Malala Yousafzai was targeted for demanding equal education opportunities for girls, which the Taliban claimed was a violation of Islamic law. Her shooting has sparked near-universal outrage in Pakistan, and even politicians, most of whom are afraid to cross Pakistan’s powerful extremist groups, have openly condemned the Taliban. But whether this anger will translate into real change remains an open question.
AT the age of 11, Malala Yousafzai took on the Taliban by giving voice to her dreams. As turbaned fighters swept through her town in northwestern Pakistan in 2009, the tiny schoolgirl spoke out about her passion for education — she wanted to become a doctor, she said — and became a symbol of defiance against Taliban subjugation.
On Oct. 9, masked Taliban gunmen answered Yousafzai’s courage with bullets, singling out the 14-year-old on a bus filled with terrified schoolchildren, then shooting her in the head and neck. Two other girls were also wounded in the attack.
Yousafzai was first airlifted from Swat to a military hospital in the northwestern city of Peshawar, then to the country’s top military hospital in Rawalpindi. On Monday she was airlifted to Britain to receive specialized medical care and protection from follow-up attacks threatened by the Taliban. A spokesman for the hospital said Wednesday Yousafzai remained in a stable condition and was continuing to impress doctors by responding well to her care.
The shooting came days before the first International Day of the Girl Child on Oct. 11, which was inaugurated by the United Nations. The U.N. stated that the day “focuses attention on the need to address the challenges girls face, promote their empowerment and fulfill their human rights.”
A Taliban spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, confirmed by phone that Yousafzai had been the target, calling her crusade for education rights an “obscenity.”
“She has become a symbol of Western culture in the area; she was openly propagating it,” Ehsan said, adding that if she survived, the militants would certainly try to kill her again. “Let this be a lesson.”
The Taliban’s ability to attack Pakistan’s major cities has waned in the past year. But in rural areas along the Afghan border, the militants have intensified their campaign to silence critics and impose their will.
That Yousafzai’s voice could be deemed a threat to the Taliban — that they could see a schoolgirl’s death as desirable and justifiable — was seen as evidence of both the militants’ brutality and her courage.
“She symbolizes the brave girls of Swat,” said Samar Minallah, a documentary filmmaker who has worked among Pashtun women. “She knew her voice was important, so she spoke up for the rights of children. Even adults didn’t have a vision like hers.”
The shooting has been denounced worldwide and by Pakistan, which has said it will do everything possible to ensure that Yousafzai makes a recovery, paying for her treatment, and offering more than US$100,000 for the capture of her attackers.
The attack has united many in her native country in outrage. Demonstrations and vigils have been held in support of the teenager.
Yet in Britain, too, campaigners for the empowerment of young Muslim women say the attack has struck a chord in parts of society where traditional attitudes, in particular those carried over from rural northern Pakistan, still manifest themselves through resistance — in a minority of families — toward education of girls.
“Malala is a role model because even though we are not facing the Taliban here in the U.K., there are a number of girls who face that backward mentality. So I think definitely she has become an inspiration for standing up against force at such a young age,” said Sabbiyah Pervez, a young mother and university graduate in the northern English city of Bradford, home to one of Britain’s largest Muslim populations.
Meanwhile, farther south in Birmingham, where Malala is hospitalized, her arrival has engendered feelings of a different kind among Muslims living there.
“There is a strong connection [between the two places] because of the large number of Pakistanis who live in the city, I am proud that Birmingham has stepped in to help in this situation,” said Qayyum Choudhury, chairman of the Council of British Pakistanis.
Activists say the shooting should be a wake-up call to those who advocate appeasement with the Taliban. But analysts suspect there will be no significant change in a country that has sponsored radical Islam for decades.
Yousafzai first came into the public eye in 2009, when private schools in Pakistan’s Swat valley were ordered to close in a Taliban edict that forbade girls from attending school.
Her father ran one of the last schools to defy Taliban orders to end female education.
Starting on Jan. 3, 2009, Yousafzai kept a diary for the BBC’s Urdu service, in which she detailed how the ban affected her and her peers. She wrote the blog under the pen name “Gul Makai,” meaning “grief stricken.”
Her diary entries, which were published online, chronicled three months of life under the local chapter of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, an umbrella group of organizations fighting the Pakistani state, which took hold of the valley in late 2007.
Yousafzai writes about being told “not to wear colorful clothing as the [Taliban] would object to it,” and constantly remarks on the noise of artillery fire. The then 11-year-old girl repeatedly expresses her desire to return to school, and sadness that many of her friends’ families were moving away to provinces where their daughters could safely attend school.
The school was eventually forced to close, and Yousafzai was forced to flee to Abbottabad, the town where Osama bin Laden was killed last year. Months later, in summer 2009, the Pakistani Army launched a sweeping operation against the Taliban that uprooted an estimated 1.2 million Swat residents.
The Taliban fled, or so it seemed, as fighters and their commanders fled into neighboring districts or Afghanistan. An uneasy peace, enforced by a large military presence, settled over the valley.
Yousafzai grew in prominence, becoming a powerful voice for the rights of children. In 2011, she was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize. Later, Yousaf Raza Gilani, the prime minister at the time, awarded her Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize.
Mature beyond her years, she recently changed her career aspiration to politics, friends said. In recent months, she led a delegation of children’s rights activists, sponsored by UNICEF that made presentations to provincial politicians in Peshawar.
“We found her to be very bold, and it inspired every one of us,” said another student in the group, Fatima Aziz, 15.
Minallah, the documentary maker, said, “She had this vision, big dreams, that she was going to come into politics and bring about change.”
That such a symbol of optimism and courage could be silenced by Taliban violence was a fresh blow for Pakistan’s beleaguered progressives, who seethed with frustration and anger Oct. 9. “Come on, brothers, be real man. Kill a school girl,” one media commentator, Nadeem F. Paracha, said in an acerbic Twitter post.
In Parliament, Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf urged his countrymen to battle the mind-set behind such attacks. “She is our daughter,” he said. (SD-Agencies)
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