For us here in Pakistan, it is a moment of tremendous pride that Malala Yousafzai has embarked upon her undergraduate studies at Britain’s prestigious Oxford University. That her first term kicked off in the same week that the world celebrated the UN International Day of the Girl only underscores her achievements.
This year the IDG aims, over the next year, to spur global attention and action to the immense challenges facing the girl child before, during and after crises. Malala knows what it is to confront a militant patriarchal mindset that seeks to keep girls disempowered by way of robbing them of the right to education. Such efforts could not be timelier.
Yet these threats to the girl child are not restricted to non-state actors. Today wars waged and societies decimated by the US and the NATO war machines from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Syria to Somalia to Yemen have turned the girl child into a refugee. Or as the West prefers to call her: an economic migrant. Those who do not manage to flee face the bombs and bullets of what the western media still insist on calling ‘civil wars’. Yet for the girl child, all she knows is that whether a refugee or an Internally Displaced Person — she has been denied the right to education, medical assistance, food. In short, the right to childhood. Nowhere is this more so than in Yemen, one of the world’s poorest nations. The ICRC has warned that the cholera epidemic could hit the one million mark by the year’s end. It has labelled the crisis there as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, with some 80 percent of children in desperate need of aid. This is what nearly three years of Saudi-led military intervention looks like. Elsewhere there is also US sabre rattling about the possibility of sanctions being imposed upon Pakistan and Iran. Such measures always hit the most vulnerable first and the hardest.
Thus while we support the UN endeavours when it comes to having people around the world rally behind the girl child before, during and after crises — what we don’t support is the western narrative that suggests the latter befall her by their own accord, as if by magic. Rather, we would like to say that it’s nothing less than a stain on the so-called civilised world that nearly 60 years after de-colonisation the plundering of natural resources from the world’s poorest nations by the richest is still going on. Unashamedly. The war next door in Afghanistan is one that has been waged according to different narratives of the day. One of which purported that it had been driven to liberate Afghan women and so that girls could go to school. Yet after 16 long years — the US is said to be eyeing mineral mining projects which may or may not amount to some $3 trillion — conveniently more than covering the cost of war.
Tell us if this doesn’t undermine the future of the Afghan girl child?
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