Just two days later, however, a Taliban official arrived at another of Samar's clinics with his ailing mother. Samar decided to play hardball. "Sima sat him down and said, 'We've got a problem. You've got my generators. I've got your mother,' " says Armstrong. It worked. The woman was treated, says Armstrong. Samar got her generators.
After the fall of the Taliban last year, Samar, 45, became minister for women's affairs in Afghanistan's interim government, one of only two women named to the cabinet. In June she was elected vice chairman of a council of Afghan leaders who met to determine the shape of Afghanistan's new permanent government. But the road to progress has been strewn with land mines. Conservative male colleagues on the council refused to look at Samar (who covers her head—but not her face—with a scarf in public). She says she was harassed, then threatened with death until she resigned last July. Today she never leaves her spartan house in Kabul without Kalashnikov-toting bodyguards. "Democracy is more than a word," she says. "It's something people really practice—and we have a long way to go."
Not that Samar's difficulties have halted her work. With her husband of five years, Rauf Naweed, 49, Samar operates a network of four hospitals, 11 clinics and 64 schools scattered throughout the country and just over the Pakistani border. She is also the head of Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission, a position she intends to use to protect citizens' rights from a backlash of intolerance that has gripped the country. Just last month, extremists attacked four girls' schools with mortars and fire in a violent attempt to cut off women's access to education. "Afghans haven't seen anything except violence and abuses for generations," says Samar of the tasks that lie ahead. "We have to educate the public about their rights through every means possible."
Given the obstacles in her path, it's surprising what Samar has been able to achieve so far. Born in the mountainous region of Ghazni, she defied the wishes of her father, a civil servant with two wives and 10 other children, by becoming a doctor. While she was studying medicine at the University of Kabul in 1979, Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviet Union. Samar watched as pro-Russian students abducted her first husband, a physics professor, whom she never saw again. "I could do nothing," she says. She raised their son Ali Ghafoori with help from her family.
After completing her training in Kabul three years later, she returned to Ghazni and began caring for women in the Central Highlands, sometimes trekking for days on horseback to reach poor and illiterate patients in remote hamlets. "She had seen bad treatment of women, even in her own family, and knew how critical the situation was," says Ghafoori, 24, now studying political science at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. After moving to neighboring Pakistan, where political conditions are more stable, she began organizing clinics and schools there and in Afghanistan, often in private homes to avoid the attention of the Taliban. "Sima has been so effective as a role model for women," says Michael Posner, executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, which honored Samar in October.
With funds from the United Nations and foreign donors, Samar plans to expand the operation in Afghanistan, where she returned after the fall of the Taliban, by opening another 42 co-ed schools and computer-training centers for women. "I want to help people. I want to change things," she says. "We do not choose our sex, so why should we be punished for it?"
Patrick Rogers
Liz Corcoran in Kabul, Nina Biddle in London and Joanne Fowler in New York City
- Contributors:
- Liz Corcoran,
- Nina Biddle,
- Joanne Fowler.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
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