A Women’s-Rights Activist Is Concerned About Negotiations with the Taliban
A Women’s-Rights Activist Is Concerned About Negotiations with the Taliban
Sima Samar, the chairwoman of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, has had a long career as a champion of the oppressed
She was born in Afghanistan and, in 1982, she earned a medical degree, from Kabul University. In 1984, the communist government kidnapped her husband, who never returned, and Samar and her son fled to Pakistan There she established the Shuhada Organization to provide reproductive health care to Afghan refugees. After the defeat of the Taliban, in 2001, Samar returned to Afghanistan, where she served as the minister of women’s affairs in the interim government of Hamid Karzai She went on to serve the United Nations as a special representative on human rights in Sudan. Since 2004, Samar has been the chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission the country’s national human-rights organization, which is independent from the Afghan government Early this year the Trump Administration announced that it had a framework for a peace deal with the Taliban, which would eventually lead to the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces. Yet the Afghan President, Ashraf Ghani, and women’s-rights activists fear that an American-led deal would undermine their interests, and that the Taliban would be unlikely to abide by it in the long term.