WE ARE SEEDS

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

Canadian journalist Sally Armstrong describes Sima Samar as “the quintessential Afghan woman: she’s strong, she adores her country, and she’s had to fight for everything she’s ever had”.

Outspoken, the impassioned memoir of Sima Samar – medical doctor, public official, founder of schools and hospitals, thorn in the side of the Taliban, nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize (same year Obama won), and lifelong advocate for girls and women – offers insight into one woman’s determination to advocate for her people. For ordinary people in one of the world’s most dangerous regions.

With an unparalleled view and personal understanding of Afghanistan’s past and its present, Samar also provides a route map for the road ahead. But getting there will take a joint effort – by the Afghans themselves and by the world that is perhaps unable to see beyond the dust-covered landscape and the clichéd images emerging from one of the most complex regions on the planet.

Samar paints a different picture. “Most of the world sees us as a people at war. And war has a way of colouring a country various shades of gray; the guns, tanks, dust, mud and rubble blur into a single hue. To most of the world Afghanistan has been presented in the recent past as nearly colourless, a sepia image of treeless mountains and endless desserts populated by beige-blanketed, bearded men with dashes of periwinkle blue provided by burka-covered women.”

She has always believed that men and women are like the two wings of a bird. “Both wings have to be healthy and whole– not broken or wounded – to enable the bird to fly.”

To put things in perspective, she describes her carefree childhood in Jaghori where she “took to learning like a bee to flowers”.

But she was aware of being singled out because of her ethnic origins. As a Hazara, that wouldn’t be the last discrimination she faced.

She grew into a feisty young woman who agreed to marry Professor Ghafoor Sultani who came to the family with a proposal only because he was supportive of her desire to study further. He kept his word, trying to persuade her father to let her accept a scholarship to enrol in medical school. When that didn’t work, he borrowed money so they could get married and move to Kabul. They enjoyed the perfect partnership, one in which all chores, the cooking, cleaning, even the banking, all responsibilities were shared equally. So much so that their friends described them as the “50 per cent couple”.

But the happiness was cruelly snatched away one night when a group of students barged into their home, and took him away. That evening, as he silently pleaded, “Don’t go looking for me, it’s too dangerous for you,” was the last she saw of her husband.

When countless attempts to locate him or get any news of him yielded nothing but silence, she took the hard decision to relocate with her infant son to Sangi Masha, the village where her in-laws lived, and set up a clinic there.

As her reputation grew, so did the unrest in the country. Along with seeing children and pregnant women who had had no access to medicine, she was also attending to injuries sustained in rocket attacks. There’s a gut churning description of amputating a gangrenous limb with a carpenter’s saw.

She established the Shuhada Organization that operated more than 100 schools and dozens of hospitals and clinics. She served in the interim administration of Afghanistan and established the first-ever Ministry of Women’s Affairs. From 2002 to 2019, she chaired the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, a commitment that has put her own life at great risk. Having served as the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Sudan from 2005 to 2009, she was appointed in 2019 as a member of both the UN Secretary-General’s panel on internal displacement and the advisory board on mediation.

To do this, she formed alliances around the world.

In 1997, she was invited by Canada’s minister of foreign affairs to visit Canada to assist in developing a strategy to deal with the Taliban and to foster women’s rights in Afghanistan.

At a UN conference on Afghanistan, she asked if there was space for women at the peace table discussions.

She had a private meeting with Condoleezza Rice while in Washington to receive an award from the International Human Rights Law Group.

She raised the issues of accountability and the need to fight against the production of opium with UN secretary general Kofi Annan.

When intimidation tactics against her ratcheted up, Canada’s foreign minister Bill Graham issued a visa and told the UN she would be welcomed in Canada if they could fly her out. She was also offered shelter in other countries. But Samar knew it would be a “voyage of no return” and chose to stay and fight.

She highlights the stories of others who did the same. Including a young girl called Shamsia Husseini who made international headlines when someone threw battery acid on her for walking to school with a friend.

After recovering from horrific burns, Husseini returned to school, graduated, went on to study at the Teacher Training College in Kandahar and is now a language and science teacher.

Her story, writes Samar, reminds her of a Mexican proverb: “They thought they could bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds.”

Outspoken is as much about the lives of such people as it is about the history and politics of a land we read and hear so much about but paradoxically know very little of.

She underscores the reality that “Afghanistan’s geopolitical situation includes tension between many powers”. Pakistan, Qatar, India, Iran, Turkey, America... they all have conflicting interests in the region.

And so, ultimately, it comes back full circle to the Afghans. Afraid of the international community abandoning Afghanistan, she urges her countrymen to come together. To rise above the differences that divide them into warring factions.

And she leaves her readers with hope.

“Hope that my own story helps Afghans to invest in the female members of their families, to respect freedom of choice for their daughters and sisters, to create a future with values that see women as partners.”

And, one might add, to create fertile ground for seeds to thrive.

• Dr. Sima Samar is an honorary officer of the Order of Canada and received the John Humphrey Freedom Award named after the Canadian lawyer who wrote the first draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She is a recipient of a slew of prestigious honours including the Ramon Magsaysay Award; the Global Leader for Tomorrow Award from the World Economic Forum in Davos. The former vice-president of her country is currently a visiting scholar at Tuft’s University’s Fletcher School.