06 March 2009
Afghan Women Struggle for Equal Rights, Roles in Government, March 6, 2009(Her hopes for progress in Afghanistan fuel activist Wazhma Frogh)
Washington — Wazhma Frogh believes in changing systems from within, and she is willing to stake her life on her beliefs.
In 2002, when she visited a conservative district in northeastern Afghanistan, the activist overheard the local mullah urging male worshippers to kill her for her plans to start a literacy program for women.
Frogh told a Christian Science Monitor reporter about how she marched into the mosque and challenged the mullah to hear her out. Reciting a number of Koranic passages that supported education, she decried the use of Islam to justify domestic violence and child marriage. The mullah listened, and then endorsed her plans to start the literacy program.
Her activism began at a young age. In the eighth grade, she offered tutoring to her landlord’s children in exchange for reduced rent to ensure she and her sisters would be able to continue school. At age 17, she used her internship at a prestigious Pakistani newspaper to expose poor living conditions and abuses of women’s rights in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan.
Frogh currently works as the Afghanistan country director for Global Rights, an international human rights organization. She has launched public debates on domestic violence and marital rape in Afghanistan, both previously unmentionable topics in her country.
She persuaded mullahs to join her in a monthlong campaign of speaking out against domestic violence, and, by mobilizing a group of more than 35 civil society organizations, convinced the government of Afghanistan to take action against child rape. Frogh also provides training to policewomen on issues involving domestic violence and child abuse.
In an interview with America.gov, Frogh said one of her goals is to see more women in decision-making positions in the Afghan government. “I believe the country is in the chaos because women in this county have always been left behind in the very important decision-making,” she said, citing security concerns as a major reason ambitious Afghan women are turned away by men from positions in government.
“But we are already dying,” she told America.gov. “Women are not very much protected. So why not to die as the minister? Why not to die as a governor?
“We are still struggling to prove ourselves as human beings, which itself is a huge human rights situation in Afghanistan,” Frogh said. She called on the international community to put greater pressure on the Afghan government to include women in decision-making and earmark a portion of aid for gender-based programs.
Frogh also decried the “huge knowledge gap” about Afghanistan prevalent among Westerners.
“One of the worst misconceptions,” she said, “is that they think Afghanistan is a country where things are impossible — that Afghans are kind of backward, wild people, that they are not open to any progress and nothing is going to change in that county.”
She blamed the chaos of the fighting and the economic devastation as major contributors to Afghan society’s slide to tribal traditionalism.
“When you look at the conditions the country had even before the Soviet invasion — I remember my grandmother said she used to wear miniskirts when she went to university [in Kabul],” Frogh said. “She now tells us the way she used to go to movies. And girls of my age and my generation in that country cannot even dream of it now.”
Even so, Frogh, who is 29 years old, has hope for her country and its women.
The Afghan Constitution has provisions for women’s equality — a major accomplishment — but they must be more fully implemented and enforced, she said.
“We have made some progress on women’s conditions,” she said. “Women like me, we are all examples of that progress. And there are many women like me who are working very hard on that front.”
Frogh’s courage and leadership have won her recognition from the United States. On March 11 she will be presented with the International Women of Courage Award by the U.S. secretary of state. (See “United States Recognizes Women of Courage.”)
