Carleton UniversityThursday, July 15, 2010Outline of Speech by Dr. Sima SamarChair, Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission
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Thank you to the Administration, faculty, staff, and students of Carleton University for this great honor.
Receiving this honorary degree is very special and important to me. Because of the situation and Soviet Invasion, I never had own graduation ceremony or received the actual diploma when I graduated from medical school in Kabul.
All of my education has been in Afghanistan. As a young girl, I attended co-educational elementary and secondary schools in Helmand. I then attended Kabul University, where I completed my medical degree in 1982. Today, Helmand Province is the center of production of poppy and has been the site of major fighting with the Taliban. These days, we cannot talk about co-education in Helmand Province. Women were making progress during sixties and seventies; we had female ministers, parliamentarian, and doctors, but the past three decades of war destroyed the progress that women had begun to make in education, the professions, and the public arena.
After I completed my studies, I began to practice medicine in a hospital in Kabul. When it became too dangerous to live in Kabul because of the Soviet invasion, their puppet regime and the resistance against them. I fled to central Afghanistan to the remote part of the country in which I was born. I arrived there with little more than a stethoscope, a copy of a medical journal, and my son. I practiced medicine there, walking for hours or traveling by donkey to visit patients.
After three years, I fled Afghanistan for Pakistan in order to provide opportunity for my son to be educated. In Pakistan, I obtained a job as a doctor at the Mission Hospital, a 100-year old facility in the southwestern part of the country. I worked at the hospital and traveled to refugee camps. The conditions were horrible and women had no access to proper health care and particularly to reproductive health care because of the lack of facilities and the power of the conservative elements in the camps. Women died of curable conditions and sicknesses as they were denied treatment. After experiencing such a situation, I started a hospital for Afghan refuges women and children in 1987. On our first day, we had 300 women and children to receive services.
Education is essential to women’s health and well-being. This is why I started literacy training for women and schools for boys and girls soon after the hospital opened. Progress for human rights and particularly women’s rights is not possible without education. In total, the Shuhada Organization, has established and build more then 100 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was very hard to find support for formal education, especially for women and girls at this time. The international community was reluctant to fund even the printing of books to support the formal education. More attention was paid to support the religious schools and madrasas to fight against the communism. No thought was given to the long-term impact of support for these institutions. One of the reasons that the war in Afghanistan is so long and violent is because of lack of education.
When the Taliban came to power, one of their first actions was to ban almost all education for girls. We were able to fight to keep girls’ schools open in some parts of the country. The Shuhada Organization’s high school in Jaghori was the only girls’ high school to remain open in the country during the Taliban regime.
After the fall of the Taliban, the schools were opened for the Afghan children. Today, around six million children are going to school. Only one third of the students are girls, and the drop out rate of the girls after the sixth grade is very high because of the lack of facilities and lack of trained female teachers. The quality of education does not fill the needs of today. The situation in higher education is almost same. In fact, there is not enough attention paid on higher education. The higher education institution in the country cannot absorb all the graduate students from high school. For example 100,000 students were graduated from high schools last year, but the universities were able to accommodate only around 35,000.The number of the girls are much lower in higher education, due to the lack of facilities and the absence of female dormitories in different part of the country.
At the same time that the opening of schools was seen as an example of progress, the international community ignored the signs of the reemergence of the Taliban, which, of course, affected girls and women first. After 2004, over three hundred schools were bombed, burned, and attacked. Night letters were posted warning parents not to send their girls to school. These attacks have only escalated. Teachers and principals have been beheaded. Girls on their way to school have been attacked with acid. The overall security in Afghanistan has deteriorated and, as usual, women and girls face the most severe repercussions.
Even today, I am asked whether it is worth the effort to make women’s rights a priority in Afghanistan when everything seems to be such an uphill battle in the country. It is important to realize that the demands for recognition of women’s rights and human rights come from within Afghanistan. As Afghan women, we want to live with the full rights and dignity of human beings.
We have had some victories in our work for women’s rights. When we finally were able to return to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, no infrastructure existed for the government or civil society. With few resources and a lot of hope, the key institutions of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission were built from scratch to promote women’s rights.
These institutions and NGOs have had success in pressing for women’s rights policies. In 2004, we won equal rights provisions for women in the Afghan Constitution as well language committing the Afghan government to implementation of treaties and conventions to which it is a party. These international conventions include CEDAW, which Afghanistan ratified in 2003.
While key constitutional and treaty obligations are in place, the reality for women on the ground remains a major concern.
Most women lack economic empowerment and live in poverty. The absolute majority of women are not independent economically. Although some women have their own business, there are few of them. The economical empowerment of women are important to shape their lives and position in the society.
In many parts of Afghanistan, women have not seen a medical doctor in their entire lives. Women have not much possibilty to control the number of the children that they have. Maternal and infant mortality rates are among the highest in the world.
A culture of impunity exists for sexual violence in the country. It is always seen as private matter of the family. State institutions refuse to intervene in some cases. In other cases, they promote the ownership of females in the family by men.
Women’s access to justice is very limited. One of the reasons is the low number of women in the judiciary system. No women are in the Supreme Court Council.
There has not been enough political will within the Afghan government to achieve equality for women. The political will not be sufficient without constant support from the international community.
The lack of security is another problem that reduces the freedom of women and freedom of expression in general. Security must be defined to include human rights, women’s rights, and economic well-being, along with the absence of fighting. The absence of security undermines women’s rights and human rights. Accountability and justice for violation of human rights and women’s rights is a pre-requisite for security. The respect for culture and religion should not be used as an excuse to ignore the human rights and women’s rights.
The solution to the problem in Afghanistan is to promote democracy, human rights and an environment without discrimination. To achieve this goal, the Afghan government and international community need to have comprehensive, multi-dimensional long-term strategy. These goals cannot be achieved by short-term, quick fix policies that we have seen in the past few years. In order to promote this situation, we need to build the confidence of the people to the process, promote rule of law, good governance and provide justice for victims of violation of human rights in the past and present to build a better future.
Clearly peace and security will not be sustainable without development, and both cannot be achieved with out respect for human rights, and full participation of women. Education is necessary for all of these goals.
Without full participation of women in society, the problems in Afghanistan cannot be solved. Women must be included in decision-making, peace talks, and peace building. The strong military and political presence of the international community and important United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1325 providing for inclusion of women are made meaningless when a new policy of reintegration and reconciliation with the so-called good Taliban is considered without any discussion of the consequences for women. Women were the primary victims of the Taliban in the past and will be in the future unless attention to women’s rights is paid and upheld by both the Afghan government and the international community, as partner to the Afghan government and people.
Finally, I ask you to join me in calling strongly for the international community that the people in Afghanistan as human beings deserve peace and freedom. United and committed, we have to fight against the enemies of freedom and humanity. Peace and security in Afghanistan is related to the security in the region and the world. If the people in Afghanistan suffer, it will have a negative impact in your country and everyone’s lives.
Thank you again for this great honor and for your support of not only me, but of people in Afghanistan and the future of our country.
