One year ago schoolgirl
Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen - her "crime",
to have spoken up for the right of girls to be educated. The world
reacted in horror, but after weeks in intensive care Malala survived.
Her full story can now be told.
She is the teenager who marked her 16th birthday with a live
address from UN headquarters, is known around the world by her first
name alone, and has been lauded by a former British prime minister as
"an icon of courage and hope".
She is also a Birmingham schoolgirl trying to
settle into a new class, worrying about homework and reading lists,
missing friends from her old school, and squabbling with her two younger
brothers.
She is Malala Yousafzai, whose life was forever changed at age 15 by a Taliban bullet on 9 October 2012.
I have travelled to her home town in Pakistan, seen the
school that moulded her, met the doctors who treated her and spent time
with her and her family, for one reason - to answer the same question
barked by the gunman who flagged down her school bus last October: "Who
is Malala?"
"I didn't want my future to be imprisoned in my four walls and just cooking and giving birth” Malala Yousafzai
The Swat Valley once took pride in being
called "the Switzerland of Pakistan". It's a mountainous place, cool in
summer and snowy in winter, within easy reach of the capital, Islamabad.
And when Malala was born in 1997 it was still peaceful.
Just a few hours' driving from Islamabad brings you to the
foot of the Malakand pass, the gateway to the valley. The winding road
up to the pass leaves the plains of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formerly known
as the North-West Frontier Province, far below.
I remember it well from childhood holidays in Pakistan. But
my latest trip felt very different - the BBC crew made the journey with a
military escort. Although the Pakistan army retook control of Swat
from the Taliban in 2009 and it is arguably now safer for foreigners
than some other areas, the military clearly didn't want to take any
chances.
Historically, the north-west has been one of Pakistan's least
developed regions. But Swat, interestingly, has long been a bright spot
in terms of education.
Until 1969, it was a semi-autonomous
principality - its ruler known as the Wali. The first of these was
Miangul Gulshahzada Sir Abdul Wadud, appointed by a local council in
1915 and known to Swatis as "Badshah Sahib" - the King. Although himself
uneducated, he laid the foundation for a network of schools in the
valley - the first boys' primary school came in 1922, followed within a
few years by the first girls' school.
The trend was continued by his son, Wali Miangul Abdul Haq
Jahanzeb, who came to power in 1949. Within a few months, he had
presented the schoolgirls of Swat to the visiting prime minister of
Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, and his wife Raana. As his grandson Miangul
Adnan Aurangzeb says: "It would have been unusual anywhere else in the
[North-West] Frontier at that time, but in Swat girls were going to
school."
The new Wali's focus soon turned to high schools and
colleges, including Jahanzeb College, founded in 1952, where Malala's
father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, would study many years later. Soon, Swat
became known across Pakistan for the number of professionals it was
producing - especially doctors and teachers. As Adnan Aurangzeb says,
"Swat was proud of its record on education… one way to identify a Swati
outside of Swat was that he always had a pen in his chest pocket, and
that meant he was literate."
Against this backdrop, the fate that befell the schools of Swat in the first years of the 21st Century is particularly tragic.
By the time Malala was born, her father had realised his dream of
founding his own school, which began with just a few pupils and
mushroomed into an establishment educating more than 1,000 girls and
boys.
It is clear that her absence is keenly felt. Outside the door
of her old classroom is a framed newspaper cutting about her. Inside,
her best friend Moniba has written the name "Malala" on a chair placed
in the front row.
This was Malala's world - not one of wealth or privilege but
an atmosphere dominated by learning. And she flourished. "She was
precocious, confident, assertive," says Adnan Aurangzeb. "A young person
with the drive to achieve something in life."
In that, she wasn't alone. "Malala's whole class is special," headmistress Mariam Khalique tells me.
And from the moment I walk in, I understand what she means.
Their focus and attention is absolute, their aspirations sky-high. The
lesson under way is biology, and as it ends I have a few moments to ask
the girls about their future plans - many want to be doctors. One girl's
answer stops me in my tracks: "I'd like to be Pakistan's army chief one
day."
Part of the reason for this drive to succeed is that only white-collar,
professional jobs will allow these girls a life outside their homes.
While poorly educated boys can hope to find low-skilled work, their
female counterparts will find their earning power restricted to what
they can do within the four walls of their home - sewing perhaps.
"For my brothers it was easy to think about
the future," Malala tells me when we meet in Birmingham. "They can be
anything they want. But for me it was hard and for that reason I wanted
to become educated and empower myself with knowledge."
It was this future that was threatened when the first signs
of Taliban influence emerged, borne on a tide of anti-Western sentiment
that swept across Pakistan in the years after 9/11 and the US-led
invasion of Afghanistan.
Like other parts of north-west Pakistan, Swat had always been
a devout and conservative region, but what was happening by 2007 was
very different - radio broadcasts threatening Sharia-style punishments
for those who departed from local Muslim traditions, and most ominously,
edicts against education.
The worst period came at the end of 2008, when the local
Taliban leader, Mullah Fazlullah, issued a dire warning - all female
education had to cease within a month, or schools would suffer
consequences. Malala remembers the moment well: "'How can they stop us
going to school?' I was thinking. 'It's impossible, how can they do
it?'"
But Ziauddin Yousafzai and his friend Ahmad Shah, who ran
another school nearby, had to recognise it as a real possibility. The
Taliban had always followed through on their threats. The two men
discussed the situation with local army commanders. "I asked them how
much security would be provided to us," Shah recalls. "They said, 'We
will provide security, don't close your schools.'"
"People don't need to be aware of these things
at the age of nine or 10 or 11 but we were seeing terrorism and
extremism, so I had to be aware," she says.
She knew that her way of life was under threat. When a
journalist from BBC Urdu asked her father about young people who might
be willing to give their perspective on life under the Taliban, he
suggested Malala.The result was the Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl, a blog for BBC Urdu, in which Malala chronicled her hope to keep going to school and her fears for the future of Swat.
She saw it as an opportunity.
"I wanted to speak up for my rights," she says. "And also I didn't want my future to be just sitting in a room and be imprisoned in my four walls and just cooking and giving birth to children. I didn't want to see my life in that way."
The blog was anonymous, but Malala was also unafraid to speak out in public about the right to education, as she did in February 2009 to the Pakistani television presenter Hamid Mir, who brought his show to Swat.
Continue reading the main story
Hamid MirI was surprised that there is a little girl in Swat who can speak with a lot of confidence, but I was concerned about her security”
"I was surprised that there is a
little girl in Swat who can speak with a lot of confidence, who's very
brave, who's very articulate," Mir says. "But at the same time I was a
bit concerned about her security, about the security of her family."
At that time it was Ziauddin Yousafzai, Malala's father, who
was perceived to be at the greatest risk. Already known as a social and
educational activist, he had sensed that the Taliban would move from the
tribal areas of Pakistan into Swat, and had often warned people to be
on their guard.
Malala herself was concerned for him. "I was worried about my
father," she says. "I used to think, 'What will I do if a Talib comes
to the house? We'll hide my father in a cupboard and call the police.'"
No-one thought the Taliban would target a child. There were
however notorious incidents where they had chosen to make an example of
women. In early 2009, a dancer was accused of immorality and executed,
her body put on public display in the centre of Mingora. Soon
afterwards, there was outrage across Pakistan after a video emerged from
Swat showing the Taliban flogging a 17-year-old girl for alleged
"illicit relations" with a man.
Ziauddin Yousafzai must have known that Malala's high profile
in the valley put her at some risk, even though he could not have
foreseen the outcome.
"Malala's voice was the most powerful voice in Swat because
the biggest victim of the Taliban was girls' schools and girls'
education and few people talked about it," he says. "When she used to
speak about education, everybody gave it importance."
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