Malala Gave A Powerful Speech Calling On The World To Stand Up For Girls And Women In Afghanistan
“It took a bullet to my head for the world to stand with me. What will it take for the world to stand with the girls and women of Afghanistan?”
Pakistani activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai has delivered a powerful speech calling on the world not to forget about the plight of Afghan girls and women living under the Taliban’s rule.
Speaking at the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Johannesburg, South Africa, on Tuesday Dec. 5, 26-year-old Yousafzai called the Taliban’s crackdown on women’s rights since it took power in 2021 “gender apartheid”.
She began her speech speaking of the progress that Afghanistan had made in women’s rights just two years ago, prior to Taliban seizing power in 2021, and the systemic oppression that followed.
“For a short time, this made headlines, but since then, the world has turned its back against the Afghan people,” she said.
Yousafzai said that this may be a reflection of the sheer number of crises the world is facing, from violence and displacement in Sudan, famine to Yemen, the climate crisis, war in Ukraine to the bombardment of Gaza, where a child is killed every 10 minutes.
“So much of humanity is wounded, but we cannot allow ourselves to buy into this false notion that we can only care about one crisis at a time,” she said. “We must be able to hold space for suffering wherever it is happening in the world. So today, I would like to bring attention back to the girls of Afghanistan for suffering has been sidelined.”
Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by a local branch of the Taliban for campaigning for girls to be allowed to go to school at age 15, said that the Taliban has in effect, “made girlhood illegal”.
“If you are a girl in Afghanistan, the Taliban has decided your future for you,” she said. “You cannot attend a secondary school or university. You cannot find an open library where you can read. You see your mothers and your older sisters confined and constrained in a similar way. They cannot leave the house on their own, not to work, not to go to the park, not to get a haircut, not to even see a doctor.”
She called on the global community to make “gender apartheid” a crime under international law and not to normalize relations with the Taliban.
“If we as a global community accept the Taliban’s edicts, we are sending a devastating message to girls everywhere that they are less human, that your rights are up for debate. That we are willing to look away,” she said.
“It took a bullet to my head for the world to stand with me. What will it take for the world to stand with the girls and women of Afghanistan?” she said. “To anyone who says they care about protecting girls and women, to anyone who says they care about education, to anyone who says they care about oppression? What are you waiting for?”
Yousafzai said that it was clear that millions of Afghan girls are effectively imprisoned but were still fighting on, calling for justice and for the world to stand with them.
“They are the heroes the history books can teach us about. We must be their champions until they are free,” she said.
