Текст книги "I Am Malala : The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban"

Автор книги: Malala Yousafzai

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

12

The Bloody Square

THE BODIES WOULD be dumped in the square at night so that everyone would see them the next morning on their way to work. There was usually a note pinned to them saying something like, ‘This is what happens to an army agent’, or ‘Do not touch this body until 11 a.m. or you will be next.’ On some of the nights of the killings there would also be earthquakes, which made people even more scared as we connect every natural disaster with a human disaster.

They killed Shabana on a bitterly cold night in January 2009. She lived in Banr Bazaar, a narrow street in our town of Mingora which is famous for its dancers and musicians. Shabana’s father said a group of men had knocked at her door and asked her to dance for them. She went to put on her dancing clothes, and when she returned to dance for them, they pulled out their guns and threatened to slit her throat. This happened after the 9 p.m. curfew and people heard her screaming, ‘I promise I’ll stop! I promise I won’t sing and dance again. Leave me, for God’s sake! I am a woman, a Muslim. Don’t kill me!’ Then shots rang out and her bullet-ridden body was dragged to Green Chowk. So many bodies had been left there that people started calling it the Bloody Square.

We heard about Shabana’s death the next morning. On Mullah FM, Fazlullah said she deserved to die for her immoral character and any other girls found performing in Banr Bazaar would be killed one by one. We used to be proud of our music and art in Swat, but now most of the dancers fled to Lahore or to Dubai. Musicians took out adverts in the papers saying they had stopped playing and were pledging to live pious lives to appease the Taliban.

People used to talk about Shabana’s bad character, but our men both wished to see her dance and also despised her because she was a dancer. A khan’s daughter can’t marry a barber’s son and a barber’s daughter can’t marry a khan’s son. We Pashtuns love shoes but don’t love the cobbler; we love our scarves and blankets but do not respect the weaver. Manual workers made a great contribution to our society but received no recognition, and this is the reason so many of them joined the Taliban – to finally achieve status and power.

So people loved to see Shabana dance but didn’t respect her, and when she was murdered they said nothing. Some even agreed with her killing, out of fear of the Taliban or because they were in favour of them. ‘Shabana was not a Muslim,’ they said. ‘She was bad, and it was right that she was killed.’

I can’t say that was the worst day. Around the time of Shabana’s murder every day seemed like the worst day; every moment was the worst. The bad news was everywhere: this person’s place bombed, this school blown up, public whippings. The stories were endless and overwhelming. A couple of weeks after Shabana’s murder, a teacher in Matta was killed when he refused to pull his shalwar above the ankle the way the Taliban wore theirs. He told them that nowhere in Islam is this required. They hung him and then they shot his father.

I couldn’t understand what the Taliban were trying to do. ‘They are abusing our religion,’ I said in interviews. ‘How will you accept Islam if I put a gun to your head and say Islam is the true religion? If they want every person in the world to be Muslim why don’t they show themselves to be good Muslims first?’

Regularly my father would come home shaken up due to the terrible things he had witnessed and heard about such as policemen beheaded, their heads paraded through the town. Even those who had defended Fazlullah at the start, believing his men were the real standard-bearers of Islam, and given him their gold, began to turn against him. My father told me about a woman who had donated generously to the Taliban while her husband was working abroad. When he came back and found out she had given away her gold he was furious. One night there was a small explosion in their village and the wife cried. ‘Don’t cry,’ said her husband. ‘That is the sound of your earrings and nose studs. Now listen to the sound of your lockets and bangles.’

Yet still so few people spoke out. My father’s old rival in college politics Ihsan ul-Haq Haqqani had become a journalist in Islamabad and organised a conference on the situation in Swat. None of the lawyers and academics he invited from Swat to speak turned up. Only my father and some journalists went. It seemed that people had decided the Taliban were here to stay and they had better get along with them. ‘When you are in the Taliban you have 100 per cent life security,’ people would say. That’s why they volunteered their young men. The Taliban would come to peoples’ houses, demanding money to buy Kalashnikovs, or they would ask them to hand over their sons to fight with them. Many of the rich fled. The poor had no choice but to stay and survive the best they could. So many of our men had gone to the mines or to the Gulf to work, leaving their families fatherless, the sons were easy prey.

The threats began to come closer to home. One day Ahmad Shah received a warning from unknown people that they would kill him, so for a while he left for Islamabad to try to raise awareness there of what was happening to our valley. One of the worst things about that period was when we started to doubt one another. Fingers were even pointed at my father. ‘Our people are being killed, but this Ziauddin is so outspoken and he’s still alive! He must be a secret agent!’ Actually he had been threatened too but hadn’t told us. He had given a press conference in Peshawar demanding that the military act against the Taliban and go after their commanders. Afterwards people told him his name was heard on Mullah FM in a threat from Shah Douran.

My father brushed it off. But I was worried. He was outspoken and involved in so many groups and committees that he often wouldn’t come home till midnight. He started to sleep at one of his friend’s houses to protect us in case the Taliban came for him. He couldn’t bear the thought of being killed in front of us. I could not sleep until he returned and I could lock the gate. When he was at home my mother would place a ladder in the back yard up to the outside wall so he could get down to the street below if he was in sudden danger. He laughed at the idea. ‘Maybe Atal the squirrel could make it but not me!’

My mother was always trying to think up plans for what she would do if the Taliban came. She thought of sleeping with a knife under her pillow. I said I could sneak into the toilet and call the police. My brothers and I thought of digging a tunnel. Once again I prayed for a magic wand to make the Taliban disappear.

One day I saw my little brother Atal digging furiously in the garden. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.‘Making a grave,’ he said. Our news bulletins were full of killings and death so it was natural for Atal to think of coffins and graves. Instead of hide and seek and cops and robbers, children were now playing Army vs Taliban. They made rockets from branches and used sticks for Kalashnikovs; these were their sports of terror.

There was no one to protect us. Our own deputy commissioner, Syed Javid, was going to Taliban meetings, praying in their mosque and leading their meetings. He became a perfect talib. One target of the Taliban were non-governmental organisations or NGOs, which they said were anti-Islam. When the NGOs received threatening letters from the Taliban and went to the DC to ask for his help, he wouldn’t even listen to them. Once in a meeting my father challenged him: ‘Whose orders are you representing? Fazlullah’s or the government’s?’ We say in Arabic, ‘People follow their king.’ When the highest authority in your district joins the Taliban, then Talibanisation becomes normal.

We like conspiracy theories in Pakistan and we had many. Some believed the authorities were deliberately encouraging the Taliban. They said the army wanted the Taliban in Swat because the Americans wanted to use an airbase there to launch their drones. With the Taliban in the valley, our government could say to the Americans we can’t help you because we have our own problems. It was also a way to answer growing American criticism that our military was helping the Taliban rather than trying to stop them. Now our government could respond, ‘You say we are taking your money and aiding these terrorists, but if that’s the case why are they attacking us too?’

‘The Taliban obviously have the support of unseen forces,’ said my father. ‘But what’s happening is not simple, and the more you want to understand the more complex it becomes.’

That year, 2008, the government even released Sufi Mohammad, the founder of the TNSM, from prison. He was said to be more moderate than his son-in-law Fazlullah, and there was hope that he would make a peace deal with the government to impose sharia law in Swat and release us from Taliban violence. My father was in favour of this. We knew this would not be the end, but my father argued that if we had shariat the Taliban would have nothing more to fight for. They should then put down their arms and live like ordinary men. If they did not, he said, this would expose them for what they really were.

The army still had their guns trained on the mountains overlooking Mingora. We would lie in bed listening to them boom boom all night. They would stop for five, ten or fifteen minutes and then start again the moment we drifted off to sleep. Sometimes we covered our ears or buried our heads under pillows, but the guns were close by and the noise was too loud to block out. Then the morning after, on TV, we would hear of more Taliban killings and wonder what the army was doing with all its booming cannons and why they could not even stop the daily broadcasts on Mullah FM.

Both the army and the Taliban were powerful. Sometimes their roadblocks were less than a kilometre apart on the same main roads. They would stop us but seemed unaware of each other’s presence. It was unbelievable. No one understood why we were not being defended. People would say they were two sides of the same coin. My father said we common people were like chaff caught between the two stones of a water mill. But he still wasn’t afraid. He said we should continue to speak out.

I am only human, and when I heard the guns my heart used to beat very fast. Sometimes I was very afraid but I said nothing, and it didn’t mean I would stop going to school. But fear is very powerful and in the end it was this fear that had made people turn against Shabana. Terror had made people cruel. The Taliban bulldozed both our Pashtun values and the values of Islam.

I tried to distract myself by reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which answered big questions such as how the universe began and whether time could run backwards. I was only eleven years old and already I wished it could.

We Pashtuns know the stone of revenge never decays, and when you do something wrong you will face the music. But when would that be? we continually asked ourselves.

13

The Diary of Gul Makai

IT WAS DURING one of those dark days that my father received a call from his friend Abdul Hai Kakar, a BBC radio correspondent based in Peshawar. He was looking for a female teacher or a schoolgirl to write a diary about life under the Taliban. He wanted to show the human side of the catastrophe in Swat. Initially Madam Maryam’s younger sister Ayesha agreed, but her father found out and refused his permission saying it was too risky.

When I overheard my father talking about this, I said, ‘Why not me?’ I wanted people to know what was happening. Education is our right, I said. Just as it is our right to sing. Islam has given us this right and says that every girl and boy should go to school. The Quran says we should seek knowledge, study hard and learn the mysteries of our world.

I had never written a diary before and didn’t know how to begin. Although we had a computer, there were frequent power cuts and few places had Internet access. So Hai Kakar would call me in the evening on my mother’s mobile. He used his wife’s phone to protect us as he said his own phone was bugged by the intelligence services. He would guide me, asking me questions about my day, and asking me to tell him small anecdotes or talk about my dreams. We would speak for half an hour or forty-five minutes in Urdu, even though we are both Pashtun, as the blog was to appear in Urdu and he wanted the voice to be as authentic as possible. Then he wrote up my words and once a week they would appear on the BBC Urdu website. He told me about Anne Frank, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis with her family in Amsterdam during the war. He told me she kept a diary about their lives all cramped together, about how they spent their days and about her own feelings. It was very sad as in the end the family was betrayed and arrested and Anne died in a concentration camp when she was only fifteen. Later her diary was published and is a very powerful record.

Hai Kakar told me it could be dangerous to use my real name and gave me the pseudonym Gul Makai, which means ‘cornflower’ and is the name of the heroine in a Pashtun folk story. It’s a kind of Romeo and Juliet story in which Gul Makai and Musa Khan meet at school and fall in love. But they are from different tribes so their love causes a war. However, unlike Shakespeare’s play their story doesn’t end in tragedy. Gul Makai uses the Quran to teach her elders that war is bad and they eventually stop fighting and allow the lovers to unite.

My first diary entry appeared on 3 January 2009 under the heading I AM AFRAID: ‘I had a terrible dream last night filled with military helicopters and Taliban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat.’ I wrote about being afraid to go to school because of the Taliban edict and looking over my shoulder all the time. I also described something that happened on my way home from school: ‘I heard a man behind me saying, “I will kill you.” I quickened my pace and after a while I looked back to see if he was following me. To my huge relief I saw he was speaking on his phone, he must have been talking to someone else.’

It was thrilling to see my words on the website. I was a bit shy to start with but after a while I got to know the kind of things Hai Kakar wanted me to talk about and became more confident. He liked personal feelings and what he called my ‘pungent sentences’ and also the mix of everyday family life with the terror of the Taliban.

I wrote a lot about school as that was at the centre of our lives. I loved my royal-blue school uniform but we were advised to wear plain clothes instead and hide our books under our shawls. One extract was called DO NOT WEAR COLOURFUL CLOTHES. In it I wrote, ‘I was getting ready for school one day and was about to put on my uniform when I remembered the advice of our principal, so that day I decided to wear my favourite pink dress.’

I also wrote about the burqa. When you’re very young, you love the burqa because it’s great for dressing up. But when you are made to wear it, that’s a different matter. Also it makes walking difficult! One of my diary entries was about an incident that happened when I was out shopping with my mother and cousin in the Cheena Bazaar: ‘There we heard gossip that one day a woman was wearing a shuttlecock burqa and fell over. When a man tried to help her she refused and said. “Don’t help me, brother, as this will bring immense pleasure to Fazlullah.” When we entered the shop we were going to, the shopkeeper laughed and told us he got scared thinking we might be suicide bombers as many suicide bombers wore the burqa.’

At school people started talking about the diary. One girl even printed it out and brought it in to show my father.

‘It’s very good,’ he said with a knowing smile.

I wanted to tell people it was me, but the BBC correspondent had told me not to as it could be dangerous. I didn’t see why as I was just a child and who would attack a child? But some of my friends recognised incidents in it. And I almost gave the game away in one entry when I said, ‘My mother liked my pen name Gul Makai and joked to my father we should change my name . . . I also like the name because my real name means “grief-stricken”.’

The diary of Gul Makai received attention further afield. Some newspapers printed extracts. The BBC even made a recording of it using another girl’s voice, and I began to see that the pen and the words that come from it can be much more powerful than machine guns, tanks or helicopters. We were learning how to struggle. And we were learning how powerful we are when we speak.

Some of our teachers stopped coming to school. One said he had been ordered by Mullah Fazlullah to help build his centre in Imam Deri. Another said he’d seen a beheaded corpse on the way in and could no longer risk his life to teach. Many people were scared. Our neighbours said the Taliban were instructing people to make it known to the mosque if their daughters were unmarried so they could be married off, probably to militants.

By the start of January 2009 there were only ten girls in my class when once there had been twenty-seven. Many of my friends had left the valley so they could be educated in Peshawar, but my father insisted we would not leave. ‘Swat has given us so much. In these tough days we must be strong for our valley,’ he said.

One night we all went for dinner at the house of my father’s friend Dr Afzal, who runs a hospital. After dinner, when the doctor was driving us home, we saw masked Taliban on both sides of the road carrying guns. We were terrified. Dr Afzal’s hospital was in an area that had been taken over by the Taliban. The constant gunfire and curfews had made it impossible for the hospital to function, so he had moved it to Barikot. There had been an outcry, and the Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan had called on the doctor to reopen it. He had asked for my father’s advice. My father told him, ‘Don’t accept good things from bad people.’ A hospital protected by the Taliban was not a good idea so he refused.

Dr Afzal did not live far from us, so once we were safely home, my father insisted on going back with him in case he was targeted by the Taliban. As he and my father drove back, Dr Afzal nervously asked him, ‘What names shall we give if they stop us?’

‘You are Dr Afzal and I am Ziauddin Yousafzai,’ replied my father. ‘These bloody people. We haven’t done anything wrong. Why should we change our names – that’s what criminals do.’

Fortunately the Taliban had disappeared. We all breathed a big sigh of relief when my father phoned to say they were safe.

I didn’t want to give in either. But the Taliban’s deadline was drawing closer: girls had to stop going to school. How could they stop more than 50,000 girls from going to school in the twenty-first century? I kept hoping something would happen and the schools would remain open. But finally the deadline was upon us. We were determined that the Khushal School bell would be the last to stop ringing. Madam Maryam had even got married so she could stay in Swat. Her family had moved to Karachi to get away from the conflict and, as a woman, she could not live alone.

Wednesday 14 January was the day my school closed, and when I woke up that morning I saw TV cameras in my bedroom. A Pakistani journalist called Irfan Ashraf was following me around, even as I said my prayers and brushed my teeth.

I could tell my father was in a bad mood. One of his friends had persuaded him to participate in a documentary for the New York Times website to show the world what was happening to us. A few weeks before, we had met the American video journalist Adam Ellick in Peshawar. It was a funny meeting as he conducted a long interview with my father in English and I didn’t say a word. Then he asked if he could talk to me and began asking questions using Irfan as an interpreter. After about ten minutes of this he realised from my facial expressions that I could understand him perfectly. ‘You speak English?’ he asked me.

‘Yes, I was just saying there is a fear in my heart,’ I replied.

Adam was astonished. ‘What’s wrong with you people?’ he asked Irfan and my father. ‘She speaks better English than the rest of you and you’re translating for her!’ We all laughed.

The original idea for the documentary had been to follow my father on the last day of school, but at the end of the meeting Irfan asked me, ‘What would you do if there comes a day when you can’t go back to your valley and school?’ I said this wouldn’t happen. Then he insisted and I started to weep. I think it was then that Adam decided he should focus on me.

Adam could not come to Swat because it was too dangerous for foreigners. When Irfan and a cameraman arrived in Mingora, our uncle, who was staying with us, said over and over that it was too risky to have cameras in our house. My father also kept telling them to hide the cameras. But they had come a long way and it’s hard for us as Pashtuns to refuse hospitality. Besides, my father knew this could be our megaphone to the outside world. His friend had told him it would make far more impact than him roaming from pillar to post.

I had done a lot of television interviews and enjoyed speaking into the microphone so much that my friends would tease me. But I had never done anything like this. ‘Be natural,’ Irfan told me. That wasn’t easy with a camera trained on me everywhere I went even as I brushed my teeth. I showed them the uniform I couldn’t wear and told them I was scared that if the Taliban caught me going to school they would throw acid in my face as they had done to girls in Afghanistan.

We had a special assembly that final morning but it was hard to hear with the noise of helicopters overhead. Some of us spoke out against what was happening in our valley. The bell rang for the very last time, and then Madam Maryam announced it was the winter holidays. But unlike in other years no date was announced for the start of next term. Even so, some teachers still gave us homework. In the yard I hugged all my friends. I looked at the honours board and wondered if my name would ever appear on it again. Exams were due in March but how could they take place? Coming first didn’t matter if you couldn’t study at all. When someone takes away your pens you realise quite how important education is.

Before I closed the school door I looked back as if it were the last time I would ever be at school. That’s the closing shot in one part of the documentary. In reality I went back inside. My friends and I didn’t want that day to end so we decided to stay on for a while longer. We went to the primary school where there was more space to run around and played cops and robbers. Then we played mango mango, where you make a circle and sing, then when the song stops everyone has to freeze. Anyone who moves or laughs is out.

We came home from school late that day. Usually we leave at 1 p.m. but that day we stayed till three. Before we left, Moniba and I had an argument over something so silly I can’t remember what it was. Our friends couldn’t believe it. ‘You two always argue when there’s an important occasion!’ they said. It wasn’t a good way to leave things.

I told the documentary makers, ‘They cannot stop me. I will get my education if it’s at home, school or somewhere else. This is our request to the world – to save our schools, save our Pakistan, save our Swat.’

When I got home, I cried and cried. I didn’t want to stop learning. I was only eleven years old but I felt as though I had lost everything. I had told everyone in my class that the Taliban wouldn’t go through with it. ‘They’re just like our politicians – they talk the talk but they won’t do anything,’ I’d said. But then they went ahead and closed our school and I felt embarrassed. I couldn’t control myself. I was crying, my mother was crying but my father insisted, ‘You will go to school.’

For him the closing of the schools also meant the loss of business. The boys’ school would reopen after the winter holidays but the loss of the girls’ school represented a big cut in our income. More than half the school fees were overdue and my father spent the last day chasing money to pay the rent, the utility bills and the teachers’ salaries.

That night the air was full of artillery fire and I woke up three times. The next morning everything had changed. I began to think that maybe I should go to Peshawar or abroad or maybe I could ask our teachers to form a secret school in our home, as some Afghans had done during Taliban rule. Afterwards I went on as many radio and TV channels as possible. ‘They can stop us going to school but they can’t stop us learning,’ I said. I sounded hopeful but in my heart I was worried. My father and I went to Peshawar and visited lots of places to tell people what was happening. I spoke of the irony of the Taliban wanting female teachers and doctors for women yet not letting girls go to school to qualify for these jobs.

Once Muslim Khan had said girls should not go to school and learn Western ways. This from a man who had lived so long in America! He insisted he would have his own education system. ‘What would Muslim Khan use instead of the stethoscope and the thermometer?’ my father asked. ‘Are there any Eastern instruments which will treat the sick?’ The Taliban is against education because they think that when a child reads a book or learns English or studies science he or she will become Westernised.

But I said, ‘Education is education. We should learn everything and then choose which path to follow.’ Education is neither Eastern nor Western, it is human.

My mother used to tell me to hide my face when I spoke to the media because at my age I should be in purdah and she was afraid for my safety. But she never banned me from doing anything. It was a time of horror and fear. People often said the Taliban might kill my father but not me. ‘Malala is a child,’ they would say, ‘and even the Taliban don’t kill children.’

But my grandmother wasn’t so sure. Whenever my grandmother saw me speaking on television, or leaving the house she would pray, ‘Please God make Malala like Benazir Bhutto but do not give her Benazir’s short life.’

After my school closed down I continued to write the blog. Four days after the ban on girls’ schools, five more were destroyed. ‘I am quite surprised,’ I wrote, ‘because these schools had closed so why did they also need to be destroyed? No one has gone to school following the Taliban’s deadline. The army is doing nothing about it. They are sitting in their bunkers on top of the hills. They slaughter goats and eat with pleasure.’ I also wrote about people going to watch the floggings announced on Mullah FM, and the fact that the police were nowhere to be seen.

One day we got a call from America, from a student at Stanford University. Her name was Shiza Shahid and she came from Islamabad. She had seen the New York Times documentary Class Dismissed in Swat Valley and tracked us down. We saw then the power of the media and she became a great support to us. My father was almost bursting with pride at how I came across on the documentary. ‘Look at her,’ he told Adam Ellick. ‘Don’t you think she is meant for the skies?’ Fathers can be very embarrassing.

Adam took us to Islamabad. It was the first time I had ever visited. Islamabad was a beautiful place with nice white bungalows and broad roads, though it has none of the natural beauty of Swat. We saw the Red Mosque where the siege had taken place, the wide, wide Constitution Avenue leading to the white-colonnaded buildings of the Parliament House and the Presidency, where Zardari now lived. General Musharraf was in exile in London.

We went to shops where I bought school books and Adam bought me DVDs of American TV programmes like Ugly Betty, which was about a girl with big braces and a big heart. I loved it and dreamed of one day going to New York and working on a magazine like her. We visited the Lok Virsa museum, and it was a joy to celebrate our national heritage once again. Our own museum in Swat had closed. On the steps outside an old man was selling popcorn. He was a Pashtun like us, and when my father asked if he was from Islamabad he replied, ‘Do you think Islamabad can ever belong to us Pashtuns?’ He said he came from Mohmand, one of the tribal areas, but had to flee because of a military operation. I saw tears in my parents’ eyes.

Lots of buildings were surrounded by concrete blocks, and there were checkpoints for incoming vehicles to guard against suicide bombs. When our bus hit a pothole on the way back my brother Khushal, who had been asleep, jerked awake. ‘Was that a bomb blast?’ he asked. This was the fear that filled our daily lives. Any small disturbance or noise could be a bomb or gunfire.

On our short trips we forgot our troubles in Swat. But we returned to the threats and danger as we entered our valley once again. Even so, Swat was our home and we were not ready to leave it.

Back in Mingora the first thing I saw when I opened my wardrobe was my uniform, school bag and geometry set. I felt so sad. The visit to Islamabad had been a lovely break, but this was my reality now.