Carleton awarded a former Nobel Peace Prize nominee who has championed women’s rights and education in Afghanistan with an honorary doctorate degree on July 15.
Dr. Sima Samar was recognized in a ceremony at the Kailash Mital Theatre for her humanitarian work in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which began when she started working as a doctor in remote regions of Afghanistan during the Soviet Union invasion.
Samar earned her medical degree in 1982 from Kabul University, but never received her diploma because of the Soviet invasion that left Afghanistan in a state of turbulence.
Samar said it was unsafe to practice medicine in Kabul and left the city for central Afghanistan. “I arrived there with little more than a stethoscope, a copy of a medicine journal and my son,” she said in her award acceptance speech.
It later became “too dangerous” to practice medicine in Afghanistan, she said. When her husband was arrested, Samar said she fled to the refuge of Pakistan with her son to escape the violence. Samar said she lived there for 17 years and, in that time, cultivated health services and education programs for women and children.
Samar said she was appalled by the health conditions Afghan women and children had to endure in refugee camps. “The conditions were horrible, and women had no access to proper health care, particularly to reproductive health because of the lack of facilities and the power of the conservative elements in the camps,” she said. “Women died of curable conditions and sicknesses as they were denied treatment.”
Samar said she started a hospital in 1987 to provide treatment to refugees in need and served 300 women and children who sought services from the hospital on opening day.
Later, Samar broadened her outreach to include education and founded the Shuhada Organization, a foundation which has established more than 100 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. When the Taliban came to power, the Shuhada Organization managed to keep open the only girls’ high school in Afghanistan during the repressive regime.
“One of the reasons that the war in Afghanistan is so long and violent,” said Samar, “is because of lack of education.” Samar noted that even after the fall of the Taliban regime, girls are still not getting equal opportunities in education, particularly because universities are not equipped with girls in mind, lacking trained female teachers, dormitories and facilities. This situation becomes ever complicated, she said, with the return of the Taliban in areas around the country, and the violence and scare tactics being used to discourage girls from going to school.
As chair of the Independent Afghanistan Human Rights Commission, Samar now supervises a national program that promotes women’s right to education. “Peace and security will not be sustainable without development, and both cannot be achieved without respect for human rights and full participation of women,” Samar said. “Education is necessary for all of these goals.”
“As Afghan women, we want to live with the full rights and dignity of human beings.”