Afghan rights leader heartbroken after year of Taliban rule OLASMEDIA TV NEWSThis is what we have for you today:
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — A year after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, prominent Afghan rights activist Sima Samar is still heartbroken at what happened to her country.
Samar, a former minister of women’s affairs and the first chairman of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, left Kabul in July 2021 for the United States on her maiden voyage after the COVID-19 pandemic, without expecting Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to fled the country and the Taliban took power for the second time shortly after on August 15.
“I think it’s a sad birthday for the majority of people in my country,” Samar said, especially for the women “who don’t have enough to eat, who don’t know what the future holds for them.”
As a visiting researcher at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School, she has written the first draft of an autobiography and is working on a customary law policy paper for Afghan women. She’s also trying to get a green card, but she said, “I honestly can’t orient myself, where I am and what I’m doing.”
She wishes she could go home, but she can’t.
In an interview Friday with The Associated Press, she recalled a Taliban press conference a few days after they came to power when they said that if people apologized for past actions, they would be forgiven.
“And I said: I should apologize for starting schools for the people?” said Samar, a member of Afghanistan’s long-persecuted Hazara minority. “Should I apologize for starting hospitals and clinics in Afghanistan? Do I have to apologize for trying to stop the torture of the Taliban? I should apologize for advocating against the death penalty, including (for) the Taliban leadership?”
“All my life I have fought for life as a doctor,” she said. “So I cannot change and support the death penalty. I should not apologize for those principles of human rights and be punished.”
Samar became an activist as a 23-year-old medical student with a young son. In 1984, the then communist government arrested her activist husband, and she never saw him again. She fled to Pakistan with her son and worked as a doctor for Afghan refugees and started several clinics to care for Afghan women and girls.
Samar recalled the Taliban’s previous rule in the late 1990s, when they largely locked up women in their homes, banned television and music, and carried out public executions. A US-led invasion drove the Taliban from power months after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, which al-Qaida orchestrated from Afghanistan while protected by the Taliban.
After the ouster of the Taliban, Samar returned to Afghanistan where he held the highest positions in women’s and human rights, and over the next 20 years schools and universities were opened for girls, women increased the workforce and entered politics and became judges.
But Samar said in an AP interview in April 2021 — four months before the second Taliban takeover of the country — that profits were fragile and human rights activists had many enemies in Afghanistan, from militants and warlords to those seeking to suppress criticism or challenge their power.
Samar said the Afghan government and leadership, especially Ghani, were mainly responsible for the Taliban invading Kabul and taking power. But she also blamed the Afghans “because we were very divided.”
In every speech and interview she gave nationally and internationally over the years, she said that Afghans must be united and inclusive, and “we need the support of the people. Otherwise we lose.”
As chair of the Human Rights Commission, she said she had been repeatedly criticized for trying to impose Western values on Afghanistan.
“And I kept saying: human rights are not Western values. As a human being, everyone should have a shelter… access to education and health services, to security,” she said.
Since their takeover, the Taliban have limited public education for girls to just six years, restricted women’s work, encouraged them to stay at home and issued a dress code requiring them to cover their faces.
Samar pushed for international pressure not only to allow all girls to attend secondary school and university, but also to guarantee all interrelated human rights. And she emphasized the importance of education for young boys, who, without any education, job or skills, are at risk of becoming involved in opium production, arms smuggling or violence.
She also urged the international community to continue humanitarian programs critical to saving lives, but said they must focus on food for work or money for work to end total dependence on people and to give them “self-confidence and dignity. ”
Samar said Afghan society has changed over the past two decades, with greater access to technology, rising education levels among young people and some experience of elections, even if they were not free and fair.
She said such achievements leave the possibility of positive change in the future. “Those are the problems that they (the Taliban) cannot control,” she said. “They would like to, but they can’t.”
Samar said he hoped for eventual accountability and justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity. “Otherwise we feel the culture of impunity everywhere and everywhere – and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a repeat of the case of Afghanistan,” she said.
Her hope for Afghan women is that they can “live with dignity instead of being a slave to people”.