Fawzia Koofi was hesitant to face the Taliban militants who jailed her husband, threatened to stone her for wearing nail polish, and — when she became a high-profile MP and women’s rights champion — tried to assassinate her.
But the trailblazing politician and mother of two daughters could not refuse a rare invitation this month to stand before her oppressors and declare unequivocally that their brand of misogyny and prejudice would never again take root in Afghanistan. “It was not that I wanted to do it, but I was doing it for the women of Afghanistan,” she said in an interview at her Kabul home. “I felt powerful. It was a room full of people, all male... For me, it was important that I make myself visible and my message clear to them.”
2 women invitees
Koofi was one of just two Afghan women invited to a grand hotel in Moscow earlier this month for informal meetings with the Taliban. Many women are afraid of being forced back under Taliban rule, beneath burqas and behind walls, without access to education or jobs.
In Moscow, in scenes unthinkable under the Taliban regime, the mullahs sat in silence as Ms. Koofi defended her daughters’ rights to thrive in a modern Afghanistan, free from harsh limitations.
The other 48 delegates at the unprecedented conference in the Russian capital were all men, Afghan political heavyweights and bearded Taliban officials, none used to being addressed so assertively by a woman. “You cannot just put her in her house and deprive her, like you did me, seeing the world through the small window of their burqas,” Ms. Koofi said, recalling her defiant speech before the delegation. “She has now much more connectivity. She will not go back to your time.” One of Ms. Koofi’s fellow passengers on the flight to Moscow was the Taliban’s head of vice and virtue — the dreaded moral police who cruised the streets in white pick-up trucks flogging women accused of indecency.
Not everyone was pleased that Ms. Koofi was given a seat at the table in Moscow.
Squarely in the minority, she had to lobby to get into smaller discussion circles. At the official press conference, she was stuck at the back, given no chance to speak while the men addressed foreign media at the front.
But that was nothing new for the woman lawmaker, who has developed a thick skin in a country often described as the most dangerous on earth to be a woman or a politician — let alone both. “My fight is not a very pleasant fight... It’s not something that people like, especially politicians in Afghanistan. I see that as a positive sign,” she said.