Pakistani activists carry photos of Malala in 2012, when the young woman had been the victim of a Taliban attack.arif ali / afp
In the autumn of 2013 I interviewed Malala in Birmingham, Great Britain, where she was still recovering from the attack she suffered a year earlier, when a Taliban shot her in the head simply for wanting to go to school (and for claiming that girls could continue to do so).
The bullet entered below her left eye, smashing her face, severing her facial nerve, and grazing her brain, which swelled to such a degree that doctors removed the cap from her skull to relieve pressure, and the adolescent (had at the time fifteen years) had to spend several months with his brains in the air until they were covered with a titanium plate.
How much I have thought about Malala these days.
If the sinking of Afghanistan has been distressing for me, what will it be for her?
All the horrors that I only imagine, she has lived.
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The Taliban reached the Swat valleys of northwestern Pakistan, where Malala was born, when she was ten years old.
I was reading the
twilight
saga
and he believed the vampires were coming. Headless bodies appeared in the squares and women were flogged for not being dressed as they should. They burned down televisions, destroyed hair salons, banned music and girls from going to school. If they heard too much noise inside your house (laughter, songs), they broke into it to punish you: "You couldn't even play to comb your dolls." The musicians began to put advertisements in the newspapers saying that they were sorry for their sins and that they would not sing again, lest they be killed. Such is life in the Taliban hell, in which women do not even have the right to go out on the streets if they are not accompanied by a man.
It is a delusion, but the terrifying thing is that delusion sometimes triumphs. It happened in the Third Reich, it happens now. We believed that we had freed ourselves from the monsters and did not know that when we woke up, the dinosaur would still be there. The permissiveness in the face of corruption, the lack of a sufficient development aid project, the tempting money that people receive for the cultivation of opium, which the Taliban control, are some of the causes of this catastrophe. The fact is that twenty years later, after many sacrifices and pain and deaths that are useless today, we are back to the way we started. What do I say, much worse. Because now they are stronger, they will last longer. And they will be the head of radical Islamism worldwide.
That is why we cannot look the other way. We cannot allow a regime that, as a proud display of its ferocity, condemns half the population to a life of degradation and slavery, to slow genocide. We cannot allow it due to an ethical principle, but also because we are all at stake too much. And let's not be fooled by the Taliban's promises of temperance: they are all a lie. During the siege of Mazar-i-Sharif, the Taliban spokesman told the BBC: “They have followed the Western way of life: they have to be killed” (Antonio Elorza tells it in
El Correo)
. What will happen to the hundreds of thousands of Afghan women who studied, who became professionals, journalists, politicians, teachers, lawyers?
25% of the democratic parliament were women, and there were more than one hundred thousand in the local councils (data from Soledad Gallego Díaz in this newspaper).
Without a doubt they are going to kill them, or lock them up, or beat them, or maim them.
Are we going to allow it?
Afghan women are the Jews of Nazism today, they are the blacks of apartheid.
The emblem of an inadmissible horror.
At the age of eleven, in the darkest of the gloomy Taliban night, Malala began writing an underground blog for the BBC.
The first entry read: “On my way home from school I heard a man yelling: I will kill you!
I quickened my pace, but to my great relief I saw that he was talking on his cell phone and that he must be threatening someone else ”.
They start by shooting the Malalas and end up threatening us all.
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