Dr. Sima Samar

Samar was born in Jaghoori, Ghazni, Afghanistan on 4 February 1957. As a child in school, she learned what it meant to be a minority in Pushtun-dominated Afghanistan. She is Hazara, one of the most persecuted of the ethnic minorities in Afghanistan that comprise some 17 percent of the population. Moreover, as a female in a conservative Muslim society, she was doubly second class. At 18, she married and began her medical education. She obtained her degree in medicine in February 1982 from Kabul University, the first Hazara woman to do so. Soon after came the Russian invasion, and as a doctor, she aided the anti-Soviet resistance movement, the mujahideen. When her husband was arrested in 1984, never to be seen again, Sima Samar and her young son fled to the safety of nearby Pakistan, where she worked as a doctor in a refugee camp in the small border town of Quetta. Thousands of refugees from war-ravaged Afghanistan lived there in appalling misery, particularly the women, who were forbidden to visit male doctors, venture from their homes to work or attend school.

With other women, Dr. Samar established her first hospital for women in 1987 and later in 1989 established the Shuhada Organization, a non-governmental and non-profit organization committed to the reconstruction and development of Afghanistan with special emphasis on the empowerment of women and children. Dr. Samar and her medical staff now run four hospitals and ten clinics in Afghanistan and another hospital in Quetta that provide much needed medical assistance and education for Afghan women and children. Worried about where the next generation of female physicians will come from, Dr. Samar also provides medical training courses at the hospitals she runs. She runs schools in rural Afghanistan for more than 20,000 students as well as a school for refugee girls in Quetta attended by over 1,000 girls. Her literacy programs are accompanied by distribution of food aid and information on hygiene and family planning. Services also include mobile health clinics and medical outreach workers who go door to door. Last year, the Taliban succeeded in closing two of her hospitals in Afghanistan but the others are still running.

Dr. Samar refuses to accept that women must be kept in purdah (secluded from the public) and speaks out against the wearing of the burqa (head-to-foot wrap), which was enforced by the Taliban. She also has drawn attention to the fact that many women in the area are suffering from osteomalacia, a softening of the bones, due to an inadequate diet. Wearing the burqa reduces exposure to sunlight and aggravates the situation for women suffering from osteomalacia.

Dr. Samar is also part of the international network Women Living Under Muslim Laws, which has links in 40 countries and a powerful voice at the United Nations. She received the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 1984.

After living in refuge for over a decade, Samar returned to Afghanistan in 2002 to assume a cabinet post in the Karzai-led Afghan Transitional Administration. In the interim government, she served as Deputy President and then as Minister for Women's Affairs. She was forced into resignation from her post after she was threatened with death and harassed for questioning conservative Islamic laws, especially sharia law, during an interview in Canada with a Persian-language newspaper. During the 2003 Loya Jirga, several religious conservatives took out an ad in a local newspaper calling Samar the Salman Rushdie of Afghanistan.

She currently heads the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC).
Dr. Samar publicly refuses to accept that women must be kept in purdah (secluded from the public) and speaks out against the wearing of the burqa (head-to-foot wrap), which was enforced first by the fundamentalist mujahideen and then by the Taliban. She also has drawn attention to the fact that many women in Afghanistan suffer from osteomalacia, a softening of the bones, due to an inadequate diet. Wearing the burqa reduces exposure to sunlight and aggravates the situation for women suffering from osteomalacia.

Clinics set up
Dr Samar fled Afghanistan for Pakistan 17 years ago after her husband was arrested during the Russian occupation. He was never heard from again.
She gained a medical degree from Kabul University and developed a passion for women's rights.
She practised medicine in a border refugee camp before opening a hospital for women in 1987. With initial funding from Church World Service, she began setting up clinics and girls' schools inside Afghanistan, travelling frequently between the two countries.
When the Russians withdrew in 1992, Afghanistan lost its strategic value to the United States.
The US Central Intelligence Agency shut the tap on the $3.3bn it had poured into the rebels' coffers since 1979.

Dr Sima Samar was on a lecture tour in Canada when the news broke that she had been named deputy premier of the new government in Afghanistan.
Dr Samar, who is from the minority Hazara ethnic group, has been placed in charge of women's affairs in Afghanistan.

Although women often served as ministers in cabinets before the Taleban came to power, Dr Samar will be the first woman to occupy such a senior post.
"I was not expecting this position so I've really not prioritised what I'm going to do," she said..

Chairperson of the AIHRC and United Nations special envoy to Darfur Sudan

In the face of threats to her own safety, Dr. Samar has defied the Taliban's edicts that deny women and girls their basic rights to education, employment, mobility and medical care. Since 1989, Dr. Samar has been operating schools for girls and health clinics in many of the provinces of Afghanistan as well as in the refugee camps in Quetta, Pakistan. She has shown an incredible commitment towards assisting Afghan women in their struggles to end their oppression and to provide them with access to healthcare and education services. She is a strong advocate for the involvement of Afghan women in government and the reconstruction of civil society in Afghanistan.

Awards

Dr. Sima Samar has received numerous international awards for her work on human rights and democracy, including: