The Afghan revolutionary who took on the Soviets and patriarchy – Al Jazeera English

Only one clip of Meena speaking flickering, faded, just a few minutes long survives today, and it sounds like a prophecy. It is 1981. She is 24, in a pale blue turtleneck and a dark blue dotted pinafore, her wavy hair cropped short.

Meena had just delivered a speech in Valence, where she was invited by the new French Socialist government to represent the Afghan resistance movement at a party congress. Her speech so angered the Soviet delegation the USSR had invaded Afghanistan two years earlier, and she spoke forcefully against the occupation that they stalked out, glowering, as she raised a victory sign in the air.

In the clip, a snippet from an interview with a Belgian news channel, she predicts calmly, sombrely, pen in hand the victory of anti-Soviet forces. But she also warns of its cost: that the anti-democratic, misogynistic factions of the mujahideen being valorised by the West in their fight against the Soviets would, in turn, devour Afghanistan.

Amid the clumsy binaries of war, Meena was treading a tricky path.

Meena was born in 1956, in the final decades of Mohammed Zahir Shahs reign. The modernist king had nudged along a number of firsts for women: female voices on Afghan radio, voluntary abolition of the chadar, and ratification of the constitution by a Loya Jirga a grand legal assembly that included women.

She attended one of Kabuls best schools the Lycee Malalai, named after a beloved folk heroine who rallied flailing Afghan forces to victory against the British in 1880 but in her middle-class home, she saw her father periodically beat her two mothers.

Uncommonly alert to injustice her relatives casual mistreatment of Hazara servants, of the educational disparities between her architect father and her unlettered mother teenage Meena became increasingly fixated on the inferior status of women.

How men saw women and how women saw themselves as individuals with their own hopes and dreams, rather than in perpetual service to the family, the tribe, and the nation would not be transformed by state mandates alone. These roles would have to be renegotiated, Meena knew, by Afghan women themselves, from within the most fundamental unit of society, the family.

It is 1976. Three years earlier, the old king had been overthrown by his cousin, and the 225-year-old monarchy was replaced with an autocratic one-party state. Kabul University, where Meena is now studying law, is a microcosm of the forces buffeting Afghanistan: Marxists and Maoists, monarchists and Islamic revivalists.

Meena, 20, is married to a doctor 11 years older, the only man her family could find who fit her criteria: no bride price, no second wife, no objection to school or work. He is the leader of a Maoist group. Meena also leans left, but she is not interested in being relegated to the womens wing of a political outfit. She seeks an organisation that centres the liberation of Afghan women.

There is none, so she starts one herself. It is called the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).

In the beginning, there were five. A year later, 11. They were not even all known to each other and rarely met all together. Once, when they did meet, they sat in a room partitioned by curtains so they could hear the rest but could not see more than three others. Years before the Taliban first took over Afghanistan, at a time when women had the right to education, were such extraordinary measures necessary?

RAWA was not plotting the downfall of the state. At first, it was organising adult literacy classes, a preliminary step in Meenas vision towards helping women from strict patriarchal families develop a sense of self. But in a stubbornly gendered society, where the only women with any real power tended to be mothers-in-law, the organisers knew their work would be perceived as a threat: it would, in Dari, be mushti dar dahan a fist in the mouth of patriarchy.

In 1978, on the heels of a violent coup, a new Soviet-backed government began rolling out reforms across Afghanistan. Land was redistributed, the tricolour flag turned a solid communist red, bride prices reduced, and marriage before the age of 18 outlawed. Afghan society bristled at these changes particularly, scholars have since noted, the changes concerning women. RAWA baulked, too: if the fight for their rights became associated with imperial power, it was Afghan women who would bear the brunt of the backlash. And so, it expanded its mandate, becoming, in Meenas words, an organisation of women struggling for the liberation of Afghanistan and of women. One could not be achieved without the other.

Anti-Soviet resistance mounted across Afghanistan, first percolating in the countryside, then spreading to the cities. The crackdown by the Soviet-backed government also intensified. Political prisoners in Afghan jails tribal leaders, clergy, public intellectuals, students tripled within six months. Executions were a daily occurrence. Many others vanished into thin air. Meena began visiting the families of the jailed and the disappeared, asking after them.

This is how many women joined RAWA. They were struck by the fact that Meena cared. Bereft of male protection but also male authority for the first time, they heeded her call to channel their rage and despair into a disciplined resistance.

In December 1979, Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan. RAWA members took part in popular demonstrations, surreptitiously distributing political pamphlets (shabnameh, literally translating to night missives, circulated under cover of dark), started Payam-e-Zan (Womens Message), a polemical magazine that they assembled by hand, and supported secular factions of the mujahideen on the war front, where they dispensed medical aid and learned to use and clean guns.

Melody Ermachild Chavis, author of a RAWA-authorised biography of Meena, recalls story after story of Meenas doggedness: disguised in an old burqa, she would visit women from dawn to dusk, talking for hours, returning every week.

That is the closest to a critique of Meena that Chavis who channelled 20 years of experience as a private investigator preparing death-row appeals in California into reconstructing Meenas life heard from RAWA members. Some of the older women would tell her, youve got to rest, youve got to protect yourself more. They told me how shed periodically collapse: from dehydration, exhaustion, malnourishment, sometimes pregnancy, she says.

And sometimes from grief. Once, thousands of women went to meet jailed family members being released under a general amnesty when only 120 were released, the women stormed the prison and found piles of dead bodies.

Meena, returning home from one of her prison visits, collapsed, unable to process what she had witnessed the screams of a mother whose son was killed in prison. That night, she shook in her sleep.

The first issue of Payam-e-Zan, published in 1981, shortly before Meenas trip to Europe, features an unsigned poem.

The midnight screams of bereaved mothers still resonate in my ears

Ive seen barefoot, wandering and homeless children,

Ive seen giant henna-handed brides with mourning clothes,

Ive seen the giant walls of prisons swallow freedom in their ravenous stomach,

Im the woman who has awoken,

Ive found my path and will never turn back

The poem was penned by Meena. By the time she returned from Europe, a number of RAWA members and supporters had been imprisoned. Her husband, after being jailed and tortured, had fled to Pakistan. As a political activist opposing the Soviet occupation who had garnered international attention, Meenas photos were being circulated at checkpoints across Kabul, so she too crossed the border, alongside millions of other Afghans seeking refuge from war.

Ultimately, she set up a base in the Pakistani city of Quetta, where RAWA began opening schools, clinics and orphanages for fellow refugees.

In 1986, Meenas husband was murdered in Peshawar by mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyars Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin an armed group said to have received more CIA funding than any other mujahideen group during the Soviet war.

Three months later, Meena went missing in Quetta. In August 1987, her body was unearthed from the compound of an abandoned house, identifiable only by her wedding band. She had been strangled to death, betrayed by a male RAWA supporter. Originally arrested for driving a truck filled with explosives into Pakistan, the two men who confessed to her murder had ties to KHAD, the Afghan secret police allied with the Soviets. In 2002, 15 years after her death, they were hurriedly executed by the Pakistani state. Afterwards, RAWA released a statement reiterating its opposition to capital punishment.

More than 10 years after Meenas assassination, scholar Anne E Brodsky recounts viewing that clip of Meena alongside young RAWA members in Pakistan. Watching their martyred leader predict a future they had lived through but one she did not live to see, the young women were moved to tears. Most of them had never met her, Brodsky writes in With All Our Strength (2003), her book-length account of RAWA, but they had heard the stories and they felt that the only reason they were where they were educated, safe, and with a deep purpose in life and a community of love and caring to support their struggle was the efforts of this woman.

Brodsky, a community psychologist, interviewed more than 100 RAWA members and supporters in the early 2000s. Time and again, women spoke of how RAWA gave them meaning amid the chaos of war. They chanted the slogans that were stuck in my throat; they spoke the words that I didnt dare speak, one member told Brodsky. Another, a premed student forced to stay home when the Taliban came to power in 1996, was able to claw her way out of depression through involvement with RAWA: I even forgot I didnt have rights and couldnt continue my studies because I was always busy.

RAWAs response to Meenas murder had been to double down on her lifes work. On both sides of the Durand Line the British-drawn boundary between Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan RAWA established schools and orphanages for Afghan boys and girls, literacy programmes for older women, health clinics and income-generating programmes.

In Afghanistan, then as now, most of these operations remained underground. In areas of Pakistan where it was relatively safer to operate for RAWA, many people remember Meenas visage having pride of place. Jennifer L Fluri, a feminist political geographer at the University of Colorado, recalls in the early 2000s nearly every room in an openly RAWA-run school or orphanage in Pakistan featuring Meenas portrait. She was very much a living presence, she says.

Meena remained the face of RAWA for another reason, too: after her assassination, the organisation became entirely anonymous, operating as a single, undifferentiated front. At the same time, it became even more decentralised, a collection of committees spread across Afghanistan and Pakistan that exchanged information on a need-to-know basis.

Chavis estimates that there were approximately 2,000 members in the mid-2000s membership is limited to Afghan women living in Afghanistan or Pakistan, while men and other women can join as supporters but there was no real way of ascertaining the actual number. For security reasons, RAWA did not maintain a consolidated list.

In 1997, a year into Taliban rule, they launched a website, helping them find international supporters and donors. It exists today, too, stuck in a 90s design warp, an ode to Meena as well as meticulous documentation of the conditions of Afghan women at large. Trigger warnings abound, followed by an unapologetic reminder: this is the reality for many.

In addition to their social work, RAWA also began documenting Taliban atrocities at a time when Afghanistan had been largely forgotten by the world. In 1999, members smuggled a camera into a football stadium in Kabul to film the public execution of Zarmina, a mother of seven accused of killing her husband. When RAWA approached Western media outlets with the video, most declined to air it it was too shocking, they said, for their viewers.

Then 9/11 happened. RAWAs footage of Zarminas execution, despite being two years old, began playing on a loop on CNN. Before dropping bombs on Afghanistan, US warplanes first dropped flyers over the country making the case for military action. Some of the pamphlets featured images of Taliban crimes plucked from RAWAs website. RAWA was appalled, says Sonali Kolhatkar, co-director of the Afghan Womens Mission, a US-based non-profit established in 2000 by RAWA supporters. To them, it was such a betrayal and a huge danger to be inadvertently associated with a US invasion that they staunchly opposed. The US never asked for their permission to use those images.

In her role as a RAWA ally, facilitating its advocacy work abroad, Kolhatkar had a front-row seat to Western liberal feminisms encounter with RAWA.

Prior to 9/11, some members came to the US for the first time on a speaking tour sponsored by a prominent womens organisation. The organisation sold these little pins with squares of mesh cloth on them, similar to what youd find on a burqa, Kolhatkar recounted. And one condition of the invitation was that at every event featuring RAWA, they would first have to play a five-minute video, produced by the organisation, highlighting the plight of Afghan women and after 9/11, they [RAWA] were dismissed by Western feminists as being too Western. This, to me, was the most infuriating part: to have their work co-opted and their legacy questioned by Western feminists.

The activists who came to the US, writes Brodsky, were also frustrated by Western attempts to individualise them, needling them for their personal stories, rather than engaging with RAWAs institutional message.

When a RAWA representative explained her role on RAWAs foreign affairs committee to the Western women in the room, Brodsky recalls the meeting room lapsing into baffled silence. The other women in the room appeared to strain to integrate this piece of information into their mental picture of this young woman and her grassroots organization, she writes in With All Our Strength. Finally someone responded, A Foreign Affairs Committee, isnt that organized of you?!

For RAWA, these experiences abroad were a vindication of Meenas fierce commitment to independence and her refusal to let the organisations mission be subsumed into a broader political project, whether at home or abroad. Her legacy remains really central to RAWA, especially with regard to independence, secular democracy, and the complete rejection of foreign intervention except when it comes to people-to-people solidarity, says Kolhatkar.

Fluri, as a geographer, was particularly interested in examining how RAWA negotiated power closer to home in Pakistan. She recalls spending time in a refugee camp in Peshawar in the early 2000s, where RAWA wielded great influence so much so that when a woman complained of her husband continually hitting her, they worked with male allies to have the man kicked out of the camp. It was almost like they had their own mini nation there, says Fluri. The camp was a microcosm of their vision of Afghanistan feminist, multiethnic, she says. I remember thinking, oh wow, they really are kind of creating this there.

Many of the major refugee camps in Pakistan were disbanded in the mid-2000s. As Afghan men and women returned to their homeland often involuntarily, hounded out by an increasingly hostile host country RAWAs activities in Pakistan began to dissipate. In Afghanistan, its work continues but remains underground: a mix of home-based schools and feminist study circles, rural health services, and income-generating projects for women, such as poultry farms.

RAWA did not respond to requests for an interview.

Much of RAWAs work today depends on donations from international supporters and is therefore especially susceptible to the fleeting attention span of the West. The situation right now inside Afghanistan is worse than it was last summer [when US forces withdrew]. But theres less attention being paid, and so its harder to raise funds and getting the money to RAWA has also become nearly impossible because of US banking sanctions, says Kolhatkar.

Still, RAWA soldiers on. Last December, they marked International Human Rights Day with a protest against the Taliban, concealing their identities by wearing masks of slain Afghan activists. In the absence of freedom and democracy, their placards proclaimed, human rights have no meaning!

Meenas legacy extends beyond RAWA, too. Years after that refugee camp in Peshawar was shut down, not too far away, another young Pashtun would become famous for demanding her right to education so famous that she too would be known by her first name alone. In 2014, asked about her childhood memories of reading, Malala responded: One of the first books I read is called Meena, about a girl who stood up for womens rights in Afghanistan.

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The Afghan revolutionary who took on the Soviets and patriarchy - Al Jazeera English