The future we wanted for Afghan women
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hi nilofer thank you for being with us
today hello thank you for having me and
a very warm good afternoon to everyone
you love
you are a woman
activist for women rights and a mother
of three
and
back in afghanistan
you were
a business owner and
you had a very active life and on august
20th your life changed completely
uh can you tell us
how did it happen and uh why how did it
happen that you had to leave
all right so
imagine all the titles you just
mentioned about me the life
each one of those titles took me years
to of work for that
and
suddenly an entire country of 40 million
people population collapses
and you’re one of those
40 million people
and
all you have to do is
you receive a message
it’s two and
it’s
almost late in the in the night
just like other nights your kids ask for
favorite noodles and for that they
always turn to their daddy because mommy
doesn’t know how to cook
and me as usual having my
cup of green tea
that night my mother was also with me
because of the situation and she knew
that i was stressed
i receive a message
the message says that
you have to be at the airport in two
hours
and you only have two backpacks
allowance
wow two backpacks so how did you feel
when you get this message
you know my heart dropped i just had a
look
at my mother’s face and
she also broke a little and i said i had
to go
and i didn’t have the time to
have a even
look at my house and i just threw
everything on the floor and pick the
most important things in one bag pack in
my kids
diaper and milk another and we had to
leave
with
we left
the food for my daughter left on the
stove
my cup of tea
right on the side of my bed
and
an entire home
so you know how i felt
yes wow
so uh when you arrived at the airport uh
with your family with your three
children with your husband
what happened and what did you
experience at the airport
you may have seen this apocalypse movies
a lot in hollywood
which i would always say that it’s
impossible for human beings to be this
cruel to run over each other to reach
one plane
to save their life and families
but we experienced the same thing in
reality
it was the doomsday of our life
hundred thousands of people
each one of them desperate to save their
families their kids and
to live leave everything behind
and we were also one of them
there was a lot of obstacles we had to
cross
the terrorist checkpoints who just had
invaded our country we had to
pass these checkpoints without getting
recognized and we had to go through
a hundred thousand of crowd
and there was a moment
that four women got run over and died
that’s what what we witnessed and
another moment
when the taliban recognized my husband
who’s also a very
famous anti-terrorist figure and also he
is from a minority community shia
community
they pulled him out of the crowd put the
gun on his head started saying that kill
this
kafir non-believer because for
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can you tell him
yes my my my daughter was screaming and
my son that don’t kill our father don’t
kill our own father and i run to them
started speaking in their language which
is my language too pashto and i said
all right we are leaving our home our
life our country just let us live take
everything let us go
and they turned to me
and they hit me with the back of the gun
and said that
your father was covered why because they
married a pashtun daughter to a hazara
son-in-law
and i know that your father is
raised raised you in a little bit
different way so can you tell us a
little bit more about this
well
when he repeated the word
coward
in my head i said you know
you don’t know anything about my father
my father came come from a very wealthy
landlord background but he left
everything and and decided to be a
teacher his entire life
and
he chose to teach people to teach the
generation to educate them and no matter
what
regime came what political stance there
was
he was neutral
and he taught us to be neutral
i remember one day i was playing outside
because i have experienced the first era
of taliban i was born under taliban i
was four or five years old i was playing
outside without a scarf
a talib commander
recognizes me and says come here and
when i go he slaps me very hard that
why are you not wearing a scarf if next
time i see you without a scarf i will
show you
what it is and i run crying to my father
he was so angry and furious that he told
my mother
chop her hair off from now on she will
be
dressing as a boy so she could
experience every every little bit of
life as her brother do
and that’s when my life changed and i
could experience everything
even under taliban
wow so you were
dressing
as a boy and you were exposed to the
life that boys could experience right
right
i was dressed up as a boy up until 13
years
when when my body started changing
and then i was forced to
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change to a girl and before that i
remember
i had my first period since i was
dressing as a boy i was doing all the
activities that a boy should do i was
also taking karate classes
and back then the mothers would tell the
daughters don’t do any activities that
boy do like cycling like
playing sports that boys play because
you will lose virginity
and that day after a hard day of
practice i come home and at the night i
see blood
and i was shocked that my mother will
kill me
maybe i i broke my virginity
and it was horrible moment
but luckily i had a partner in crime who
was the same like me who she was a girl
she was dressing as a boy and i told her
that i i broke my virginity and
she was laughing at me and said no this
is not that case
you are getting your first period and
she taught me how to use a piece of
cloth
because back then we didn’t had the
sanitary pad afghanistan was way
backward then
now
so
that’s where my activism started
the first
was when my father dressed me as a boy
and i got to experience both lives and i
knew that what a man man thinks in what
of being a woman is
so i started from school going to each
one of my classmates asking how old are
you and when they say 13 do you know you
will get periods
and i remember getting in trouble so
many times my teachers would
would fight with me and call my mother
and my father that
you haven’t teach taught your daughter
manners and my father would say oh i
have taught her everything she needs to
know
my father was always there to have my
back and then when i grow up i started
this group of
dhukhtarani shamal means
girls of the north and i gathered
girls like me girls likewise and also
girl rebellious girls from school we
formed a group and we started educating
each and every woman about the things
that mothers were ashamed to talk with
with the daughters
and that’s how my activism started and
then
wow this is so interesting that you
started being an activist already at
such a young young age
and
how did it influence when you grew up
this uh
dressing up as a boy and starting
educating young girls at school
well
today i’m here in this platform it means
that it started quite good and went very
well but the only thing which went wrong
was
the collapse of my country we were going
quite good the women of afghanistan
was this close to reach
that 10 percent of fright which european
women has they are not asking for much
just the 10 percent they want to be able
to walk on the street without
being killed they want to sit in a
restaurant have a cup of coffee they
want to work they want to drive which is
quite common thing it’s not a crime to
be able to drive
and the
most important thing for afghan women is
and was
to have the right on their children to
have their name in the in their
children’s birth certificate which was
forbidden in afghanistan
and we made it after two years of
activism we just had got this law passed
that the mothers would be mentioned
in the children’s id and
now it’s all gone
and uh tell us a little bit about the
women political participation network um
you started this group two years ago and
uh
who who is the member
tell us a little bit about the members
of this group and about your activities
well this group is all
formed with independent women and also
some of our minority community the lgbt
community
and the women who are in this group we
formed the reason we formed this group
because two years ago um these peace
talks with the terrorist group who has
invaded our country right now started
and we as afghan women were
never
ready to go back and we were afraid that
this this will happen so we started
forming this group coming together
uh through social media it started and
we started advocating that if you want
to have a peace talk you should have
women included
if there are no women there is no peace
talk and we will and that’s how it
formed in past six months when the
situation started changing
we started uh being more active
and um
as you could uh
see on the on the news the protests
which have been taking place by the past
three months it was all it started with
this group of women
i would to give some example of the
women who are
in this group these are just smear
examples there are a lot of them
we have
dr batul said heideri who is from a very
religious family
she covers herself from head to toe but
she is a sexologist
she has a phd in sex therapy she is a
sex therapist and her her
thesis of phd is on bachchabazi
we have in afghanistan this topic
you call it maybe
the molesting yeah molesting young boys
and and that’s a very
common thing between them
warlord
but also a very dangerous topic to work
on especially for a religious woman
then we have engineer zahra jaffari
again she is she’s from a very
conservative city herrod city but she
has made her own way
she lived
alone single in kabul and she has been
active and you can see her face all over
the protest in all over the media
we have khaleda popozay afghan
football team captain
she was the
the woman the first woman who talked
about
the harassment and and molestation she
had she faced when she was in
afghanistan in olympics by the olympic
head and she started
here metoo movement in afghanistan
and she is the one who evacuated the
entire
football girls football team to
london with some of our lgbt community
members
and there is one person from our lgbt
community
whose name is afshar in afghanistan he
had to be a boy because he
they see them as a boy but he choose
to be
a girl and she has chosen fatana as her
name
and now she is in london safe so these
are just few examples but
we have in this group we have teachers
we have tailors we have housewife we
have mother
and and all they have in common is they
want the basic right for a woman they
want women to be counted as a human
instead of an object because in
afghanistan
before these 20 years women were just an
object a
child-making machine
a maid in the home and that’s
basically a nanny
but past 20 years changed their
narrative they tasted freedom they
tasted
what is it what does it feel like to be
a human so that’s all they’re asking and
i don’t think it’s much yeah so
what now lilofar what what is the future
of afghan women
if
this this collapse hadn’t happened you
would see afghan women on the best
platforms but unfortunately
one way or another these this this group
will be
recognized by the world
but we don’t want that
right now all we can do is the women who
have been who are created all around the
world i am just one small example
there are hundreds and thousands like me
who have been evacuating to the
different countries
all we can do is
to use their talent to give them
platform to nurture them so they could
fight back for their countries just the
way i’m using this platform to speak for
my sisters
and i think
the future of women holds
we we are the flag bearers we who have
left the country
we shouldn’t stop and we will not stop
yeah so you know far what what can we do
to
support afghan women in in any way
possible
you can do many things
you you know luckily you live in a
country where you have rights
there is no upper class and lower class
everybody has equal rights so you can
use your rights to save people
i was saved by two common people a woman
named liam marshall from spain and a man
named mihai jakovsky a journalist a
radio journalist from poland
if they can save me and my five kids and
today i’m alive i’m here i was able to
organize this much of protest you can
too
you don’t need to spend money all you
you need to do is
write an email ask your government
ask the world
to not recognize these terrorists to
help afghan women afghan people
or you can you can you can
maybe if you
are generous enough you can
find an afghan woman who is the
the head of the family in afghanistan
you can support her
i don’t know maybe financially even 50s
lotte means a lot for a person in
afghanistan
or
the best thing keep speaking about them
keep them alive
don’t let afghanistan topic to be
shoved under the rag we don’t want to be
forgotten
right now when i’m speaking here
hundreds of afghan women watching me
online and all they have asked me to do
is to ask you all to remember them to
talk about them to use your social media
platforms to use your gatherings to at
least say that this is happening in
afghanistan this is happening to afghan
women they are human
afghanistan is a 40 million population
country and 20 million is women you
cannot eliminate these 20 million women
you cannot forget these 20 million
humans who exist there
so this will be the best thing you can
do
yeah
thank you nilofer for this message
so
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you