As pashto poet Masoom hurmaz puts it in his words:
Tareekh da Pukhtun gora che ye peghly tal jangegi
Yao Malala da Maiwand wa bala paas pa Swat osegi
( History has consistently witnessed female Pashtun warriors
There was once a Malalai of Maiwand, and now there is one who lives in Swat)
There have been a lot of gossip and rants about the shooting of Malala
Yousafzai. When she was shot in the head by the Taliban and they openly claimed
responsibility for the attack last year, the electronic media and the Pakistani
political parties gave a lot of attention to Malala and condemned the attack on
the fourteen year old school girl. But the stand of Pakistani Islamist parties
on this incident was ambiguous from the beginning. According to an AFP
report, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the pro-Taliban head of the Jamiat
Ulema-e-Islam party, told a rally in Peshawar that the attack on the 14 year
old in the nearby Swat Valley was fake. ". "Pictures shown on social
media have shown the whole character as suspicious because there was no sign of
injury after the dressing was removed. It shows that the bullet did not hit her
in the head”, he said.
Facebook was the
social media to which Maulana referred and below are some of the pictures
which, according to the admin of the page are real.
In this picture
they have tried to show her healthy after the dressing has been removed and
then mocked it.
When I saw such pictures on Facebook I was
shocked, and instantly got in touch with a friend- a doctor who attended her at
the hospital in Swat. He was angry when he came to know that such pictures had
gone viral and swore that he was an eye-witness that she was severely bleeding
when arrived at the hospital. The reality is that all of the doctors who saw
her in Saidu Hospital Swat and CMH Peshawar denied the claims that the attack
on Malala was fake and confirmed that she had been shot.
The pictures of Malala not getting hit went viral
through different sources and in today’s world of Photoshop and other
photo-editing softwares, there still people exist who would believe those
pictures and not Malala and her father themselves. But, in the end of the day,
facts remain facts.
There was an organised campaign against Malala
Yousafzai’s mission and to stop people from believing that there did not exist
any “good Taliban”. Telling lies about Malala and showing her fake pictures to
the masses is only one part of this campaign; others include beheading more
than 1000 tribal elders (the people-loving and sincere Tribal elders), blowing
up schools, killing human rights activists and baring media organizations to
report the realities from FATA and Swat. This is a pre-planned campaign against
the Pakhtuns living on this side of the Durand line.
They didn`t stop here but went on comparing Malala’s work with that of social philanthropists, such as Abdul Sattar Edhi’s when the campaign for nominating her for the Nobel Peace Prize started in the form of signing a petition..
Any person with a sound mind
would instantly think that, although
Abdul Sattar Edhi is an honorable Philanthropist and his contributions should
be recognized, awarding a Nobel Peace Prize to Malala is not demeaning his and
the works of his alikes’. . He has received a number of such International
recognitions. Below is the list of his awards:
International awards
1. Ramon
Magsaysay Award for Public Service (1986)
2. Lenin
Peace Prize (1988)
3. Paul
Harris Fellow from Rotatory International Foundation, (1993)
4. Peace
Prize from (USSR former) for services in the American earthquake disaster,
(1998)
5. Largest
Voluntary Ambulance Organization of the World - Guinness Book of World Records
(2000)
6. Hamdan
Award for volunteers in Humanitarian Medical Services (2000) UAE
7. International
Balzan Prize (2000) for Humanity, Peace and Brotherhood, Italy
8. Peace
and Harmony Award (Delhi), 2001
9. Peace
Award (Mumbai), 2004
10. Peace Award
(Hyderabad Deccan), 2005
11. Wolf of
Bhogio Peace Award (Italy), 2005
12. Gandhi
Peace Award (Delhi),2007
13. UNESCO
Madan jeet sing Peace Award (Paris),2007
14. Peace Award
Seoul (South Korea), 2008
15. Honorary
Doctorate degree from the Institute of Business Administration Karachi
(2006).[1]
16. UNESCO-Madanjeet
Singh Prize (2009)
17. Ahmadiyya
Muslim Peace Prize (2010)
18. Peace Award
(London), 2011
The Facebook pages (see the link
in the second last para) also compared some pictures they portrayed as victims
of drone strikes with those of Malala’s. The page viewers are asked why people don`t talk about victims of
drones. They also blame the media of being biased towards the “American Malala”
and of ignoring other innocent kids.. The pictures which are shown to be of
victims of drone strikes are not of such people, in fact. The first picture is
of Barra Khyber Agency operation by Pakistani army. This picture was taken in
Lady Reading hospital Peshawar and the kid was not a drone victim, instead he was
injured when a misfired mortar was dropped on his house. Half of his family
members died in that strike and the rest
were seriously injured. The second picture is of Damadola Mamund Tehsil of Bajaur
Agency. This was way before the Taliban explicit insurgency in that area.
A madrassa was attacked
in 2006 by the Pakistani Army jets and director of Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) Shaukat Sultan
accepted the responsibility for killing 80 people in the attack. My intent here
is not to blame the Pakistani army but to show that the pictures used by such
Facebook pages were from the above two incidents and not of the victims of
drone strikes. The first picture is one of the hundreds of collateral damages
of the Pakistani army’s war on terror and the second is, according to Mr.
Shaukat , of a militant training school.
The above picture was the most
disturbing but there were people who
responded to them with some research about the realities about Afia
Sadiqui. The below picture states some
suspicious activities Sadiqui was involved in.
There are pictures of Malala, like the one in which she
is shown with deceased US envoy Richard Halbroke, claiming that it was a meeting
with agents from the CIA. That
picture was taken in Islamabad when Malala was awarded with National Peace
Award and many foreign diplomats and other officials including Richard Halbroke
were present. Shad Begum, an NGO worker and a women’s rights activist, is shown
as Malala’s mother by the conspiracy theorists. In another picture
the deceased technology expert Arfa Karim has been compared with Malala. Arfa
no doubt was a child genius but she did not contribute to peace and a Taliban
stricken society.
Malala Yousafzai is one brave
girl and I do not feel any shame to reckon that she was way braver than many of
us. I couldn`t dare to speak against the Taliban but she did. No one out of
fear could raise their voice for education, not even for male education, yet
she fought for female education. As for reference to her diaries is concerned
where she has expressed her fears of
seeing the men with long beards and long hair, everyone of the area has almost
the same feelings about the Taliban. Once my 9 year old brother Khalid rushed
in the house, he nearly fainted because he had seen some men with long hair and
beards which he took for the Taliban.
The Taliban will go to any extent
to keep Pakhtuns deprived of education. They will kill liberals and those who
speak for their basic rights. But the students have a role to play and can
contribute by making the parents of kids, who are deprived of education,
understand.
If Malala was a CIA agent, she
would not have used a local school bus as a means of transport to and from her
school. If she was an American agent, she would have not lived in an old house
without any security. She was just another normalchild, but a child with guts. .
We, the Pakhtuns, are proud of her and will continue her mission of educating
our sisters and daughters. We won`t let ourselves and others fall into the
conspiracies of some hypocrites. It is time to realize our miseries and speak
against those who have pushed us into these miseries slowly over the decades.
Please refer to the link here, which is the video of Malala after her successful
surgery and here are the photos in which this whole propaganda
was launched against her.
I believe that if Malala was from
any other part of Pakistan (not a Pakhtun) she would not have been criticized so harshly.
Majority of the anti-Malala gang
on facebook are girls and majority of these girls are non-Pahstoons.
So these non-pashtoon girls who
are anti-Malala, would like for them to spend a day in the shoes of a village
pukhtanu and live through her daily struggles before throwing out their
opinions."
Their (Anti-Malala girls) problem
is “if Malala is a daughter of the Nation, who we are then?” Exactly girls who
are you? Show your guts, educate yourselves and fight for girl’s education in
the areas where all girls’ schools have been blown up e.g. the two Waziristans (
north and south) and Bajaur, Aurakzai , Mohmand and |kurram Agencies.
The article has appeared on www.pashtunwomenvp.com Here
