Veiled threat: A discussion with Sally Armstrong

It’s been 15 years since award-winning journalist and human rights activist Sally Armstrong brought Canadians the story of Afghan women living under the Taliban in an article published in Homemaker’s magazine. It was a world in which women were denied education, jobs and health care. They were forced to wear burqas and relied on males for secure passage in the streets. She’s watched as international troops entered Afghanistan and how the intervention has impacted the women it came to help. She recently sat down with Globalnews.ca to discuss how much has changed for women in Afghanistan, the challenges they have left to face and women’s potential to create change, which Armstrong calls a “veiled threat.”

Take me back to 1996. What was life like for women when you first visited Afghanistan?

It was horrendous. It was shocking. It was the kind of thing you observed and thought, “Where the heck is the world? Who knows about this? How could this possibly be happening in 1996?” But indeed it was happening and it carried on for five more years before anyone paid attention, and the only reason they paid attention when they did was because 9/11 happened.

Why do you think it took until September 11, 2001 for our country to take action?

Actually to be fair our country did take action. There were three people in a position in authority in the world who spoke out about what was happening: one was Emma Bonino from the European Union, one was Hillary Clinton, who was married to the president at the time and the third was Lloyd Axeworthy of Canada.

And Lloyd Axeworthy did a lot. Axeworthy brough Sima Samar here to Canada to help him shape a policy on Taliban. Lloyd Axeworthy contacted me and we ended up with a group of women, Afghan women, Canadian women, women activists, going to Ottawa to talk to him.

He gave us a challenge and he said you don’t have to convince me. He told us we had to create a national coalition. He told us to get a resolution. We had to start a national awareness campaign. It was enormous. He said, “If you can complete this by the 1st of April, that is the day Canada starts its interim period on the Security Council and he said I will make that my cause.

On the 31st of March we sent our case and he made it his cause. He stood up in the United Nations and said:

“All aspects of this conflict are reprehensible, but some stand out more than others. Perhaps the most disturbing is the Taliban’s systemic pattern of violation of the human rights of half the population – women and girls – a violation the Taliban misrepresent as having a religious foundation.”

They did speak out, but basically the world looked the other way. The why is the rest of the world said well that is their culture and their religion and it’s none of our business. What was happening to the women of Afghanistan was not cultural, it was criminal. It took the rest of the world a very, very long time to understand that the Taliban were acting in the name of God, and in fact what they were doing, was political opportunism.

What has changed for women since the international troops arrived in Afghanistan?

A great deal has changed and the problem is the public don’t know very much about it because we focus on the insurgency. We write about the insurgency because our men and women are in harm’s way and we need to report on that. We don’t seem to have the resources to report very much about what is happening in the rest of the country.

Women are better off. Are they as better off as we hoped? No, but they are definitely better off. And it is the women who are leading the reform of Afghanistan. It is the women who’ve demanded reform on family law. It’s the women who are doing the first-ever research on issues in Afghanistan that have a great deal to do with how the judiciary runs, for example polygamy. The women did a study on polygamy, the first ever, and found 86.5 per cent of Afghans are against polygamy. They’ve also discovered that there are ten reasons for polygamy and eight of them are against the Koran. God forbid, you do something against the Koran that is very bad.

They are not all back in school, the little girls, but a lot of them are. Almost 3 million, compared to zero are back in school. The women are definitely back at work. The women who are wearing burqas are much scarcer. And it is not quite as religiously strict as it was before, not to say there is not enormous room for improvement. There are miles to go, but things are better then they were.

Women seem to be afraid that these gains will be bargained away when the West leaves. What’s at the heart of those fears?

The heart of those fears is reality. They could easily be bargained away because people like President Karzai would sell out the women in order to get a deal. It’s up to women themselves to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Certainly in this country, beginning in the 60s, women shouldered open the door and kept it ajar with their heels and they said to politicians and institutions; “Go through this opening and make change, make this a better country.” And you know who went through the opening? Absolutely nobody. What women in Canada learned if you want to make change you need to do it yourself. And the women of Afghanistan have to do the same thing. We can support them, help them, send funding if they need it, but nobody can change anything on the ground except the people that live on the ground.

Since the international intervention Afghanistan has adopted laws, created a human rights commission. But tradition and religion also play a huge role in determining the lives and rights of women. How strong is this tension and how do women negotiate this?

It is strong. Their religion has been misinterpreted for them all of this time. But you know what happens when the world comes to your doorstep, and in this case it’s in the form of war; you find out other people don’t live like this. Why don’t they live like this? And you begin to ask the question and that is the beginning of change.

They refer to their illiteracy as being blind. As one women said to me, “I couldn’t read so I couldn’t see what was going on.” What a clever remark she made. The first question is: “What’s going on? Other people don’t live like this.” Then you begin to ask why. That’s how all change begins. It’s how it began in Canada. Women have to come together and figure out how they got to where they are and then do the homework and simply change it.

The way they live in Afghanistan is not sustainable. The women know it. There is fear everywhere. In Afghanistan today the perception of fear is greater than the actual need for fear. Look at the footage. There are people out on the street, kids are going to school, people are going to work. But you set off a suicide bomber, especially in a supermarket in a fancy neighbourhood, and you paralyze regions of the country so the perception of fear becomes greater than the actual need to be afraid.

The perception of fear ongoing like that leads to the perception of failure and that is the tricky place the Afghans are at right now because perceptions of failure can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Which has the bigger influence, the law or tradition and religion?

You can’t have one without the other. The tradition and the religion have laid down one set of rules. Tradition calls for tribal law, like bad.

Imagine your tribe has a fight with my tribe. Your tribe wins so I have to give you a little girl, sometimes two of three little girls depending on the size of the harm done. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what they do to these little girls. If you are human you cannot possibly accept that that is decent behaviour.

I said to a man – I had been writing about one of these little girls who had been give in bad at the age of four and was now eight and in pretty rough shape – I said to him, how can you do this?

He said, “Well I know it is wrong, but it is our way.” I said, “If you know it is wrong then we can do some work here.”

Those are the issues. People are told this is the way their lives are. Tribal law is illegal. You have three levels of law in Afghanistan. You have civil law. You have sharia law. And you have tribal law. You have to reform the judiciary so there are a set of laws that are fair for all of the people. You have to get rid of tribal law all together and then you have to read what sharia law really says before pronouncing legalities and illegalities, especially when you don’t even know what you are talking about because you can’t read the text. The civil law needs reform, the judges the lawyers the police. But they are working on it.

Canada has had a hand in helping women assert their rights and achieve their goals. Now the troops are leaving their combat role. Do you think the new training mission puts enough emphasis on the supporting Afghan women?

The training really hasn’t a lot to do with that. The training is to teach the Afghan army to be an army. You have to have security in the country. You can’t do anything without security. You can’t run a school. You can’t run a hospital. You certainly can’t run a judiciary. You can’t run a government.

(The troops) are all going to leave. Afghanistan has lost favour. The world has lost interest in Afghanistan and what the world does when it loses interest in a place is they declare victory and leave. We are all about to say Afghanistan can run itself.

Our job remaining is to make sure the Afghan army can fulfill that role. Whether they can or not when the Americans pullout is very, very questionable.

Canada claims it is going to continue its humanitarian work. I think that is what affects the women because that is reforming the judiciary, that’s keeping the human rights commission going, that’s improving the lives of the people and so that does have a huge effect on the women. I also believe the opposite is true: The women have a huge effect on what can happen in Afghanistan. I think they are the reformers. They are the way forward.

At times it seems that Canada is fairly war-weary. What would you say to Canadians who are tired of our involvement to keep them engaged and interested?

I don’t think you can do that. I can address why they claim they are tired. Canadians don’t know the story because the government is silent. And it’s not just the Conservative government, the Liberals before them were silent. For some reason, I dare say it is because politicians are afraid they will lose a single vote, they have decided not to speak to the people.

This country is at war. We have soldiers at war and when you are at war you are supposed to tell the people what is going on. The government has chosen silence. When that happens the protestors own the conversation. It’s the protestors who are spreading the information.

The media has done a terrific job, but it focuses on the insurgency as they must. There are very few like me writing about the women, so the protestors own the conversation and the protestors are saying the most outrageous things to Canadians. They are saying things like the Afghan people wish you would leave. They are saying things like Canada invaded Afghanistan. This outrageous collection of revisionist of history is being visited upon the Canadian people and nobody is counteracting it. What the Canadians think about Afghanistan is not the true story.

It’s not a hopeless case?

I don’t want to be overly optimistic because Afghanistan is never going to be Paris. But I think it is better than it was and hopefully with the right tools the people of Afghanistan can make it a better place.

You need a spectacular leader to lead them out of the abyss and they don’t have one. Most of us don’t, everybody wishes they had a Martin Luther King. They have a very poor leader, but there are things happening behind the scenes in Afghanistan that make me hopeful. There are people talking about forming a new political party, about running for the presidency and they are the kinds of people that make me feel hopeful.

Last question, what are the benchmarks for the type of society where Afghan women have the freedom to live, achieve their goals and have their human rights protected?

They are not hard benchmarks. We’ve written these in the declaration of human rights at the U.N. and we’ve written them into the constitutions of almost every country on the planet. The benchmarks are getting an education, having health care, having enough to eat, being able to find a job. It’s not that complicated.