Nobel laureate Malala Yusufzai and the price of a peaceful struggle
Heading "Heroine" is dedicated to for women who are equal and who have something to learn - in one way or another. One of the main heroines of our days is a 17-year-old human rights activist from Pakistan, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in mid-October. We tell how a girl from a dangerous region became a politician, without even planning on herself, who helped her in this and how the tragedy in the life of one child helped fight for world peace.
In a small conference hall in 2009, a delegation from the United States and representatives of the protest movement of Pakistan sat. Richard Holbrooke, a US diplomat appointed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as country’s special representative in Afghanistan and Pakistan in January of the same year, nervously rolled his pen around the table and seemed to be unable to believe his eyes. Opposite him were a girl-blogger named Malala Yusufzai with her father, the director of a local school. “How old are you?” Holbrooke asked her. “I’m 12,” Malala blurted out and continued without stopping: “I ask you all, and you, dear ambassador, I ask you - if you can help us with our education, then please help.”
Richard Holbrooke, looking desperately at all of those present in turn, replied: "We will invest over a billion dollars in your economy, we work with your government to solve electricity problems, but your country, as you all know, is facing a huge number of other problems ". The following year, Holbrooke will die in Washington during a heart surgery, never knowing that a brave Pakistani child, famously demanding his help with the formation of an entire country, will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in a few years. Swat Valley in the Pakistani Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the place where the story of Malala Yusufzai begins and continues, was re-opened to tourists in October 2009. The news that the army was able to clear the region of the remnants of Taliban groups that tormented the province swiftly bypassed the tourist portals of the world - now supposedly in the highland region with green endless meadows and incredibly clear lakes, it will again be possible to ski in the country's ski resort. About a year earlier, local reporter Syed Irfan Ashraf was approached by David Rammel, a producer of documentaries from the New York Times, to help video journalist Adam Ellick take off his short story about events in the region.
We say this: the mother feeds the child with milk only when he cries. So if you don’t cry, you’ll get nothing, especially in third world countries
Traveling in a place that is teeming with the Taliban was very dangerous at that time, and the need for a local guide was acute. Although Ashraf strongly did not want to endanger the life of a foreign reporter, after some time he agreed. Together with his best friend Abdel High Kakar, who worked at the time on the BBC, they had long since ceased to consider themselves journalists, seeing their mission as partisans more. Ashraf and Kakar investigated the crimes of the Taliban militants, and at some point education became their main target. The Taliban, who were then in full control of the Swat Valley, prohibited local girls from going to school.
Friends unanimously decided that they needed a child’s voice, preferably a girl, who could tell about how she feels and feels because of the lack of the opportunity to receive knowledge. Abdul Kakar wanted such a voice for a special, very personal blog on the BBC website, and Ashraf with Ellik as the main narrator in his film. The choice fell on Mamala Yusufzai - the daughter of their longtime friend and school principal Ziauddin Yusufzai, as well as a member of the underground liberation movement in which they were all together. Malala agreed instantly, without fear, unlike the other girl, whose parents initially agreed to their daughter's participation in writing a blog, and later abruptly withdrew this consent. Malala began blogging a little earlier than becoming the main character of the documentary. The BBC editors, familiar with the mores in the region, wanted to preserve her anonymity by any means possible, since the child’s revelations began to rapidly gain popularity — no one had ever given a voice to children on the pages of the most popular publications in the world. They spent a long time and consistently discussed this with the Malala family and, for their part, did everything to protect the girl’s identity. However, they could not control the actions of her father, who managed to take Malala to the press club in Peshawar, where she made a speech entitled "How dare the Taliban deny me the basic right to education?". This speech went around Pakistani newspapers and television. Malala's identity was revealed several months after repeated appearances in the press and after the release of the New York Times documentary.
“I want to become a doctor, this is my personal dream. My father told me that I should become a politician, although I do not like politics,” Malala said on camera. “But I see an incredible potential in my daughter that she can achieve more than a doctor. She can create a society in which a medical student can easily get her scientific degree,” Ziauddin Yusufzai responds. Being an activist throughout his life, Yusufzai Sr. did not see any other way to remedy the plight of his country, except to shout about it at every corner.
"You know, we say this: the mother feeds the child with milk only when he cries. So if you don’t cry, you won’t get anything, especially in third world countries like ours. You have to shout about everything." Malala adopted the principles of her father - from the moment the world public familiarized herself with her personality and her words, she never for a moment stopped talking about the problems of the country and demanding normal education for all its inhabitants. Of course, neither her father, nor the BBC and New York Times journalists then knew that these loud pleas for help would lead a girl raised to a pedestal to mortal danger. In the end, who will shoot the child, even in Pakistan? October 9, 2012 was quite ordinary Tuesday in London. Aamer Ahmed Khan, the head of the BBC Urdu service and the ideologue of an anonymous blog about the life of a Pakistani girl, went up to his floor with a cup of coffee. At the same time, Malala Yusufzai was returning home on a school bus, which was stopped by armed men in masks. When one of the militants got on the bus and began to ask the children who was Malala, her identity was quickly established. He shot her in the head, the bullet went right through. As soon as the producers controlled by Aamer Khan saw this news, they sat in a daze for several minutes, staring at each other. Absolutely each of them considered it his duty to make this story main on October 9, and absolutely everyone considered himself guilty of what had happened.
Syed Irfan Ashraf felt the worst. He locked himself up for three days in his office and, following the results, published a column permeated with guilt in the most readable English-language newspaper in Pakistan, Dawn. He condemned "the role of the media in drawing smart young guys into dirty wars with dire consequences for innocent people." In the end, Ashraf confessed to Vanity Fair journalist that he could not even speak to anyone for a few days, that he experienced agonizing agony every time he saw the news, and that he now considers himself a criminal. "This is my crime. I pulled a 11-year-old child into it all." The problem with these repentances, in spite of their obvious sincerity, was that behind them, it seems, Malala herself could no longer be seen. Despite the fact that the journalists and her father really played a role in the girl’s activities, they also gave other people a platform for statements before and after, but while the others were silent, she spoke. The assassination was preceded by performances on national television and radio stations and even an interview with a Canadian newspaper, full of fearlessness and with no regrets about the impossibility of becoming a doctor. Malala firmly realized that she wanted to be a politician.
At home, her activism was ambivalent. On the one hand, she won the National Prize for Active Young People, who played their part in establishing peace in Pakistan, renamed the school in her honor, and local politicians were invited to speak in parliament, although she said shortly before that in an interview with Geo TV our politicians are lazy, and I would like to remove laziness and serve the nation. " On the other hand, local journalists endlessly stabbed her for how Dawn newspaper columnist Huma Yusuf summed up that her fame underlines the most negative aspect of Pakistan - unrestrained militancy; that her educational campaigns echo the western agenda and for the fact that their admiration for the West is full of hypocrisy, because they prefer to ignore other innocent victims. In the end, she was even called a CIA spy - a painfully familiar label in countries where no one talks to foreigners, and women cannot be taken on camera because it is a sin.
Despite her ambivalence towards Malala in her native Pakistan, after the girl’s condition stabilized after the assassination, she was quickly transported to hospital in the English city of Birmingham with the help of the Pakistani government, and she was discharged in January 2013 and continued treatment on an outpatient basis. Those who did not want to hear and listen before, now could not escape the feeling of shame. The author of the New York Times documentary Adam Ellick said that he told his wealthy city friends about the events that he had witnessed in the Swat valley and about Malala, but then everyone didn’t care. “They looked at me as if I were the carrier of a contagious disease, as if I described the atrocities in a village in Suriname,” he later wrote on his Facebook. Time magazine later will call Malala one of the most influential people in 2013, she will be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, she will receive the Anna Politkovskaya Award and the Sakharov Prize. In the end, she even released an autobiography, after which the Taliban spokesman said that they would definitely try to kill her again. Later, Aamer Ahmed Khan will say that he never regretted that in 2009 he instructed the local BBC correspondent to find a girl for blogging. “If I sat at the table and thought,“ My God, if we didn’t find her, this would never have happened, ”it would mean that I do not take into account the enormous contribution that children like Malala made to that we all believe so. Would anyone even talk about the situation of girls ’education in Pakistan if it were not for her?" Khan asks. What a tragedy that in order to remind the world that everything is given to us by default, you need to be a teenage girl from Pakistan and get a bullet in your head just because you really wanted to be a doctor. However, two years after the attack, Malala, with a titanium plate implanted into the skull and an installed hearing aid, won the Nobel Peace Prize, saying that her only problem during public appearances was always too high a podium. This time he approached her.
Photo: www.malala.org