UNITED NATIONS –
A year after the Taliban took over Afghanistan, prominent Afghan rights activist Sima Samar is still heartbroken by what has happened to her country.
Samar, a former minister for women’s affairs and the first chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, left Kabul in July 2021 for the United States on her first trip after the COVID-19 pandemic, not expecting the president Afghan, Ashraf Ghani, to flee the country. and the Taliban to seize power for a second time shortly thereafter on August 15.
“I think it’s a sad anniversary for most people in my country,” Samar said, particularly for women “who don’t have enough food, who don’t know what tomorrow is for them.”
A visiting scholar at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard Kennedy School, she has written the first draft of an autobiography and is working on a policy paper on customary law relating to Afghan women. She is also trying to get a green card, but she said, “Honestly, I can’t get my bearings, where am I and what am I doing.”
She wishes she could go home, but she can’t.
In an interview Friday with The Associated Press, he recalled a Taliban news conference a few days after they took power when they said that if people apologized for past actions, they would be forgiven.
“And I said, should I apologize because I started schools for people?” said Samar, a member of Afghanistan’s long-persecuted Hazara minority. “Should I apologize for opening hospitals and clinics in Afghanistan? Should I apologize for trying to stop the Taliban’s torture? Should I apologize for advocating against the death penalty, including (for) Taliban leaders?”
“All my life I fought for life as a doctor,” he said. “So I can’t change and support the death penalty. I shouldn’t apologize for those human rights principles and be punished.”
Samar became an activist when she was 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 young son and worked as a doctor for Afghan refugees and opened several clinics to care for Afghan women and girls.
Samar recalled the previous Taliban rule in the late 1990s, when they largely confined women to their homes, banned television and music, and carried out public executions. A US-led invasion drove the Taliban from power months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which al Qaeda orchestrated from Afghanistan while protected by the Taliban.
After the overthrow of the Taliban, Samar returned to Afghanistan and held top women’s rights and human rights posts, and over the next 20 years schools and colleges were opened for girls, women entered the workforce and politics, and They became judges.
But Samar said in an AP interview in April 2021, four months before the Taliban’s second takeover of the country, that gains were fragile and that human rights activists had many enemies in Afghanistan, from militants and lords of the war to those who wanted to stifle criticism. or challenge his power.
Samar said the Afghan government and leaders, especially Ghani, were primarily responsible for the Taliban invading Kabul and seizing power. But he also blamed Afghans “because we were so divided.”
In every speech and interview he gave nationally and internationally over the years, he said that Afghans had to be united and inclusive, and “we have to have the support of the people. Otherwise we will lose.”
As chair of the Human Rights Commission, she said she repeatedly faced criticism that she was trying to impose Western values on Afghanistan.
“And I kept saying that human rights are not Western values. As a human being, everyone needs to have a shelter… access to education and health services, to safety,” she said.
Since taking power, the Taliban have limited girls’ public education to just six years, restricted women’s work, encouraged them to stay home and issued dress codes requiring them to cover their faces.
Samar urged international pressure not only to allow all girls to attend secondary school and university, but also to guarantee all human rights that are interrelated. And she emphasized the importance of education for young children, who without any education, work or skills could be at risk of becoming involved in opium production, arms smuggling or violence.
He also urged the international community to continue humanitarian programs that are critical to saving lives, but said they should focus on food-for-work or cash-for-work to end people’s total dependency and give them “self-confidence and dignity.” “
Samar said Afghan society has changed in the last two decades, with more access to technology, higher levels of education among the youth and some experience with elections, even if they were not free and fair.
She said such achievements leave the possibility for positive change in the future. “Those are problems they (the Taliban) can’t control,” she said. “They would like to, but they can’t do it.”
Samar said he hoped that there would finally be accountability and justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity. “Otherwise, we will feel the culture of impunity everywhere, everywhere, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a repeat of the case in Afghanistan,” he said.
Her hope for Afghan women is that they can “live with dignity instead of being slaves to the people.”