Afghan Women's Mission

Published in New Standard News

An interview with journalist and activist Sonali Kolhatkar by Julie Sabatier

TNS Interview: Sonali Kolhatkar is a journalist and also the co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a group that helps raise funds for schools, orphanages and other program led by Afghan women.

Sonali Kolhatkar is co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a group that helps raise funds for schools, orphanages and other program led by Afghan women. She also hosts the popular radio show Uprising on Pacifica Radio’s KPFK in Los Angeles. Kolhatkar was trained as an astronomer, but made a career shift six years ago to writing, radio and activism. Reporter Julie Sabatier interviewed Kolhatkar for The NewStandard last week.

TNS: You’ve done work in so many different activist campaigns, from Free Mumia to the anti-WTO movement. How did you decide to focus so much time and energy on the women of Afghanistan?

SK: In a way, Afghanistan found me. I got a chain e-mail in 2000 about the Taliban’s mistreatment of Afghan women. I started doing research and found the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). I was so inspired by these women, and I went down the street to a coffee shop and just cried and wondered if I was wasting my time working for [California Institute of Technology] and NASA. I contacted RAWA and asked them, ‘What can I do? How can I help?’ They said they needed a legal way for people to make donations from the US.

TNS: You’ve criticized the US media for neglecting Afghanistan, and have noted many problems mainstream media outlets have ignored, including dismally low employment rates for women, lack of healthcare in rural areas and the threats independent Afghan journalists face. Why do you think these issues have been underreported? How does the coverage compare to that of Iraq?

SK: Mainstream journalists ñ and to some extent alternative journalists ñ have not known how to wrap their mind around Afghanistan. Although there was a lot of coverage after 9/11, it didn’t help to explain the oppression of Afghan women. After the war with Iraq began, it was like Game Over. Now, people are seeing the violence increase in Afghanistan and they don’t understand it. The media didn’t explain that it was not a success story over there. For the first time in Afghan history, you see suicide bombers in the country.

People don’t understand the fury and the violence there. When Kabul exploded in anti-US riots, people didn’t know why. The media has really failed because there is no explanation in their coverage about why Afghanistan is erupting in flames once more.

No one is catching the fact that the US worked with drug lords; it’s such an obvious story that people are missing.

The focus is on Iraq because US troops are in Iraq and in order to really portray the truth that Afghanistan was not this success story, the media would have to admit their own failures to make connections early on. I think the alternative media is guilty of it, too.

TNS: How did you start writing about these issues? What is the best way to counter tepid reporting in other countries, and in the US as well?

SK: I don’t know if there’s necessarily one way. Because of the Internet and the advancements in technology, I think alternative media is a very good tool to counter mainstream media. You can really get a huge audience.

And there’s definitely something to be said for trying to subvert the mainstream from the inside. It’s amazing how far you can get by covering investigative stories and doing it the right way with fact-checking and research and going places that other journalists aren’t. I have a lot of respect for those mainstream journalists who are pushing those limits and being subversive by being good journalists. People should just keep speaking out as much as they can. The more we speak out, the safer all of us are.

TNS: In your criticisms of media coverage, you specifically note the inaccurate portrayals of women in Afghanistan and Pakistan, countries you have traveled to. What do you think the media has missed about the lives of these women? What are their greatest challenges?

SK: I think the main thing that they’ve missed is that most Afghan women live in grinding poverty. What good is a right not to wear a burqa if you can’t put food on your table? Many people still wear the burqa for a lot of reasons, but a lot of women wear it out of shame to cover their rags that expose how poor they are. They have no jobs, no literacy. Between 4 and 10 percent of Afghan women can read and write.

There are some really, really extreme issues like honor killings, women being jailed because of adultery, women burning themselves to death. There was a woman last year, Amina, who was stoned to death. Boy, did the media miss that one. There was no uproar.

The poverty issue is not a sexy issue. It’s not dramatic; it’s more abstract, more elusive and there’s no easy fix to it. Afghanistan was one of the world’s poorest countries before 9/11 and it is still one of the poorest countries.

TNS: Other than RAWA, the women-led organization that the Afghan Women’s Mission Project helps raise funds for, are there others forms of empowerment and independence that are growing on a grassroots level?

SK: I think there are many, many pockets of that. There are so many efforts that we don’t know about until we go there because they don’t have websites. On the smallest levels, women are empowering themselves through cooperatives all over the country. I read a story about some women who started a mine-clearance project ñ three women who saw some children get killed by a cluster bomb. I feel from what I’ve seen, from what I’ve read, that those small acts of resistance and courage are happening all over the place. That’s RAWA’s approach ñ that no one is going to liberate them, they have to liberate themselves ñ and what we need to do is get our government off their backs.

TNS: Do you see the election of women like Malalai Joya to parliament in Afghanistan as a sign of progress in the region?

SK: Well, yes and no. When I was there last February, it was amazing to see how excited people were about the idea of democracy. I wanted to dismiss it as a sham, but I could not deny the pride and joy I saw in people’s faces. It was such an exciting exercise because most Afghan people have not had the chance [to vote] outside of the cities in a very long time.

When the presidential elections happened, people were thrilled. That was just really amazing to see. They chose Hamid Karzai, and I wanted to understand that. They know he’s a US puppet, but he’s not a warlord. In Afghanistan, people wanted anyone but the warlords. After the election, he completely turned around and started appointing all these warlords to high positions and the people got very, very cynical and the parliamentary elections had a much lower turnout.

Malalai was elected because she was so well-loved. Her victory on the one hand is a sign that there is a possibility for democracy and people are hungry for it. Democracy doesn’t just mean elections. Until there is justice, that seed of democracy that was planted will not be allowed to grow in Afghanistan.

TNS: How did you form the Afghan Women’s Mission Project and how has it grown since then?

SK: We officially started in [the] summer of 2000. My colleagues and I started writing and researching more about Afghanistan and the US involvement with the Taliban. We did some teach-ins and slowly, slowly, the attention and donations were increasing. Our goal was to re-open a hospital that RAWA had been running until they ran out of money.

Then 9/11 happened and donations started pouring in like rain. Within a month, we had enough to reopen the hospital. I think in that one year, we raised over a million dollars. Our main focus for the past two years has been to write a book, Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords and the Propaganda of Silence, which will be published by Seven Stories Press in the fall.

TNS: How does the Afghan Women’s Mission project collaborate with RAWA? What role does RAWA play in the lives of women in the country? How far is their reach?

SK: RAWA has about 2,000 active members and they are the oldest women’s organization in Afghanistan. Because they are so outspoken, they are also very much underground. RAWA has to operate stealthily. If they are in a province where they have support, they are so beloved in the community. At the same time, their uncompromising stand on women’s issues and secular government means that some people see them as sometimes too radical.

Our relationship to RAWA is very important. We don’t tell them how to run their organization and we see funding them as a form of activism. We take their lead and they inform us on their needs. The money we raise is their money. We think that is a very important approach. We want to empower these women. We want them to lead. We don’t want to interfere with them. It turns the tables on the power dynamic between privileged countries and third world countries. Our government has taken so much away from the country and what we are doing is trying to compensate for that in whatever small way we can. We are grateful to them for allowing us to try and salvage our conscience and make up for these wrongs.

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Sonali Kolhatkar is a journalist and also the co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission.

Read the original article here.

A recent fight in the legislature leads some to wonder whether Afghanistan is ready for civilised discourse.

By Jean MacKenzie and Wahidullah Amani in Kabul (ARR No. 216, 17-May-06)

Afghanistan’s legislature appears to have taken on the aspect of the national sport, buzkashi ñ a colourful if brutal game which from the outside looks like a scrum of violent horsemen dragging around a headless goat carcass, intent on doing each other bodily harm.

The lawmakers seem to have been behaving much the same lately, minus the horses, of course. And with female deputies in place of the goat.

A scuffle last week in which a female deputy was attacked with water bottles and allegedly threatened with a knife shows that Afghanistan has a lot to learn about parliamentary procedure.

The fracas started during a budget debate on May 8. Haji Almas, a delegate from Parwan province and a prominent local militia commander, interrupted proceedings to complain about recent criticism of the mujahedin, the “holy warriorsî who had just celebrated the 14th anniversary of their victory over the communist regime with great fanfare and ceremony.

The festivities sparked the usual grumbling from members of the public about the excesses of the civil war which followed the 1992 communist defeat, and which tore the country apart. They blame the mujahedin for wreaking untold destruction and killing thousands of their fellow countrymen.

But Haji Almas insisted that a few negative remarks should not be allowed to cast a shadow over the accomplishments of his fellow mujahedin commanders.

Haji Almas’s tirade prompted an outburst from Malalai Joya, the young firebrand from Farah province who has been the scourge of the mujahedin since the Constitutional Loya Jirga in 2003, when she publicly called for warlords to be put on trial.

In parliament, she again lashed out at the mujahedin, saying, “There are two types of mujahedin – one who were really mujahed [holy warriors], and the second, those who killed tens of thousands of innocent people and who are criminals.î

At this, several members of parliament began hurling water bottles at her, and then rushed her. Several very unflattering terms were thrown at her along with the bottles ñ amounting to a grave insult in a conservative Muslim society.

Abdul Rabb Rasul Sayyaf, a prominent parliamentarian and former faction commander, reportedly said that describing the mujahedin as criminals should itself be a crime.

Joya later accused Sayyaf of calling for her to be attacked with a knife. She also claimed, in interviews widely quoted in the media, that some parliamentarians had called for her to be raped.

The incident was broadcast repeatedly on the popular Tolo TV, whose cameraman was struck by one of the enraged mujahedin turned politicians.

Afghanistan’s parliament has more than its share of problems. Ethnic, linguistic and regional divisions create tensions within the body, and historical grievances make it difficult for various factions to sit under the same roof.

Now added to the mix is one of the most explosive and least tractable issues – gender. Women in parliament are more than a little upset with the men, especially the former mujahedin, whom they see as a misogynistic bunch intent on keeping them down.

“Men can say whatever they want in parliament,î said Shukria Esakhel, a deputy from Baghlan province. “They don’t give women a chance to speak. If a man had said [what Malalai did], there wouldn’t have been a problem.”

Malalai should, however, be a bit more circumspect, she advised.

“We can’t say that all mujahedin are criminalsî she said. “Lots of them fought for liberty, and now we have freedom in our country. But some of them were not real mujahedin; they destroyed houses and killed people. However, we should not bring these issues into parliament.î

Still, nothing could justify the reaction that greeted Joya\’s statements, said Esakhel.

“I am very angry that they threw bottles at Malalai. It is as if they are throwing bottles at all Afghan women. It means they do not respect women.î

Fatima Aziz, who represents Kunduz in northeastern Afghanistan, agreed.

“They have shamed themselves in front of the people,î she said of the misbehaving members of parliament. “It is against our tradition and our constitution to throw things at women.

“The mujahedin are the source of the trouble in parliament.î

This kind of talk is not likely to appease the former mujahedin, who are notoriously sensitive to criticism.

“If we are talking about crimes, then we should start with the communist regime,î said Fazlullah Mojadeddi, a former governor and commander from Logar province who now sits in parliament. “When it comes to the mujahedin, I am the first to be prepared to answer for what I did.

“If anyone is talking about criminals, they should first talk about themselves and their families, and say what they did during the jihad.î

Mojadeddi dismissed any suggestion that the ex-mujahedin were against women.

“I deny completely that the mujahedin are trying to keep women quiet,î he said angrily. “The mujahedin were 80 per cent of the Constitutional Loya Jirga, and they gave 68 seats in parliament to women.î

But Mojadeddi is bitter about those, like Malalai Joya, who air their grievances in public.

“There are people who just want to be famous,î he said. “When they see a television camera, they start saying things that are not true, just for their own purposes. Malalai is always saying things like that. We mujahedin think there are people on the outside telling her to say these things, so as to make us look bad.î

Other jihad-era leaders were more balanced.

“I am against both sides,î said Mustafa Qazemi. “I am a mujahed, but I cannot condone this kind of behaviour. There are those who are taking advantage of the name of jihad, and there are those who are taking advantage of the name of democracy.

“We need a good culture in parliament, and we should not use it for our own ends.î

In a boost for Afghan reporters’ rights, Qazemi added, “As for the man who hit the Tolo journalist ñ anyone who hits a journalist is inhuman and has no brain.î

Malalai Joya has been defiant in the face of repeated threats. She told Tolo TV in an exclusive interview: “This is my voice, and I will continue for as long as I live.î

When asked whether she had proof of her allegations that the jihadi leaders were criminals, she grew heated.

“This is my message to them. The country is the proof, the people are the proof. Your hands are stained with blood,î she said. “My life itself is a history. War, crime and misfortuneÖ women’s rights are being endangered. That is why I cannot sit quietly.î

The attack on parliament sparked a walkout of female members. On May 9, they boycotted the parliamentary session for several hours, until the speaker, Younus Qanuni, himself a prominent figure from the mujahedin era, apologised.

“There were about 30 or 40 of us,î said Shukria Paikan Ahmadi, a deputy from Kunduz. “The mujahedin are always intimidating us and we can’t say what we want. When one of the women was speaking, a commander from Herat told her to be quiet, otherwise they’d do to her what they did to Malalai.î

The boycott lasted for just a few hours, but the bitterness remains.

“The warlords are a majority in parliament,î said Ahmadi. “And even though they are all from different factions, in this they are together. They are all against us, against the women.î

Ahmadi described as “savageî the behaviour of those who attacked Joya and insisted that if there was a repetition, the women would take more drastic action.

“We cannot accept this,î she said. “We just do not have the patience. It would be better to leave parliament forever.î

Jean MacKenzie is IWPR’s country director. Wahidullah Amani is an IWPR staff reporter in Kabul.

Despite threats to her life and angering her fellow lawmakers, an Afghan woman is on a quest to rid parliament of warlords.

By JASON STRAZIUSO

Associated Press

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – A young female Afghan lawmaker who once called powerful tribal leaders “criminals” and complained publicly last week there are warlords among parliament members now sleeps in a different house every night after a fresh influx of death threats.

Malalai Joya, 28, says her mission is to improve women’s rights and expose criminal lawmakers in Afghanistan.

She says she will continue to speak out despite any danger.

Joya received worldwide attention after first making comments against former warlords at Afghanistan’s constitutional council in December 2003.

Last week, she was given her first extended chance to speak in parliament since being elected in October, she said.

“I thought it’s good to expose warlords, even in the national house,” the lawmaker said on Saturday.

“When I came into parliament they understood I was this person that I was two years before.”

After her speech May 7 calling some lawmakers warlords, former mujahedeen leader Alam Khan Ezadi stood up and asked the parliament leader why someone was allowed to insult the mujahedeen, “who sacrificed their lives to defeat the Soviets, to defeat terrorism.”

Then other former mujahedeen leaders ­ many of whom are accused of committing human rights abuses against Afghan civilians ­ started shouting and walked out.

A few lawmakers threw plastic water bottles at Joya, and a small scuffle broke out between her supporters and detractors. No one was hurt, but Joya said deep insults were shouted at her.

“They said, ‘We will rape her.’ They said that in parliament,” she said.

She said she overheard other mujahedeen lawmakers saying that the outcry would prevent anyone from speaking out against former warlords in parliament again.

Ezadi, the former mujahedeen leader from Mazar-e-Sharif, denied that anyone in parliament said Joya should be raped or that any sort of insult was shouted at her. But he said the walkout was warranted.

“We are worrying about the unity of the national house,” he said.

“The mujahedeen are not small people. We fought against the Soviets, against al-Qaida. The people of Afghanistan, they voted for us to be in parliament. We did not come here by ourselves,” he said.

He said that no mujahedeen have ever threatened Joya with death.

“We are Muslim. We never want to kill anyone, to have blood on our hands,” he said.

Joya said she can’t keep track of the number of death threats she’s received since her first speech to the constitutional council in 2003, but that several new ones were called in to her office last week.

In her speech, Joya distinguished between the “good” mujahedeen, those that helped Afghanistan win its freedom from the Soviet invasion in the 1980s, and the mujahedeen who committed crimes for power and money.

She hopes that some of the warlords will one day have to face trial, as a “healing” of the nation’s injuries.

In the meantime, she said, she will keep speaking out.

“They know very well I will never be silent. I will never be afraid,” she said. “We will all die someday.”

Read the original article here.

Canadians needs to “undo the damage”: visiting activist

by Dru Oja Jay

MONTREAL–In the midst of a public debate about Canadian troops in Afghanistan, a Montreal audience heard a stark message about what the majority of Afghani people want, but aren’t getting from occupying forces: disarmament, justice and reparations.

Sonali Kolhatkar, co-director of the US-based Afghan Women’s Mission, and radio host on Los Angeles’ KPFK Pacifica Radio, was the messenger.

“Afghanistan,” Kolhatkar told a crowd at Montreal’s Sala Rosa, “is a broken country,” that has “endured decades of continuous war.” Much of that war, said Kolhatkar, was funded by “billions and billions of dollars” from the US, which trained, funded and armed the fundamentalist Mujahideen to fight against Soviet forces. After the Soviets left, the well-equipped warlords fought amongst each other, brutalizing populations with killings, rape and oppression of women. This violence was simply “formalized” by the Taliban when they seized power in 1996 with promises of a reprieve from war and corruption, said Kolhatkar. While the autocratic Islamist regime provided some stability, it also systematized the oppression of women in Afghanistan.

“The rapes of Afghan women, the forced marriages, all of that started under [what is today known as] the Northern Alliance.

“The Taliban institutionalized into law, in a more organized fashion what the Northern Alliance and the Mujahideen had already begun. What the Taliban did was the same, but with less killing. [The two] are ideological twins,” said Kolhatkar.

The Northern Alliance, of course, was a key ally in the US-led 2002 invasion of Afghanistan, receiving additional millions in arms and financing from the US government.

Today, Kolhatkar told The Dominion, many of the feared warlords occupy high offices in Afghanistan’s government and benefit from US and Canadian aid.

What nearly all Afghans agree on, said Kolhatkar, is that democracy and security cannot be achieved without disarmament; “Survey after survey shows that they want disarmament.

“This is something people brought up over and over again [during Kolhatkar’s recent visit]. ‘We want pens not guns, pens not guns.'”

There is a UN program, known as Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR), but Kolhatkar says it is “very underfunded, very selective and not at all comprehensive.”

“People want absolute and complete disarmament,” she said.

The International Crisis Group, a research NGO, reported in February that the central government and its international supporters have, to some extent, been complicit in the maintenance of power by militia commanders. The US-led coalition has relied on militia commanders in its military operations against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, empowering its local allies militarily and economically and helping them to resist central government control.

Kolhatkar proposed that the US and its allies need to reverse this policy. However, she insists that disarmament is only the first step towards reconstruction.

“Many people identify as victims of war crimes and they want some sort of war crimes tribunal,” said Kolhatkar. “Not,” she added, “of the kind that the US has carried out in the former Yugoslavia or in Iraq, but something that is led by Afghans, that is created by Afghans, but that simply needs some sort of foreign support.

“If you have justice and take these men to court, you might also have to indict [US presidents] Carter and Reagan and the men who supported these warlords.

“[A war crimes tribunal] is something that Canada, the UN and NATO could at least support,” she added.

Kolhatkar also criticized one-sided North American media coverage of Afghanistan, saying that few journalists venture outside of Kabul, where the country’s minimal wealth is heavily concentrated and where warlords are not in control. She also cited the little-heard-of case of Malalai Joya, an Afghan woman, who interrupted the loya jirga (a constitutional forum) to point out the Mujahideen warlords in attendance and their responsibility for the civil war that destroyed what was left of Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. For this, and subsequent acts of bravery, she has been the victim of four assassination attempts and countless demeaning insults and death threats, but she has also received enormous grassroots support. Now a member of parliament, she often says she does not expect to live out the year. The Canadian- and US-backed Karzai administration removed funding to her security detail in March, but the North American press ignored her story in favour of a man sentenced to death for converting to Christianity, said Kolhatkar.

What can be done?

“This is a crucial moment for Canadians to be questioning the war, but I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘troops out now,'” said Kolhatkar. Most Afghans, she said, believe that if troops leave, the result will be deadly: “The warlords that we armed will plunge the country into another war and tear the country apart, piece by piece.”

However, Kolhatkar believes that the conflicting messages coming from Canadian commanders—alternately, “our job is to kill people” and “winning hearts and minds”–are damaging, and their actions are making things worse. Military “Provincial Reconstruction Teams” (PRTs), she said, are an extremely ineffective and expensive way to rebuild infrastructure. Additionally, Kolhatkar said the existence of PRTs has made all aid workers potential targets for Taliban attacks, as they are no longer distinguishable from the military. She cites the case of M_decins Sans Fronti_res (MSF), which pulled out of Afghanistan after maintaining a constant presence for over two decades and three wars. MSF said that the situation is now too dangerous for its workers.

The fact that US-funded warlords are as powerful as ever “does not justify our war fighting, or really even our presence, but the damage has been done.”

“Canadians need to call for an undoing of the damage,” she said.

In addition to disarmament and justice for warlords and criminals, Kolhatkar said that the US, Canada and their allies must pay reparations to the people of Afghanistan.

“We need to pour just as many billions of dollars into rebuilding the country as we put into destroying it.” Kolhatkar said that Afghans need “no-strings-attached reparations, not loans.”

In Afghanistan, Canada’s annual military budget is roughly four times as large as its aid budget.

The aid money that is being spent in Afghanistan either “goes into the warlords’ pockets, because they’re the ones in charge,” or it goes to expensive and often misguided Western firms or NGOs.

Kolhatkar cited one instance where a foreign NGO used aid money to dig 100 wells in the Farah province. The only problem: “within a year, the wells dried up.” The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), a group that Kolhatkar works closely with, later went in to speak to farmers, who had begun fighting over scarce water resources. They realized that the best solution was to build a canal that would divert the water equitably through all of the villages.

“They built a canal with funds from donors in the US, through the Afghan Women’s Mission,” said Kolhatkar. “I visited that canal last year, and now the area is getting enough water to irrigate farms that feed 35,000 people.

“Ultimately, the Afghan people know best how to rebuild their country. They don’t need our expertise, they don’t need our advice, but they need money.

“It’s really crucial for us to figure out how we can best support grassroots organizations in Afghanistan that are doing the hard work of rebuilding.”

According to Kolhatkar, there are hundreds of groups, experts and local councils that are struggling to build schools and hospitals, provide education (especially to women), resist warlords and find alternative work for farmers who are forced to grow opium poppy to feed their families.

For now, she said, the situation remains grave for the majority of Afghans who live outside of Kabul, with literacy rates between four and 10 per cent, debilitating poverty, insecurity, rule by feuding warlords and war-ravaged infrastructure.

“There is a sense that the war is over, that we just need to mop up the insurgents and that women are liberated and on their way to freedom.

“Because media coverage has gone down, donations have literally plummeted and groups have been forced to close down schools, orphanages and literacy projects,” she said.

The solution, Kolhatkar told a few hundred Montrealers, is not for Canada to withdraw, but to begin to take responsibility for its actions and rebuild the country that has suffered so much at the hands of foreign powers.

Read the original article here.

“I speak the words that many Afghans are afraid to say in public”

San Francisco Chronicle, March 28, 2006

Halima Kazem, Special to The Chronicle

Lacing her trembling fingers around a cup of green tea, Malalai Joya lowers her voice and explains, “Every day as I am leaving the Parliament building in Kabul, I wonder if someone is waiting outside to kill me.”

Joya has every reason to be fearful. The 27-year-old Afghan parliamentarian from the conservative province of Farah has received more than a hundred death threats. Sitting in a brightly lit Fremont coffee shop in a simple black suit with a red paisley scarf around her neck, she is thousands of miles from her home but unable to cease her cautious whispering.

“Every day I look into the eyes of warlords and commanders who have ordered the killings of hundreds or thousands of Afghans, and I wonder how they can be allowed to be the people’s representatives.”

Joya is one of 68 women in Afghanistan’s recently elected bicameral Parliament. She has endeared herself to millions of Afghans because of her candor — a trait that has earned her the title “the most famous woman in Afghanistan;” it also has made her a target of Afghan power brokers.

“I speak the words that many Afghans are afraid to say in public,” Joya says. “Sure, I get fearful sometimes, but I say to myself, ‘Joya, move beyond your fears and remember that your people have voted you in office to speak on their behalf.’ ”

As a middle child in a family of eight siblings, Joya is used to working to be heard. “When I was a small girl, I used to sneak into the men’s meetings and assemblies that my father would take part in, and everyone would try to kick me out,” remembers Joya, whose father, a former medical student, lost his leg while fighting the Soviets in the ’80s. “My father would see me sneak back in, and he would just shake his head and smile. He never differentiated between me and my brothers. That is a rare trait for an Afghan man.”

At age 14 she started working as a literacy teacher and food distributor inside the Pakistani refugee camp where her family lived. In 1998, Joya’s family moved back to Farah and she continued her humanitarian work there and in the neighboring province of Herat.

“During the Taliban, I would take medical supplies to families and secretly organize literacy courses for school-age girls,” she says.

So it didn’t come as a surprise when, in late 2003, village elders elected Joya as one of only two women to represent the province in the country’s first constitutional assembly in more than 30 years. “I was honored to be recognized, even by the men, as someone who deeply cared about bringing the faraway voices of Farah province to the capital, Kabul. After all, this is what democracy was about.”

However, in Kabul the eager delegate was introduced to a different kind of democracy building — one with self-interested international players, rampant corruption and an Afghan government made up of a hodgepodge of former warlords and commanders. Joya found herself facing the post-Taliban government’s central quagmire: how to exclude commanders who successfully fought off the Soviet Army but later turned on one another, ravaging the capital city, displacing millions and killing thousands of innocent people.

“I couldn’t take watching these warlords in the new government of Afghanistan, so on the first day of the assembly I stood up and asked the constitutional commission why these criminals were a part of the future of the country and not in an international court, being tried for war crimes.”

After a moment of shocked silence, she says the assembly blew up in desperate shouts of “Allah Akbar” (God is great) and called Joya an infidel. The assembly commissioner, a former mujahedeen himself, immediately demanded that Joya apologize for her accusations. When she refused, the flabbergasted commissioner asked the delegates to accept the apologies of other delegates on Joya’s behalf.

“I knew my words were strong, but I didn’t think they’d have such an impact. As I was speaking, all I could think about were the weeping mothers who had lost their sons and husbands in the war and all the hungry Afghan children waiting to die in the Pakistani refugee camps,” Joya says.

After the constitutional assembly, she returned to Farah province to a hero’s welcome. “Some people were sending death threats to my door, while others, especially women, would quietly approach me and from under their burqas whisper, ‘I support you, Malalai, you are my voice.’ ”

At that point there was no turning back. A year after her emphatic outburst at the constitutional assembly, she prepared to run for the lower house in Afghanistan’s parliamentary election. Despite countless attempts on her life and several periods of going into hiding, Joya prevailed in December 2005 as a winner from her native Farah province.

But she is still not satisfied. Despite the election of 67 other women to Parliament and the thousands of girls back in school, Joya insists that the lives of Afghan women haven’t changed much with the formation of the Karzai government.

“The situation has changed for only 1 percent of Afghan women; 99 percent still live under oppression, lawlessness and poor health conditions,” she says.

In a recent speech to the Afghan diaspora community in Fremont, Joya told the audience not to be fooled by the hype they hear about Afghanistan’s transition to a democracy.

“Today, 70 percent of our Parliament are warlords, and the Taliban also have leaders there,” says Joya. “Even with all of the U.S. troops in the country, this is the state of our Parliament.”

Calling it a masked democracy, Joya says President Hamid Karzai, U.S. leaders and most of the international agencies in Afghanistan are turning a blind eye to the drug dealers serving terms inside the government.

“People who look the other way when they see these war criminals are smaller criminals themselves,” Joya says.

Some in the audience in Fremont said they thought that Joya is not acting on her own but is pushing someone else’s political agenda. Others argued that her youth and lack of experience are hurting her efforts to bring change.

Joya says she understands that she hasn’t done everything the right way.

“Some of my elders tell me to be more diplomatic, but I don’t have time for diplomacy. I am from Afghanistan’s war generation. We’ve lost enough time.”

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“While Hashemi toured the US defending the public murder of unchaste women, Joya risked her life to teach girls.”

Yale Daily News , March 27, 2006 By James Kirchick, a senior in Pierson College

Malalai Joya, a member of Afghanistan’s parliament, delivers speech at Ventura College. “I only want to be a voice (for) my suffering people who were always silenced,” she says.

Rahmatullah Hashemi and Malalai Joya seemingly have much in common. Both are 27, come from the same region of Afghanistan and are interested in international relations. But the similarities between Hashemi, silver-tongued former spokesman for the Taliban, and Joya, one of the new Afghani Parliament’s youngest members, end there. Not long ago, while Hashemi toured the United States defending the public murder of unchaste women, Joya risked her life to teach girls — which at the time was a capital crime.

Visiting last week, Joya gave Yale a piece of her mind. Hashemi’s presence here is, to her, “disgusting” and an “unforgivable insult.” When I asked whether she believes herself to be more deserving of a place here than a former (and current) propagandist for the Taliban, she replied, without a trace of bitterness, “I am not jealous.” She has a country to rebuild and is working hard to do so. While she has survived several assassination attempts in the past four years and must travel with armed guards in Afghanistan, Hashemi noshes on the kosher offerings at the Slifka Center and defended the Taliban to the Times of London in an article three weeks ago. Joya does not have time for an American college education. “My people need me,” she says.

“Hashemi at first should face the court,” she told me, demanding he be brought to his native country and answer for his role in advancing the Taliban’s foreign policy goals so many years. Surprisingly for a man who loved the press so much five years ago — speaking before crowds at universities across the country, meeting with editorial boards of influential newspapers, appearing in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” — Hashemi has laid low since his tell-all profile was printed in the New York Times Magazine last month. But in the Times of London interview, Hashemi proved himself to be a morally glib apologist for religious authoritarians.

Asked about public executions in football stadiums, Hashemi said, “That was all vice and virtue stuff. There were also executions happening in Texas.” Irate that a Yale-issued textbook would relate his former employer to the terrorist group it sponsored and hosted in the run-up to Sept. 11, Hashemi complained, “They would say the Taliban were the same as al-Qaida.”

“This kind of germ does not belong in the U.S.,” Joya told me, and after having heard the few scraps of equivocation Hashemi has shared in the month since his front-page expose, I am inclined to agree. Had Joya been caught for her underground activities during the Taliban era, she probably would have been publicly executed and Hashemi would have defended her public murder. Correction: might still defend her public murder.

Former Yale Dean of Admissions Richard Shaw told the Times Magazine Hashemi “could educate us about the world.” Whether one believes Hashemi should be at Yale or not, his presence has been instructive in one way: It has caused a reckoning at Yale over the issue of cultural relativism.

Outrage over religious fascism ought to be the province of American liberals. But in Hashemi’s case it has been almost entirely trumpeted by Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and right-wing bloggers. A friend of mine recently remarked that part of his and his peers’ nonchalance (and in some cases, support for) Hashemi has to do with the fact that the right has seized upon the issue. Our politics have become so polarized that many are willing to take positions based on the inverse of their opponents’. This abandonment of classical liberal values at the expense of political gamesmanship has consequences that reach far beyond Yale; it hurts our national discourse.

In a bold declaration that she will, with any hope, one day come to regret, Della Sentilles ’06 wrote on her feminist Weblog, “Broad Recognition,” “As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist and repressive than another.” While I cringe at the implications of this, I applaud its honesty. It lays bare a method of thinking that is quite pervasive on our campus, and that many, if not most, students claim allegiance to. It is at once racist — for holding non-Westerners to a lower standard of behavior — and dangerous in its cold abandonment of those who suffer under totalitarian and theocratic regimes. “They shamelessly defer to oppressive religious and cultural norms in the name of respecting diversity, betraying the victims of oppression in the process,” British gay-rights activist and self-described “radical, left-wing Green” Peter Tatchell wrote of his comrades on the left who refused to condemn barbaric practices in Muslim societies. Joya has no problem saying Taliban Afghanistan was “more sexist and repressive than” the U.S. Why can’t Sentilles?

As with any spin doctor, it is difficult to discern what Hashemi thinks, so crafty is he with language. He is quite adept at getting what he wants from Westerners with guilt complexes, be they adventurous CBS cameramen, Ivy League admissions officers or self-professed “feminists.” Come this summer, if Yale refuses to accept Hashemi as a degree student, few of us will be sorry to see him go.

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She is strongly critical of U.S. support for her country’s new government

Opinion Journal, March 27, 2006

from The Wall Street Journal editorial page, by John H. Fund

NEW HAVEN, Conn.–The BBC calls Malalai Joya the most famous woman in Afghanistan. On Thursday the 27-year-old women’s rights activist, a member of the Afghan Parliament, mounted a stage at Yale and turned her fire on the university’s decision to admit a former Taliban official as a special student.

“All should raise their voice against such criminals,” she told a crowd of 200. “It is an unforgivable insult to the Afghan people that he is here. He should face a court of law rather than be at one of your finest universities.” The Yale Daily News reported that the large attendance at her speech showed that the former Taliban official “continues to be widely controversial.” Last night the Yale College Council, the undergraduate student government, began debating a resolution urging the university’s administration not to admit Mr. Hashemi as a regular sophomore in the fall.

Ms. Joya has standing to speak for Afghan women. She ran an underground school for women during the Taliban’s rule and today receives frequent death threats after giving speeches in Parliament against “fanatical warlords.” She is strongly critical of U.S. support for her country’s new government, which she claims is increasingly influenced by warlords, as evidenced by the now-abandoned attempt to try an Afghan named Abdul Rahman for the capital crime of converting to Christianity. “Why has $12 billion in foreign aid not made it to my suffering people?” she asked me during an interview. “Fraud and waste have largely diverted your aid to others.”

But it was her criticism of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the 27-year-old Taliban ambassador-at-large turned Yale student, that stuck in the minds of some audience members at a reception afterwards. “Before I was like, who cares if the guy was Taliban or not?” Yigit Dula, a sophomore from Turkey, told the Yale Daily News. “But it means a lot more to [Afghans] to have someone like Hashemi educated at Yale.” Aisha Amir, a physician who fled war-torn Afghanistan, told me she sympathized with the difficult choices people had to make to survive under the Taliban, but added that “there are so many more deserving Afghan students who belong in Hashemi’s place.”

Intrigued, I later called her up to get her full story. She left a refugee camp in Pakistan with her mother, Maroofa, and her four younger siblings in 2002. Like Mr. Hashemi she has only a high school equivalency degree, because schooling in the refugee camp was limited. Her mother can’t work and knows only basic English, so she and her sister Rona are the only means of support for the family beyond food stamps and $600 a month in housing assistance from the state.

At the time, no one knew what else the Taliban were doing in Bamiyan beyond blowing up Buddhas. Nearby, the Afghan video journalists found the remnants of the Hazara tribe. One survivor told them the Taliban had “tried to exterminate” the entire tribe, starting with the men.

Lecture focuses on women’s rights in Afghanistan, U.S. policy since fall of the Taliban

Yale Daily News , March 24, 2006

BY CARI TUNA, Staff Reporter

Malalai Joya speaking in the Ventura College in the USA

Malalai Joya, a member of Afghanistan’s parliament, delivers speech at Ventura College. “I only want to be a voice (for) my suffering people who were always silenced,” she says.

Female Afghan parliamentarian Malalai Joya criticized current U.S. policy in Afghanistan, as well as the presence of former Taliban spokesman and foreign ministry official Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi as a special non-degree student at Yale, both during and after her speech, “Women’s Rights, Warlords, and the U.S. Occupation of Afghanistan” on Thursday night.

The lecture, which was co-sponsored by the Yale Center for International and Area Studies and the Afghan Women’s Mission, drew a full crowd in Luce Hall Auditorium and was preceded by a documentary film addressing women’s rights in Afghanistan. Students at the event said Joya’s speech and ongoing campus debate over Hashemi’s enrollment indicate that his presence at Yale continues to be widely controversial, and the Yale College Council is considering a resolution urging that he not be allowed to enroll as a regular student.

Joya said there has been no fundamental change in democratization and women’s rights in Afghanistan since the defeat of the Taliban in 2001. She criticized the U.S. government for pursuing its own strategic interests in the region while supporting fundamentalist warlords who make Afghanistan “a hell for its people.”

“Afghanistan’s issue is not an easy issue,” she said. “I only want to be a voice for my suffering people who are always silenced.”

After her lecture, Joya delivered a statement about Hashemi’s enrollment. She said Hashemi was one of the Taliban’s top propagandists and called his status as a student at Yale “disgusting” and an “unforgivable insult.”

“Before he was a Talib, and now he is a student,” Joya said, holding up two pictures of Hashemi. “Is it democracy?”

The YCC is currently considering drafting a resolution to petition the University’s administration to deny Hashemi admission as a full-time student, YCC President Steven Syverud ’06 said Thursday. The idea was introduced to the council by former YCC representative Austin Broussard ’06, and current representatives are discussing the controversy via e-mail, YCC Vice President Marissa Brittenham ’07 said.

“We’ve opened the dialogue with the YCC representatives … to try and figure out where we stand on this issue,” she said.

After Joya’s lecture, students expressed a range of opinions about her statements.

Mina Alaghband ’08 said she was surprised that none of the questions that audience members asked Joya concerned Hashemi. She said that while Joya raised some important issues, she painted a too-bleak picture of contemporary Afghanistan.

“I think the perception we all have … is that while there are still problems there, they are taking steps toward democratization and religious rights,” Alaghband said.

Hyder Akbar ’08, a native of Afghanistan, said he was encouraged to hear a female politician from his home country speaking at Yale, and he was impressed by her candor, despite numerous attempts that have been made on her life.

“For me it is a source of pride to see somebody like her representing Afghanistan,” he said.

But Akbar also said he disagreed with Joya’s assertion that there has been no political or social progress made in the country since the fall of the Taliban.

Yigit Dula ’08 said he thinks the controversy surrounding Hashemi has not attracted enough attention on campus. He said Joya’s speech offered a valuable perspective on both the U.S.-backed regime currently in power in Afghanistan and the Hashemi issue.

“It was definitely biased and very emotional, but she made some good points,” he said. “Before I was like, who cares if the guy was Taliban or not? But it means a lot more to [Afghans] to have someone like Hashemi educated at Yale.”

Hashemi could not be reached for comment Thursday.

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