Code Pink, the Taliban and Malala Yousafzai
The US antiwar group Code Pink, which describes itself as “a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end US funded wars and occupations,” recently sent a delegation to Pakistsan to campaign against drones with Imran Khan. On October 9th, a dozen of them held a symbolictwelve hour fast outside the Islamabad Press Club, holding “pictures of the more than 160 Pakistani children who have been killed by American drones.”
The same day, in nearby Swat, another Pakistani child, 14 year old Malala Yousafzai, was gunned down by the Pakistani Taliban because she was an advocate of education for girls. They stopped her school bus, asked for her by name, and shot her twice in the head, wounding two other students in the process. No turn of events could more forcefully illustrate the idiocy of the US peace movement’s one-sided approach to solidarity.
In an email from Karachi the same day, Pakistani feminist Afiya Zia reported that Malala Yousafzai was attacked because she “had launched a resistance movement against the Taliban's anti-girls' education campaign and bombings of schools. She had set up a school herself and maintained an anonymous Anne Frank type diary on the BBC website. The shooting has literally galvanized the country. Hundreds of people are at the hospital offering blood donations.”
Malala Yousafzai grew up in the Swat valley in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, where her father ran a girls’ school. When she was little, the Pakistani Taliban made the valley their base area, and as they became more powerful, they forbade female education and imposed their version of sharia law. In 2009, the Pakistani military attacked and drove 1.2 million people, including Malala, from their homes to live as internal refugees; during this period, she became a spokesperson for the children of the region via her blog on BBC-Urdu. The Taliban leaders fled into Afghanistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), including Waziristan, where they are currently being attacked by US drones with the off-and-on consent of the Pakistani government. (In 2008, Pakistan’s top general privately requested more drones while publicly denouncing them.)
Things are getting worse for FATA women and girls. This July, Farida Afreedi, a 25-year old women’s human rights defender in the Khyber region, on her way home from visiting women in the tribal areas, was gunned down by two Taliban motorcylists. No one has been arrested for this crime. The Women’s Action Forum in Lahore issued a statement after her death: “It is a matter of grave concern that retrogressive forces of extremism are allowed to perpetuate a reign of terror over the tribal population, especially women in public service. Despite these elements being identifiable, the state authorities have completely failed to enforce the rule of law.”
In August, Shirkat Gah, a Karachi feminist organization, sent a bulletin to the list of Women Living Under Muslim Laws describing further “repressive and regressive developments” in the region: at the request of “local elders”, police in the Karak district had banned women from public markets unless they were accompanied by male family members; in Kotal, the Taliban had ordered all proprietors of cell phone shops to go into another business as they were committing “un-Islamic” acts by providing the means by which music and videos could be uploaded. They also ordered all NGOs to close down within a week or they would “face the consequences.” This is all part of a pattern familiar from the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan.
You’d think that a US-UK peace delegation (Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, Reprieve) planning to go to the tribal areas might have asked for briefings from the Women’s Action Forum, Shirkat Gah, or any number of other Pakistani movement organizations. Instead their guide was Imran Khan, a cricket hero turned politician who organized a much-publicized motor procession to Waziristan to protest drone attacks. The members of the peace delegation do not seem to have been troubled by Khan’s views or his dubious associations... Read more:
