‘The People’s Power Will Always Prevail’: in Conversation with Fawzia Koofi
CW: violence against women, mention of sexual assault
This interview was conducted at the Cambridge Union, where Fawzia Koofi spoke to the Chamber on the 31st of January. Thanks to Shibhangi Ghose and Sal Widdecombe for facilitating.
Koofi in the Chamber. By Tobia Nova for the Cambridge Union.
Fawzia Koofi is a women’s rights activist and former Afghan MP. She has spent her life fighting for democracy and the rights of Afghan women. Before she spoke at the Cambridge Union, she talked to us about her activism and the importance of free speech, emphasising that “we don't have weapons. The weapons are our words.”
Koofi’s activism has always focused on the daily discrimination faced by women in Afghanistan. She promotes “equality, standing for equality, no matter what gender or race or religion. We are all equal before the law and we are all equal human beings.” She says that “the moment that I was suppressed personally, as a woman, as a girl, I could see that other women around me were also suppressed. I could see that woman were raped in front of my eyes during the war, they were used as a tool of war.”
Koofi’s father was killed when she was four, and she tells us that “my childhood gave me enough reasons to fight against discrimination and injustice.” From birth, she was discriminated against for her gender. “I was one of those unwanted children in my family. My mother wanted to have a boy, but she had a girl. Not that she didn't like the girl, but because as a woman, I think she suffered so much she didn't want another woman to suffer as much as she had.”
While she wasn't born into a war-torn country, she grew up in one. The Taliban came to power in 1996 when Koofi was a young student. The day she was forbidden from going to university changed the trajectory of her life forever. “I never wanted to be in politics. I always wanted to be a medical doctor”, she says. Since their return to power in 2021, the Taliban have banned women from attending primary schools and universities. As a woman finishing my final year of university I am reminded of my privilege. Koofi’s question is haunting: “As women, as girls, who are in one of the most prestigious universities, how can you let your sisters, like you, not be able to go to university for their gender? For the fact that they're a woman?”
Koofi was drawn into Afghan politics in 2001, as she saw the Taliban “distancing from our original values as a nation, as a country…that motivated me to come into politics and change things for others.” But before gaining a political role, Koofi had to fight her family to justify the capability of women. “I had to win an internal family election because my brothers wanted to be members of Parliament.” She ran for election in 2005, but her brothers’ disbelief didn't end there: “[They] would stop any car, when they see any big posters of me in the car, they would start misbehaving with the driver, ‘Why did you put up my sister's poster?’ They would tear my posters down. Because it's a male dominated society, right?”
She later ran for Vice President of the National Assembly and won. “I wasn't even sure that I would win. But I wanted to show them, to society, that a woman can also dream high and be ambitious…this was the time my family started, my brothers, started taking me seriously. Like, she cannot be stopped, right?” She explains that her success was in part because “people already knew me. I had a connection and a base. I was also speaking about ordinary problems, common problems. Not a philosophical elite discussion coming from somewhere else, but on the ground.”
Democracy has a complicated history in Afghanistan, however: “When I say democracy, a lot of people in the West would say: ‘Democracy for Afghanistan? They have tried for 20 years. It failed.’” Koofi challenges these people to instead question the role of America and other Western countries: “I must say that it's not democracy that failed in Afghanistan. People did not fail. It's the world that failed … if the people of Afghanistan were allowed to choose what they wanted to, and they were empowered to do what they wanted to do, we would have not experienced what we experienced.”
She has faced numerous assassination attempts since entering politics, including a gunshot to the arm in 2020, but she prevails: “I think with passion, with believing in yourself, then you will make others start believing in you. Because they will know that this is serious. This is real. As a woman, the more you gain and the more powerful you become, the more you create enemies for yourself.”
Fawzia Koofi speaking in the Union Chamber. By Tobia Nova for The Cambridge Union
What can be done? How can individuals, students, or the international community help? Koofi has two strategies. “First of all, as an individual, as you, as Lily, as all of you, you can connect with a girl in Afghanistan to support them with English classes, with opportunities.” She also calls for individuals to use their collective power to influence their local MPs, social media and internet discourse. In broader terms, she says that “unless we change the political ecosystem in Afghanistan, nothing else will change. We need to really support a political alternative for the Taliban, start supporting women, start supporting civil society activists so that they are mobilised enough to become an alternative for Taliban.”
Koofi is optimistic for the future, despite being forced out of her home country. She believes that “as much as there is such a huge challenge, many women also see this as an opportunity because it mobilised women and put women, like the Iranian women, at the forefront of standing for their rights.” She assures us that “the people’s power will always prevail.”
This mobilisation brings risk. Women who protest in Afghanistan are in constant danger, and Koofi wants to amplify their voices: “Today, women in Kabul are protesting, small in numbers, twenty or thirty. These are the women who, when they leave their homes, they say goodbye to their family members. Because they know that…they might be killed, they might be imprisoned, they might be kidnapped. Anything can happen to them.”
She calls for a new narrative, a political settlement where women are at the forefront: “We should be the leaders. We did the fight, we carried the burden, it is on our shoulders inside of Afghanistan and outside. It's an entire generation of empowered Afghan women and girls in the last twenty years.” She calls for international action, not just sympathy. “If a girl is born right before the Taliban, she's now 21 years old. She just needs meaningful solidarity. She wants to be the representative of her country. She’s fighting for Afghanistan and for all of our security. She wants to be heard.”