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Afghanistan’s bravest woman calls on US to leave
by Amy Littlefield
Malalai Joya, called the “bravest woman in Afghanistan,” is finishing up a U.S. tour where she has pressed the Obama administration to pull the military out of her country. She says nothing could be worse for women than what she sees as the current civil war.
Surrounded by powerful men twice her age, Malalai Joya, then 27 and the youngest person elected to the Afghan parliament, raised her hand to speak. She denounced the warlords and drug traffickers in the government and stood up in favor of women’s rights.
That was 2005, four years after the United States invaded Afghanistan.
Two years later, Joya was expelled from parliament for criticizing the warlords who she says remain in control of the country under U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai.
Multiple times, her enemies have tried to kill her, forcing her to hide in safe houses and wear a burka.
Now, 31-year-old Joya, known widely as “the bravest woman in Afghanistan,” has come to the United States to promote her new book and deliver a message to the U.S. government as the Obama administration, according to widespread press reports, considers some level of troop buildup.
On tour from Oct. 23 to Nov. 12, she’s made the following demand in some two dozen engagements from New York to Los Angeles: “Leave my country as soon as possible.”
Joya is one of a handful of Afghan women speaking out against the occupation of Afghanistan and drawing attention to the worsening condition of women. Following the end of her U.S. tour, she will head to Canada for another round of speaking engagements.
Liberation for Afghan Women?
The United States billed the invasion of Afghanistan as a liberating moment for Afghan women.
“The last time we met in this chamber, the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school,” President George W. Bush said in his 2002 State of the Union address. “Today women are free and are part of Afghanistan’s new government.”
Joya said the violence of occupation and the misogyny of the country’s current political leaders have made life worse.
“Woman’s situation is like hell,” said Joya in a speech at Brown University, as part of her tour, noting that a single hospital in Kabul reported more than 600 attempted suicides, primarily by women from 2008 to 2009.
Joya called the current regime under the recently re-elected President Karzai “mentally similar to the Taliban,” saying the government “only physically has been changed.”
She pointed to Karzai’s signing of the so-called “rape law” as evidence of the misogynist nature of his government. Following global outcry in April, Karzai vowed to change the law, which mandated that Shia women submit to sex with their husbands. A second version of the law, which permits Shia men to deny food to their wives if they do not obey sexual demands, was passed this summer.
Afghanistan is “sandwiched between two powerful enemies . . . external enemies and internal enemies,” said Joya. “It is much easier to fight against one enemy than against two.”
The Afghan presidential runoff election scheduled for Nov. 7 was cancelled and Karzai, the incumbent, declared the winner after his opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, who had accused Karzai of fraud, withdrew from the race Nov. 1.
More U.S. Troops for Support
Although the legitimacy of Karzai’s presidency remains in question due to charges of vote tampering, President Obama appears poised to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to support him.
Many in the United States, including Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, believe that a civil war would erupt in Afghanistan if U.S. troops withdrew.
Joya is among those who say that the country has already reached levels of violence that amount to a civil war and that the Afghan people should be trusted to take control.
“Democracy by war is impossible,” she said in response to a question at Brown University about who would provide security in the absence of the U.S. military. “Let us breathe in peace,” she said. “We know what to do with our destiny.”
Joya gained international recognition in 2003 when she spoke out against warlords and drug traffickers at the Afghan constitutional assembly. Addressing the “felons” who controlled the country, she called them anti-woman, demanded they be put on trial in international court and declared that history would never forgive them. She was then pushed out of the assembly room in a sea of both threats and applause.
After speaking at Brown, Joya met with Women’s eNews and recounted with a smile another speech in which she compared members of parliament to animals, attacking their integrity and usefulness. That got her banned from parliament and stripped of her formal political role, but she has not stopped speaking.
Joya has little security at her speaking events, even though, as she told Women’s eNews, she faces threats from allies of Afghan warlords in this country.
Worth the Threats?
When asked if it is worth the threats and the separation from her family, Joya, who became emotional when talking about her siblings back home, responds with stories about women and girls who have been raped, tortured and murdered in Afghanistan.
She tells of a 5-year-old girl killed for resisting a grown man’s attempts to rape her, another girl who begged for the right to divorce after her husband tortured her and hundreds of women who have burned themselves alive to escape nightmarish lives of poverty and abuse.
Sometimes she is unable to sleep at night after she has seen pictures of the horrors, she said. It is loyalty to “my people” that has brought her to the United States, where she has spoken to packed auditoriums and sold copies of her 2009 book, “A Woman Among Warlords.”
Joya said she wrote the book in order to communicate a small part of the sorrow and pain of her people and to reveal the truth about the warlords who were her peers in parliament. Although government officials have demanded Joya’s apology for insulting them, she does not believe she is the one who should be sorry.
“Someone had to do that and I did it . . . and I don’t regret it,” she said.
Instead, she addresses President Obama:
“Apologize to my people and end this.”
Afghanistan's bravest woman calls on US to leave
Afghanis hate the Americans from the bottom of their hearts
Jerome Starkey in Shinwar
“People hate the Americans from the bottom of their hearts,” Haji Akhtar Mohammed Shinwari said as he recalled how the US military had brought death to his homeland.
For residents of Shinwar, a village in distant Nangahar province, the message from President Karzai’s address yesterday that the Americans would hand over security over the next five years was disappointing.
At the village bazaar, Mr Shinwari told The Times that he could not wait that long. In 2007, a unit of special forces was speeding along a busy road a few miles from his village when they opened fire, killing 19 people and wounding 50. The unit responsible was sent home and the local US commander described the incident as a “stain on our honour”. He paid out almost $40,000 (£25,000) in compensation.
But trust, in Afghanistan’s conservative Pashtun belt, is hard won and easily forfeited. In the 20 months since the attack house raids by Nato troops had continued, Mr Shinwari, 44, said. More civilians had been killed, while little had been done to help ordinary people. “People don’t like their operations,” he said. “They search houses without permission, detain people without trial.”
In the neighbouring village of Rakhzi, Niaz Amin, a 20-year-old student, lost his older brother and grandfather in American operations last year. “We still don’t know why they did it,” he said. “When they came into the house I tried to speak to them in English but they shouted, ‘Don’t speak’.
“The first time they came my brother ran out and he was wounded by an airstrike. They took him to the hospital but brought back his body. Eight days later my grandfather was shot when he went out of the mosque.”
The Shinwar district, close to the border with Pakistan, has a reputation for smuggling. Its fierce hostility towards the Americans has made most of it a no-go area for foreign aid workers. Security officials claim that it is an occasional sanctuary for insurgents.
But many of the villagers’ complaints are more mundane. “When [the Americans] drive along the roads they don’t let anyone overtake them,” Mr Shinwari said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re transporting a dead body or a sick woman to hospital. Even if they get a puncture or break down, if it takes one hour or two days, they don’t let anybody overtake them.”
As The Times drove east yesterday from Jalalabad, the capital of Nangahar province, along tree-lined avenues flanked by orange groves, our car swerved on to the hard shoulder a few miles from the main Shinwar bazaar. A green laser from an American weapon flashed across our chests.
Drivers here have learnt the hard way. You pull over and stop to let the American convoys pass. It is a far cry from General Stanley McChrystal’s strategy of protecting the people.
The villagers’ complaints underline the difficulty that foreign forces face in trying to win over a wary population. Most US soldiers look at Shinwar and see a deathtrap, full of roadside bombs and Taleban ambushes.
Fazil Hakim, 36, a friend of Mr Shinwari, insisted that security in the area was fine. The only risk, he said, was being caught up in an attack against the Americans. “Wherever the troops are there’s instability. They bring problems with them,” he said.
Mr Shinwari added: “They should just stay in their bases. More troops won’t bring peace. We need economic development, not soldiers.”
Gerard Russell, a former British political attaché in Kabul, warned that the big foreign presence was hindering the Afghan Government. “There are many disadvantages to having foreign troops on the front line,” he said. “It’s holding the Afghans back and saving them from the need to solve their problems themselves. Until the Government realises this is a fight for its own survival it won’t make the tough decisions, and they won’t realise that as long as we [the international community] are in the way.”
Mr Karzai promised much yesterday: a complete handover of security control within five years, more roads and railways, a crackdown on corruption, plans to negotiate with the Taleban and for at least 40 per cent of foreign aid to be spent through his administration. He reiterated the need to eliminate civilian casualties at the hands of Nato forces.
Mr Shinwari said that a US aid agency had levelled the road in his village but that the most valuable development project had come from the Afghan Government, which gave his village almost $50,000 to improve an irrigation canal.
Afghans say President Karzai's five-year handover is not soon enough - Times Online
