Millenium Development Challenge, March 2009, Kelowna BC

http://www.globalcitizenkelowna.org/content/EventsItem_19

Opening Keynote address to 500 teens during the Global Millenium Challenge Event in Kelowna
by CW4WAfghan Project Diretor, Lauryn Oates.

Good morning and thank you for inviting me to be here today. Firstly, I would like to congratulate you on your undertaking, for your commitment to the Millenium Development Goals, a commitment you are taking so seriously as to treat like a sport, to hold a competition! I am immensely proud to have been invited to be your speaker this morning, as your goals are very near and dear to my heart.

Your decision to stand up and take action is more than just extending a helping hand or a learning experience for you. You are helping cut through what is too often a deafening silence, where those who are privileged fail to speak out for those whose voices are too often not heard.

My work is about human rights and speaking out for human rights, and so is yours. The MDGs are fundamentally about human rights- the right to food, shelter, clean water, equality between men and women, the right to go to school, and the right to have governments that are accountable for protecting these rights. They are about the right to dream about futures where people are free, where children will grow up to a ripe old age, where they will be able to access quality healthcare throughout their lives, and where they can live free from poverty.

But the path to getting there is a long one and it can never be left up to someone else to pave it. You are that someone else. There is only us, the ordinary people, to take on the great task of advocating for these rights, whether in Canada or anywhere in the world.

Asma Jahangir and Hina Jilani, two sisters who are human rights lawyers in Pakistan, and who have been working all their lives to protect women there from violence, have said “Exposing realities is not easy. If people get the message that only extraordinary people do this work, then the movement becomes static and discourages others from joining. That’s why I am always keen to stress we are just ordinary people who have made up our minds that we have a cause worth fighting for.” Their words should be taken to heart.

But speaking out is not always easy. And as activists for global change and for social justice, you need to make your peace with that.

When I was 14 years old, in 1996, I learned for the first time that a regime called the Taliban had come into power in Afghanistan through war, and had imposed a strange and cruel system of laws over the women and girls of Afghanistan. Girls and women were no longer treated as human beings. They were stripped of their rights. Girls were banned from going to school. Women were no longer allowed to work outside of their homes. Women were not allowed to get medical treatment and access healthcare. Women were not even allowed to leave their homes without being accompanied by an immediate male relative. The windows of their houses had to be painted black, so they could not be seen from the outside and could not tempt men. They were even forbidden from wearing shoes that made noise, make-up, white socks, or nail polish. Non-religious books were collected and burned. Pictures of animals and people were made illegal. Music was banned. A favourite pass-time of Afghans, kite-flying, was even forbidden. Women were forced to wear the burqa, a garment which covers one from head to toe, with not even the eyes visible. If so much as a bare wrist showed from underneath the burqa, a woman could be hauled off to a secret jail cell, beaten, and never heard from again.

Those who broke the rules suffered vicious punishments. Buried to their wastes in burqas, women accused of having relationships with men they were not married to, or of being prostitutes, were stoned to death in Kabul’s sports stadium in front of tens of thousands of unwilling spectators. Thieves had their hands or feet cut off, their eyes gauged out, and the bodies of supposed criminals hung in the street to spread fear through the population. It worked. People were afraid.
This is not the stuff of a bizarre science fiction movie. This was real life for the people of Afghanistan. But I could not believe that this was happening in the same world in which I lived.

I read the newspaper article over and over again, and each time, my rage grew and grew. The only thing more shocking than what the Taliban were doing to the people of Afghanistan, was that they were getting away with it. There was hardly any outcry. One of the world’s worst human rights catastrophes, what some started calling “gender apartheid”, was just another news story in the back pages of the paper. The U.N. was saying very little. Western governments were saying even less. And their publics hardly knew what was happening. And the women of Afghanistan were dying.
Before reading that newspaper article, I would never have been able to even find Afghanistan on a map. I didn’t know anything about human rights. But I did understand that it was the silence of ordinary people like me that was allowing this to happen. I could not be silent. As Canadian writer, journalist, film-maker and women’s rights defender, Sally Armstrong says, “there is no such thing as an innocent bystander”.

So I began agitating, and have been ever since. My goal is simple: that a young woman in Afghanistan should be allowed to go to school, to learn to read, to dream of being anything she wants. If I have those rights, so should she.
But this is, surprisingly, a controversial goal in our world. Since I was 14 years old, people have been telling me to mind my own business, to not interfere in the affairs of other countries. I was often told that human rights are “western”, are “imposed” and that they do not go with the culture of Afghanistan. When I brought my petition for the rights of Afghan women to my high school, my 9th grade science teacher refused to sign it, saying “that’s their culture and it’s none of our business how they choose to run their country”.  I couldn’t believe my ears. But I started to get used to hearing it.

This, my friends, is called cultural relativism, and it is a very dangerous thing. It is used constantly as an excuse to not have to extend the same rights which we enjoy, in our privileged and free society, to others. And Afghan women will be the first to tell you, denying their daughters the right to go to school, is not cultural. It’s about controlling women, about power, about using religion and culture in the service of politics. To ever say that culture excuses the cruel treatment of women, the murder of women, is nothing less than shameful.

Human rights are not western. They are something we all share, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender or any other point of identity. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, and if they do, question them. And remind them that all over the world, citizens are demanding rights in home-grown movements for social change, for development, and for political freedoms. It’s those voices whose calls to action we need to heed, not the calls to leave it well alone.
Those that are on the frontline of human rights movements around the world are speaking out, often at great cost. I want to share with you the stories of a few activists who bring me inspiration when I need to be reminded what this good fight is all about.

Katia Bengana was a 16-year-old Algerian girl who was outspoken in her resistance to wearing the veil, at a time when Islamic fundamentalists were increasingly controlling the behaviour of women, attacking women in the streets of her neighbourhood for not conforming to strict dress codes. She was heading to school, waiting at a bus stop with a friend when she was shot to death by armed men. I read her story in the back pages of the newspaper many years ago, and didn’t want her courage- and its tragic conclusion- to be just another blip in the annals of human rights martyrs. I tell her story in every presentation I give, so people know her name and that her death and her life should remind us to carry on Katia’s outspokenness.

Gerry Conlon spent 13 years as an innocent man imprisoned, after him and six others were falsely accused of an IRA bombing in London in the 1970s. The police fabricated evidence against Conlon and the other prisoners, beat them, and used confessions and witness statements which were later retracted. Conlon’s father came to London to try to help him, and was also arrested. He died in prison after several years. When Conlon was finally released and pardoned, having lost 13 years of freedom and his father, he headed into a life of post-traumatic stress disorder, dug abuse and depression, having difficulty having normal relationships with people and leading any semblance of a normal life. But he continued in his fight for justice in an effort to honour his father’s name. There is a terrific film telling his story, “In the Name of the Father”.

Or there is Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani woman gang-raped on the orders of tribal elders, as punishment for a so-called crime committed by her brother, who had been accused of having a relationship with a girl from a rival tribe. In a society where most sexual violence goes un-reported and unpunished, Mai cut through that silence with a knife, taking her case all the way to Pakistan’s highest court, resulting in the prosecution of her rapists and compensation being awarded to her. A poor village woman, she used the money to build a school for girls. Today she speaks out around the world against rape and the impunity which usually surrounds it, demanding justice for women, calling for shelters to help protect them, and the prosecution of those who harm them.

These people have been fighting tooth and nail, dissenting from within their communities. They turned their pain and distress into the fuel for a life-long fight against powerful systems of tyranny, inspiring hope in others, and making just a little easier for the next person to stand up and break the silence.
There are of course many other examples and you probably have a few of your own heroes, whether the famous like Nelson Mandela, or the unknown like Katia Bengana.

I’ve been watching closely what is happening in the valley of Swat, in Pakistan. Taliban took control there and have burned down hundreds of girls’ schools. If a girl wants to go to school in Swat, she does so at risk to her life. And yet, girls are going to school anyways. In Kandahar, Afghanistan, some Taliban threw acid at a group of school girls on their way home from class. One was blinded and some will be scarred for life. It was a terrifying experience. And you know what? Most of them went back to school a short while later.

There is a critical lesson here to us. Afghan girls want to exercise their right to go to school so much, that they are doing so at risk to their lives. That’s a powerful commitment to education. And it’s one which we must stand behind.
I am proud of the girls of Swat, but I am also very worried for them. Because I feel like I am living 1996 all over again, watching a corner of the world descend into darkness, and the silence is deafening. Too little is being said from those who have the ability to speak out. The Pakistani government has made a deal with the Taliban in Swat. We don’t know if girls will be allowed to go back to school there.

But if you speak out, you might be able to change that. And people will tell you to mind your own business. And you know what you should say back to them? Tell them…. to “Shut up!”

I am so glad that I didn’t give up when I faced resistance. Because I have been able to make a difference. I’ve raised money that went to hire teachers to teach classrooms full of girls in Afghanistan, to build schools, and to build libraries. I’ve been fortunate enough to have visited Afghanistan many times, and will be leaving for my 13th trip there tomorrow morning. I’ve been able to see the pay-off of the efforts of Canadians, whether the volunteers of Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, the young fundraisers and awareness-raisers of Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan,  or the human rights activists behind groups like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch who kept reminding us that human rights are universal and they were not being respected in Afghanistan…. And that’s the business of all of us. I have met women who learned to read and write because of our work, girls who were going to schools that we helped pay for, I’ve been in shelters for abused women that exist because of the efforts of other women from around the world, and the women in those shelters are alive because women on the other side of the world decided that they cared what happened to them.

Most recently, CW4WAfghan and LW4LWA have been supporting a village library in a mountain valley near Kabul, called Dara village for short. The library is one room and it opened last August. It has about 1000 books and there is a literacy class for men and a literacy class for women. The entire village helped set-up the library. My friend Eshaq, who is from the village and has been watching the impact its having on his community, calls me up by Skype every week from Kabul and tells me how things are going. One evening in January, we were talking over the computer and he broke down and cried and said that the library has completely transformed the village. He described the experience of watching the women of his village slowly master their literacy. I remember him saying, “first a few letters, then putting the letters together and making the sounds, then…. Reading.” He had never seen anything as powerful as that, watching a person learn to read for the first time. Imagine it.

To be part of that, to work with Afghans in their struggle for the right to read, has been my great privilege. Afghanistan is a hard place that has seen a lot of suffering. Everyone there has witnessed violence, many have taken part in violence, and everyone lives with the consequences of war and poverty, and the consequences of having been ignored for too long by the outside world. Many people live on less than $1 a day, and everyone has lost something and someone. But right alongside this harshness, the worst of it, the worst of things that can happen to human beings, is also the very best of it. There are people who still celebrate weddings ferociously, treat guests like royalty, laugh together, love their kids, pick watermelons in the spring and fly kites in the summer, and girls who still go to school when they could be killed, because they want to read and write that badly. I have never witnessed a commitment to education that powerful anywhere else on earth. It’s something worth defending.

 But it’s hard to speak out. It is so much easier to mind our own business. Sometimes I still feel afraid of speaking out, of offending people. For International Women’s Day this year, a group I am involved with, the Canada Afghanistan Solidarity Committee, screened a film about Muslim Canadian activist Irshad Manji. Manji is a controversial figure. She lives in hiding right now because she has received serious death threats from people she has angered because she has called for change within the Muslim community. I started panicking a few days before the film, thinking “what are we thinking showing this film! We are going to offend somebody!”

But that’s the point of speaking out. That’s why it’s hard. You have to make a choice between offending someone who disagrees with you, or staying silent. And when you decide which is more important, stick with your decision and remind yourself every day why it’s more important.

I’ll tell you my reason for speaking out. I’m okay now with offending people. Actually, I’m getting pretty good at it. Our world is globalizing. Borders have less significance. As we have the technology and ability to find out about bad things happening in the world, we have an obligation to speak out.

Has anyone here heard of NIMBYism? NIMBY stands for “not in my backyard!” It’s a term used to describe opposition to different kinds of development in a neighbourhood. For example, a developer wants to build condos in a neighbourhood in Kelowna and the people who already live there don’t want that and fight against it. They have protests, they call the media, they sabotage the construction. Well, what if we had NIMBYism for global human rights? What if we saw the world as our own backyard, and when we hear about girls being denied the right to go to school in another country, any country, we always said, “not in MY backyard will you get away with THIS!”

Because it’s YOUR world and it’s happening to YOUR fellow human beings. And as a global citizens, we shouldn’t speak up because we want to be nice or we feel like it occasionally, but because we are OBLIGED to, as part of our duties as global citizens.

In closing, I want to share with you the words of a human rights activist who has continued to speak out, even when it meant sacrificing everything. I am reading from the book “Speak Truth to Power”. It’s a very powerful book profiling human rights defenders from around the world, many of whom have been tortured, imprisoned, harassed, intimidated, had family members killed, or have been abducted because they were fighting for various human rights- the right to justice, to education, to political freedom, an end to apartheid, or to a dictatorship. Their stories are powerful reminders that for us, it is easy to speak out. We have the freedom to do so, and we should use it.

The following words are from Dianne Ortiz, a Guatemalan-American woman who was a nun in Guatemala and was intimidated for many years for her work as a human rights defender before she was abducted, imprisoned, tortured, and repeatedly gang-raped. One of her captors was American, the others were Guatemalan soldiers.

“to this day, I cannot forget those who suffered with me and died in that clandestine prison. In spite of the humiliation that demanding answers entailed, I stand with the Guatemalan people. I demand the right to a future built on truth and justice. My torturers were never brought to justice. It is possible, that, individually, they will never be identified or apprehended. But I cannot resign myself to that fact and move on. I have a responsibility to the people of Guatemala and to the people of the world to insist on accountability where it is possible. I know what few U.S. citizens know: what it is to be an innocent civilian, and to be accused, interrogated, and tortured, to have my own government eschew my claims for justice and actively destroy my character because my case causes political problems for them. I know what it is to wait in the dark for torture, and what it is to wait in the dark for the truth. I am still waiting.”

There are many people still waiting in the dark for truth. If they are speaking, we must listen to them. If they are silent, we must demand that their voices be heard. And most importantly, we must always use our voices. Because as Martin Luther King, Jr. said “An injustice ANYWHERE is a threat to justice EVERYWHERE”. So speak up.