The Story of Malalai Joya

Malalai Joya, a 30 year old women’s rights activist in Afghanistan, has been recently interviewed by Johann Hari. Though below is actually a condensed version of her story, it is long but worth reading!

Joya was four days old when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. On that day, her father dropped out of his studies to fight the invading Communist army, and vanished into the mountains. She says: “Since then, all we have known is war.”

Her earliest memory is of clinging to her mother’s legs while policemen ransacked their house looking for evidence of where her father was hiding. Her illiterate mother tried to keep her family of 10 children alive as best she could. When the police became too aggressive, she took her kids to refugee camps across the border in Iran. In these filthy tent-cities lying on the old Silk Road, Afghans huddled together and were treated as second-class citizens by the Iranian regime. At night, wild animals could wander into the tents and attack children. There, word reached the family that Joya’s father had been blown up by a landmine – but he was alive, after losing a leg.

There were no schools in the Iranian camps, and Joya’s mother was determined her daughters would receive the education she never had. So they fled again, to camps in western Pakistan. There, Joya began to read – and was transformed. “Tell me what you read and I shall tell you what you are,” she says. Starting in her early teens, she inhaled all the literature she could – from Persian poetry to the plays of Bertolt Brecht to the speeches of Martin Luther King. She began to teach her new-found literacy to the older women in the camps, including her own mother.

She soon discovered that she loved to teach – and, when she turned 16, a charity called the Organisation for Promoting Afghan Women’s Capabilities (OPAWC) made a bold suggestion: go to Afghanistan, and set up a secret school for girls, under the noses of the Taliban tyranny.

So she gathered her few clothes and books and was smuggled across the border – and “the best days of my life” began. She loathed being forced to wear a burka, being harassed on the streets by the omnipresent “vice and virtue” police, and being under constant threat of being discovered and executed. But she says it was worth it for the little girls. “Every time a new girl joined the class, it was a triumph,” she says, beaming. “There is no better feeling.”

She only just avoided being caught, again and again. One time she was teaching a class of girls in a family’s basement when the mother of the house yelled down suddenly: “Taliban! Taliban!” Joya says: “I told my students to lie down on the floor and stay totally silent. We heard footsteps above us and waited a long time.” On many occasions, ordinary men and women – anonymous strangers – helped her out by sending the police charging off in the wrong direction. She adds: “Every day in Afghanistan, even now, hundreds if not thousands of ordinary women act out these small gestures of solidarity with each other. We are our sisters’ keepers.”

The charity was so impressed with her they appointed her their director. Joya decided to set up a clinic for poor women just before the 9/11 attacks. When the American invasion began, the Taliban fled her province, but the bombs kept falling. “Many lives were needlessly lost, just like during the September 11 tragedy,” she says. “The noise was terrifying, and children covered their ears and screamed and cried. Smoke and dust rose and lingered in the air with every bomb dropped.”

As soon as the Taliban retreated, they were replaced – by the warlords who had ruled Afghanistan immediately before. Joya says that, at this point, “I realised women’s rights had been sold out completely… Most people in the West have been led to believe that the intolerance and brutality towards women in Afghanistan began with the Taliban regime. But this is a lie. Many of the worst atrocities were committed by the fundamentalist mujahedin during the civil war between 1992 and 1996. They introduced the laws oppressing women followed by the Taliban – and now they were marching back to power, backed by the United States. They immediately went back to their old habit of using rape to punish their enemies and reward their fighters.”

The warlords “have ruled Afghanistan ever since,” she adds. While a “showcase parliament has been created for the benefit of the US in Kabul”, the real power “is with these fundamentalists who rule everywhere outside Kabul”. As an example, she names the former governor of Herat, Ismail Khan. He set up his own “vice and virtue” squads which terrorised women and smashed up video and music cassettes. He had his own “private militias, private jails”. The constitution of Afghanistan is irrelevant in these private fiefdoms.

Joya discovered just what this meant when she started to set up the clinic – and a local warlord announced that it would not be allowed, since she was a woman, and a critic of fundamentalism. She did it anyway, and decided to fight this fundamentalist by running in the election for the Loya jirga (“meeting of the elders”) to draw up the new Afghan constitution. There was a great swelling of support for this girl who wanted to build a clinic – and she was elected. “It turned out my mission,” she says, “would be to expose the true nature of the jirga from within.”

As she stepped past the world’s television cameras into the Loya jirga, the first thing Joya saw was “a long row with some of the worst abusers of human rights that our country had ever known – warlords and war criminals and fascists”.

She could see the men who invited Osama bin Laden into the country, the men who introduced the misogynist laws later followed by the Taliban, the men who had massacred Afghan civilians. Some had got there by intimidating the electorate, others by vote-rigging, and yet more were simply appointed by Hamid Karzai, the former oilman installed by the US army to run the country. She thought of an old Afghan saying: “It’s the same donkey, with a new saddle.”

For a moment, as these old killers started to give long speeches congratulating themselves on the transition to democracy, Joya felt nervous. But then, she says, “I remembered the oppression we face as women in my country, and my nervousness evaporated, replaced by anger.”

When her turn came, she stood, looked around at the blood-soaked warlords on every side, and began to speak. “Why are we allowing criminals to be present here? They are responsible for our situation now… It is they who turned our country into the centre of national and international wars. They are the most anti-women elements in our society who have brought our country to this state and they intend to do the same again… They should instead be prosecuted in the national and international courts.”

These warlords – who brag about being hard men – could not cope with a slender young woman speaking the truth. They began to shriek and howl, calling her a “prostitute” and “infidel”, and throwing bottles at her. One man tried to punch her in the face. Her microphone was cut off and the jirga descended into a riot.

… US and Nato occupiers instructed Joya that she must show “politeness and respect” for the other delegates. When Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador, said this, she replied: “If these criminals raped your mother or your daughter or your grandmother, or killed seven of your sons, let alone destroyed all the moral and material treasure of your country, what words would you use against such criminals that will be inside the framework of politeness and respect?”

…

So she ran for parliament – and won in a landslide. “I would return again to face those who had ruined my country,” she explains, “and I was determined that I would stand straight and never bow again to their threats.”

…

Joya looked out across the new Afghan parliament on her first day and thought: “In every corner is a killer, a puppet, a criminal, a drug lord, a fascist. This is not democracy. I am one of the very few people here who has been genuinely elected.” She started her maiden speech by saying: “My condolences to the people of Afghanistan…”

Before she could continue, the warlords began to shout that they would rape and kill her. One warlord, Abdul Sayyaf, yelled a threat at her. Joya looked him straight in the eye and said: “We are not in [the area he rules by force] here, so control yourself.”

…

But she was not allowed to raise these issues in the supposedly democratic parliament. The fundamentalist warlords who couldn’t beat Joya at the ballot box or kill her chanced upon a new way to silence her. The more she spoke, the angrier they got. She called for secularism in Afghanistan, saying: “Religion is a private issue, unrelated to political issues and the government… Real Muslims do not require political leaders to guide them to Islam.” She condemned the new law that declared an amnesty for all war crimes committed in Afghanistan over the past 30 years, saying “You criminals are simply giving yourselves a get-out-of-jail free card.” So the MPs simply voted to kick her out of parliament.

It was illegal and undemocratic – but the President, Hamid Karzai, supported the ban. “Now the warlord criminals are unchallenged in parliament,” she says. “Is that democracy?”

…

Today, she fights for democracy outside parliament. But, she says, any Afghan democrat today is “trapped between two enemies. There are the occupation forces from the sky, dropping cluster bombs and depleted uranium, and on the ground there are the fundamentalist warlords and the Taliban, with their own guns.” She wants to help the swelling movement of ordinary Afghans in between, who are opposed to both. “With the withdrawal of one enemy, the occupation forces, it [will be] easier to fight against these internal fundamentalist enemies.”

If she were president of Afghanistan, she would begin by referring all the country’s war criminals to the International Court of Justice at the Hague. “Anybody who has murdered my sisters and brothers should be punished,” she says, “from the Taliban, to the warlords, to George W Bush.” Then she would ask all foreign troops to leave immediately. She says that it is wrong to say Afghanistan will simply collapse into civil war if that happens. “What about the civil war now? Today, people are being killed – many, many war crimes. The longer the foreign troops stay in Afghanistan doing what they are doing, the worse the eventual civil war will be for the Afghan people.”

[To read the full story click here]

Malalai Joya is an impressive, courageous and admirable woman, putting many of us to shame. Her courage in standing up to Afghan warlords and defending women’s rights has put her in danger of being killed by the warlords. Not only did she set up a secret underground school for girls in the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, but has also recently run for parliament to fight the religious fundamentalists and warlords currently in power – power that has been granted by Bush’s government. She now moves between different safe houses, never staying in the same place for more than two nights.

Western forces currently fighting in Afghanistan against the Taliban, as many argue, are doing so to fight ‘an enemy which is a threat to all non-Islamist countries’ [see A. M. Hitchens blog on Afghanistan]. All nation states in the international system act ultimately to serve their own national self interest. Fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan eliminates the terrorist threat posed to the West, which of course is necessary and justifiable.

However, to quote Joya, “Dust has been thrown into the eyes of the world by your governments. You have not been told the truth. The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women. Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords. [That is] what your soldiers are dying for.”

The deeply moving story of Malalai Joya highlights that the West should not only be fighting in Afghanistan to protect its citizens, but should help in implementing justice for the Afghan people; justice that they so desperately seek and deserve.