January 6, 2003
Awakened Woman's Circle is working for peace
Zoya's Story
by Zoya with John Follain and Rita Cristofari
Reviewed by Diane Schulz
Dark eyes stare out from the grille of a bright blue burqa on the front of the book-jacket. A long list of "thou shalt nots" for women, enforced by the Taliban during their rule, provides text for the back. Also included is a very clear statement: "50 percent of the authors' proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)." Indeed, this is the story of a young woman, now aged 24, who was born into a family dedicated to RAWA, an organization "created a few years before you were born, by a group of professors, students, and intellectuals," Zoya's mother explains to her when she is eight years old.
Zoya had asked her mother why she was gone from the house so much, unlike the majority of mothers she knew. "There are several of us, women who are all part of a group that tries to help women and to bring peace to our country. That's what the papers that we write and distribute try to explain, that the people of our country have the right to decide their own future…."
Zoya's mother had begun to take her along on her daily rounds in Kabul when she was only seven, but Zoya had never asked what she did, simply wanting to spend time with her mother. As a child accompanying her mother, she was not under suspicion by the authorities, thus she unknowingly and successfully carried RAWA literature in her backpack for her mother.
RAWA arose out of an active underground resistance that began to form soon after the overthrow of King Azhir Shah in 1973, when a communist-based government took form. In 1979, the Russian military invaded the country and ruled through a Marxist-Leninist puppet government. They did not pull out their troops until ten years later, at which time various tribal war-lords, and the Mujahideen who had been in power before communism, began an all-out war for control of the country, with the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban finally taking complete control by 1996. By that time, Zoya's parents had been long "disappeared" (been murdered) and she was a refugee in Pakistan, living at a RAWA financed school. Zoya explains,
The school was funded by RAWA, thanks to donations made to it by supporters both in Afghanistan and elsewhere and to the money it raised through the sale of carpets and handicrafts that were made mainly by women in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. . .What we were being taught there put us in danger of attacks from Afghan fundamentalists living in Pakistan, so much so that we needed to be protected day and night.
Fear of violence had become a part of the fabric of life, a day-to-day reality, whether from male fanatics among her own people, the invading Russian soldiers, or, soon-to-be, American bombs and military men. In her school, from the age of fourteen, Zoya learned the meaning of democracy, human rights and feminism from Soroya, her older "Sister", as the teachers of the school were referred to. "I was told that if men were not allowed to become members of RAWA, it was not because we were against men -- we needed their help for the organization to continue working -- but because of its very nature."
By the time Zoya was sixteen, she had made the very difficult decision to become an active member of RAWA. After some intensive reading of RAWA's extensive files, she and a group of girls ran a RAWA safe house in Pakistan. She wrote articles for Payam-e-Zan (Women's Message) and learned that simple language was needed, not the flowery language of poetry she so loved.
Soroya taught her that "politics was not about long discussions among. . . politicians; it was about talking to poor, ignorant, and backward people and showing them that they had a future." She also read and heard many women's stories of arrest and torture, as well as the life of Meena, the poet who had founded and become a martyr for RAWA. She was strangled by an Afghan secret service man at the age of thirty. A few lines from a poem by Meena express very simply her passion for her country, and for women:
I'm the woman who has awoken,I've arisen and become a tempest through the ashes of my burned children,
I've arisen from the rivulets of my brother's blood,
My nation's wrath has empowered me.
. . .I'm the woman who has awoken,
I've found my path and will never return.
Zoya had found her strength through RAWA, and has since been a dedicated underground activist, based in Pakistan. She has returned to Kabul several times and witnessed the devastation wrought by the Taliban, including a "cutting of hands," the punishment for stealing, held at enforced mass gatherings at the former soccer stadium. "The Taliban in the black turban drew a knife, knelt down on one knee at the prisoner's side, and started sawing at the man's right wrist . . . I felt faint and sat down on the floor in the middle of the crowd, which seemed to have become frozen." This and similar macabre scenes were filmed by hidden cameras by the women of RAWA, at great risk to themselves.
But Zoya also witnessed resistance from women like Khalida, a teacher of clandestine classes for some three hundred children in various areas of Kabul. Many courageous women continued to teach under horrendously dangerous conditions. The students arrived and left the safe houses on a staggered schedule, carried no written materials, and had to keep silent about their studies.
In the past few years, Zoya has also traveled abroad to conferences and to raise funds for RAWA. She describes her experience as part of Eve Ensler's V-Day Movement event at Madison Square Garden in Feb. 2001. Zoya entered the stage beneath a burqa while Eve Ensler's poem, "Under the Burqa" was read. She was then unveiled before the podium and spoke to the thousands of people gathered for the event.
The European authors, John Follain and Rita Cristofari, had heard of Zoya and tracked her down after some time. They met with her secretly, as her life is still in danger, in order to record her story. Although only 23 at the time, they describe her as mature beyond her years. Reading Zoya's story, and the ongoing tragedy of the brutality of life in Afghanistan, opened my heart even more to understanding the immediacy of helping women like her who are dedicated to a new way of life in their ravaged country. It will be a long, up-hill struggle, but we over-privileged women of the West, especially those of us in the USA, can and must help these women re-birth their country. As part of this effort, my friends and I formed a Women's Council here in Sonoma County, California, and have linked up with a group of Afghan women in Kabul through Patricia Melton's peaceXpeace organization. (See website: http://www.peacexpeace.org/) We are now getting to know each other through email and photos and will soon find out what their needs and aspirations are. Then we can help to fulfill some of those needs.
Zoya says at the end of her story: "If peace returns to my country I would like to go back and walk the destroyed streets of Kabul, the sun shining not on a burqa but on my face. I would think not of the past but of the Future." If she can feel so positive about a future, after living in a state of war for her entire life, then that is reason enough for us to support her effort.
Please buy this book and support RAWA!
http://www.rawa.org/