“So, therefore, I think that matter for a woman is not just for women. It's about all.”
-Fawzia Koofi
Fawzia Koofi was her mother’s youngest child and the nineteenth out of twenty-three of her father's children. Her father had seven wives in the polygynous Koofi family setting. A survivor right from the day of her birth, Fawzia was left out to die in the sun for hours because she was another of the nineteen girls in the family. Her father was a four-time Member of Parliament until he was killed by the Mujahideen. He was a social worker too, who had established the first school for girls in the village but did not allow any of his daughters to attend it as it would have amounted to the loss of political support in that conservative social context. In her memoir, ‘The Favored Daughter’, Koofi recounts that it was her mother who encouraged her to go to school after her father’s death when the family fled to Kabul, even though she worried about her safety- ‘If the class or school makes you president, I don’t want you to be president. I want you to be alive.’ Fawzia Koofi was the first girl from her family to attend school and later, her sisters too graduated. In the 1990s when the Taliban took over Afghanistan, Ms. Koofi was forced to withdraw as a medical student at the top of her class, thus indefinitely derailing her long-term struggle for education and what at that time seemed like a promising future as a young doctor. Soon after the fall of the Taliban regime, Koofi joined politics.
Today, the 45-year-old widowed mother of two daughters, Fawzia Koofi, is one of the few Afghan women to have attended talks with Taliban. She has been subject to numerous threats and attacks on her life, the latest being on 15 August, 2020 when an unidentified person from an adjacent car fired two shots at Koofi, injuring her upper right arm and shoulder while she was with her daughter, travelling back from a meeting in the province of Parwan near the capital. The attack has been severely condemned as a “cowardly and criminal attempt” by numerous political leaders like President Ashraf Ghani, the head of the National Reconciliation Council Abdullah Abdullah, the Chief of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission Shaharzad Akbar, along with the US envoy and the local and global communities. However, the Taliban denied having any connections with the attack. She had endured another direct attack on her life in 2010.
Ms. Koofi has, in turn, questioned the attack in the context of its connotations about what she represents in the ‘new’ Afghanistan. “Without women’s rights in Afghanistan, democracy will never be complete”, she says, “because I think women’s rights in Afghanistan are interconnected with many progresses, with freedom of speech, for instance, with freedom of political gatherings and political participation.” (interview by Al Arabiya’s senior anchor Maysoon Noueihed in Kabul) In her memoir, The Favored Daughter: One Woman’s Fight to Lead Afghanistan into the Future (originally published under the title Letters to My Daughter), Fawzia Koofi with the aid of Nadene Ghouri, narrates the story of her life encompassing her childhood, education, and involvement in politics. It consists of narrations about her life interspersed with letters written to her two daughters. Therein she writes, “The Taliban dislike women holding such powerful positions in government as I do, and they dislike my public criticisms even more. They often try to kill me.”
Koofi launched a political campaign called “back to school” to promote girls’ education after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001. Four years later, she won her seat in Parliament. She has worked extensively with UNICEF, and her 2013 EVAW legislation created a parliamentary uproar in Afghanistan. It was only after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 that Fawzia Koofi won acclaim as a politician and in 2005, she became the first woman to serve as the Deputy Speaker of Afghanistan’s Parliament. When Afghanistan established its first elected democratic parliament in 2005, after 33 years of conflict, Koofi was elected to the Wolesi Jirga-the lower house of the Afghan National Assembly from Badakhshan province in Northern Afghanistan. She was elected as the first female Vice President of the National Assembly in the same year. In 2019, Koofi started her own political party- “Movement Of Change For Afghanistan”- wherein 60 percent of leadership positions are held by women exclusively. Fawzia Koofi could have been the first female president of Afghanistan. However, she was forced to drop out of the contest for the highest office in the country after the Election Commission changed the registration date, which disqualified her for being under the age of 40.
Ms. Koofi currently serves as Chairperson of Afghanistan's Women, Civil Society and Human Rights Commission. She is a member of the government-mandated negotiation team representing the Afghan government to participate in the so-called intra-Afghan talks scheduled to be held in the Qatari capital, Doha. This includes facing and meeting with the Taliban to agree on a deal that would mark another attempt to reach a long-term ceasefire after Afghanistan’s18 years of war. The team includes five women, including Koofi. After being nominated for the Nobel peace prize 2020, she is now one among the top five list of ‘favourites.’ Such favouritism is much needed! When she is asked the oft-repeated question about how does being a female leader, that too in a country like Afghanistan feel, she aptly replies,
“Well, at this stage, I do not want to be considered as just a woman. I want to be considered as a representative of my country and as a politician, who has equal rights to sit across the table and discuss the future of her country. Not only the future of women but the future of everyone in that country. I don't expect the Taliban to react negatively to the representative of 55% of their society, if they want to really reconcile and if they want to pursue their political agendas, not through bullets, but through ballots. They have to respect the diversity and understand that we are part of the new Afghanistan.”
On one hand her relentless persuasion of human rights, female education, democracy and a peaceful ‘new’ Afghanistan has been an inspiration and leading model to many from Afghanistan and outside, and on the other has invited blatant hatred and violence from the Taliban and other orthodox, conservative elements of Afghan society. Fawzia’s interviews echo her sense of collective being wherein she truly embodies the spirit of Afghanistan and it’s women by relating her struggles and work to the history and present condition of their land. Even in the context of her recent nomination in the Nobel peace prize list, she believes there lies a recognition to that collective effort, especially that of Afghan women, in particular and the inclusivity of women in the international community as a part of the peace-making process, in general. She believes that it is a success not individual to her or womankind but the entire population of Afghanistan. “Security is regarded as a male zone, since it is men who are involved in war and combat. In the last 40 years of war in Afghanistan, luckily women have not been involved in the destruction of the country. They have victims of it rather.”, says Ms. Koofi and we cannot agree more! It is time that the faulty traditional conceptualizations of women causing wars and men fighting for their security (which eventually becomes an issue of national security) is destabilised worldwide, especially in Indian mythological orientations.
After four decades of war, Ms. Koofi understands the impatience of her people who want speedy and worthwhile results with peaceful reforms but structural agreements take a long time to solidify and even longer to become fully implemented. The odds are high with high maternal mortality rates, infant mortality rates, illiteracy, poor access to economic resources, demands of sectarian minorities (Hindu, Sikhs) and atrocities on women being linked to orthodoxy and religious consciousness, but there has been improvement over the last two decades. With regard to the question of mainstreaming the Taliban, Ms. Koofi feels that not surrendering to one particular ideology might help, also having huge differences and still working together (the Taliban and government forces) is hard but nevertheless, possible and is indeed, essential for accommodation of diversities of the “new Afghanistan”.
When asked about her feelings towards Taliban, Fawzia Koofi replied that sustainability of peaceful goals and tools remains impossible unless the bloodshed of the masses ends. “We are all victims of war”, she emphatically states. The intermixing of personal and collective loss in the context of war is huge and indistinguishable. She has lost her family members- husband, brother, father, parts of her body, opportunities of becoming a doctor, and is fighting for her own life every other day. However, it does not remain a wholly personal loss anymore, as she is fighting for the lives of millions of women in Afghanistan and abroad to live with fundamental human rights and dignity. And Ms. Koofi adds that hers is a country that has already suffered too much. So now, the choice between any more violence to propagate political agendas or following a humanitarian approach for a peaceful future, lies in the hands of the people of Afghanistan and is very evident. If the Taliban associate victory with the former they will need to seriously reform. Her expectations from India include- continuance of friendship and supporting their education system- “We want an Afghanistan that represents everyone equally regardless of their gender.”
Sources:
Piece by-
Pronita Tripathi
Biography: Pronita is currently studying English Literature from Delhi University. She is an art enthusiast with a love for writing and reading. She hopes to debunk the multiple stereotypes associated with Humanities Studies and become a worthy English Professor to her future students. She can’t wait to meet them! On most days Pronita chooses sleep over everything else, and on some everything else over sleep.
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