car bomb exploded at the scene as bystanders ran to help the injured. A third and fourth explosion followed, and casualties mounted.

Of course, I wanted to race to the scene—I’m a medical doctor, I’m a mother. But I knew the chaotic traffic and intense security checks in Kabul would hold up the rescue and I wouldn’t be able to get there in time to help. I called a halt to the meeting and went home, where I turned on the television to try to comprehend the causes and consequences of this horrific act of violence on blameless schoolgirls.

The coverage was hard to watch. The street in front of the school was crowded with carnage—the bodies of little girls, their schoolbooks and backpacks and shoes strewn about. Limbs left at incomprehensible angles. People screaming, searching, panicking. Blood ran down the road like rainwater. Every means of transportation was being used to get the girls to medical facilities—cars, motorcycles, bicycles and rickshaws were pressed into action. The wounded were even being hoisted onto shoulders and carried away. Survivors were torn between running for their lives and staying to help classmates. Others called to onlookers to run to clinics to give blood. The injured were crying out for their mothers and begging for help while fires continued to burn all over the street. Journals of poetry and scrapbooks of artwork were consumed in flames. The notebooks held the dreams of becoming “a somebody,” as the kids here like to say: a doctor, a police officer, an engineer or a teacher who could improve the life of the family and the future of the country.

I knew that poverty would prevent the wounded from being treated with the most advanced techniques. The father of a girl who suffered multiple fractures later said he had no money to buy the pins to rebuild his daughter’s arm. As with everything else in their hardscrabble lives, they would have to put up with less. And for those who now had to deal with complicated injuries and disabilities, it meant more debt and hardship; for all of them, it would mark the beginning of an enduring trauma born from barbarity.

The school, which boys attend in the mornings and girls in the afternoons, stretches over a few city blocks backing onto a hill covered with small mudbrick houses where many of these families live. The girls, dressed in the ubiquitous black-dress-and-whitescarf uniform, had come to this place to learn. For the Hazaras who arrived here from the Waras district of Bamiyan in the central highlands, this neighborhood is stuffed with hopes. There’s a mural on the wall at Sayed Al-Shuhada school with words that read: “Your dreams are limited only by your imagination.”

They already know hardship. As is true for so many kids in this poor part of the city, their daily lives include a shift of carpet weaving to supplement the family income. The owners of the carpet companies have shrugged off the severe criticism for using child labor because they know it’s the small fingers of a child that can weave the threads rapidly and follow the intricate patterns precisely. (While I have lobbied for a stop to child labor, I do not pass judgment on poor people who are trying to educate their children in a country that has no social security.) The children earn a meager amount, maybe ten to fifteen dollars a month, while they sit on benches just centimeters from the loom. Their fingernails are broken and split; the skin beside the nails is torn from threading the tough wool fibers through the apparatus. Because they are confined to a closed room, often working in tiers stacked on top of one another, they inhale the fluff from the wool and develop chronic lung disorders. They get few breaks, often falling asleep at the loom, and are forbidden to make conversation lest it distract them from the pattern. Silence at the loom is broken only by the sound of children coughing and the rhythmic tone of the shana, the comb used to pull the knots they make into the weaving.

Still, at school, these youngsters chased their dreams, even trying their hand at activism to fulfill them. Only a week before the attack a group of them went to the media to let the government know that the school didn’t have enough books to go around. In their seriously overcrowded building, the children didn’t mind sitting on the floor and out in the halls, but books were a priority they decided to fight for.

My thoughts were swirling around the events unfolding on the television screen when I glanced out the window and noticed a bird building a nest. I was immediately struck by how carefully the bird was weaving the tiny bits of twigs and dirt and string to build this nest where she would bring new life into this world, and how she was doing so without destroying any part of the environment. I watched that little bird working feverishly to prepare the nest and considered how easily a heavy rain or a fierce wind could destroy it. I remembered a woman from Kandahar coming to me and saying, “What have I done wrong in my life? Three times I built a nest and storms came and destroyed my nests, but the storms were man-made.” So many in my country have suffered because somebody else wanted their land or their lives or to have power over them.

It had taken forty-five minutes for ambulances, fire trucks and police to get through the streets of Kabul to this west-end neighborhood at the height of afternoon traffic. The sounds of the sirens mixed with the shouting of parents and the pleas of the victims and the physical gore on the street to create a heart-stopping tableau of a people under attack—my people.

While no terrorist group took responsibility for this horrible strike, everyone here knows that trouble begins with the Taliban. If they didn’t do it, they know who did.

Most of the world sees us as a people at war. And war has a way of coloring a country various shade of gray; the guns, tanks, dust, mud and rubble blur into a single hue. To most of the world Afghanistan has been presented in the recent past as nearly colorless, a sepia image of treeless mountains and endless deserts populated by beige-blanketed, bearded men with dashes of periwinkle blue provided by burka-covered women. The overall impression is of a place that is dreary, oppressive, backward and dangerous. But there is so much more to our country—from the legacy of the Persian cultural and linguistic sphere to the acclaimed lattice Jali woodwork and the celebrated Nuristani (chip-carving) techniques. Our Istalifi pottery and ceramics and calligraphy, even...