Wahida Zalmai
Wahida Zalmai was born in Afghanistan and arrived in London in 1993. She describes how her women’s group raised awareness about the situation of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
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Transcript
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'Every year on the 8th of March, International Women’s Day, we celebrated this occasion. The members of our women’s group, plus those women who were in touch with us in London, we together used to maintain a deep spiritual relationship with women who had to live in Afghanistan during the bad situation resulting from the war. None of us could stop thinking, even for one moment, about the women back home.
'Especially during the Taliban rule, even though we could not directly help the women inside Afghanistan, financially, morally or socially - because we had our own problems - we always thought about them, and we tried hard to draw the attention of the international community to their situation, and asked them to do something about Afghan women in order to free them from all these pressures and tortures. That was the least we could do for Afghan women.
'To achieve such a goal, I managed to establish contacts with a number of women’s organisations. I can give you an example: it was in 1994 or 1995, when a conference was held in Scotland called ‘Solidarity with Women in Afghanistan’ on the occasion of 8th of March. We attended that conference. We travelled from London voluntarily and we went there. We gave a lot of information about the situation of Afghan women to those attending this conference.
'It was interesting that sometimes at the conference we were asked whether wearing ‘Chador’ or being unemployed and just sitting at home is a part of our culture. We strongly rejected these matters. We gave good examples about ourselves and about Afghan women and our culture.
'We organised this widely and we managed to raise the awareness of many participant organisations about Afghan women, both in the past and the time they were living under the pressure and tortures imposed by the Taliban.'
Copyright Evelyn Oldfield Unit