I Am Malala Read online

  My father was right to think this man was not going to give up – mullahs had become more powerful figures since Zia’s rule and campaign of Islamisation.

  In some ways General Musharraf was very different from General Zia. Though he usually dressed in uniform, he occasionally wore Western suits and he called himself chief executive instead of chief martial law administrator. He also kept dogs, which we Muslims regard as unclean. Instead of Zia’s Islamisation he began what he called ‘enlightened moderation’. He opened up our media, allowing new private TV channels and female newsreaders, as well as showing dancing on television. The celebration of Western holidays such as Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve was allowed. He even sanctioned an annual pop concert on the eve of Independence Day, which was broadcast to the nation. He did something which our democratic rulers hadn’t, even Benazir, and abolished the law that for a woman to prove she was raped, she had to produce four male witnesses. He appointed the first woman governor of the state bank and the first women airline pilots and coastguards. He even announced we would have female guards at Jinnah’s tomb in Karachi.

  However in our Pashtun homeland of the North-West Frontier Province things were very different. In 2002 Musharraf held elections for ‘controlled democracy’. They were strange elections as the main party leaders Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto were in exile. In our province these elections brought what we called a ‘mullah government’ to power. The Muttahida Majlis e-Amal (MMA) alliance was a group of five religious parties including the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), which ran the madrasas where the Taliban were trained. People jokingly referred to the MMA as the Mullah Military Alliance and said they got elected because they had Musharraf’s support. But some people supported them because the very religious Pashtuns were angry at the American invasion of Afghanistan and the removal of the Taliban from power there.

  Our area had always been more conservative than most of the rest of Pakistan. During the Afghan jihad many madrasas had been built, most of them funded by Saudi money, and many young men had passed through them as it was free education. That was the start of what my father calls the ‘Arabisation’ of Pakistan. Then 9/11 had made this militancy more mainstream. Sometimes when I walked along the main road I saw chalked messages on the sides of buildings. CONTACT US FOR JIHAD TRAINING, they would say, listing a phone number to call. In those days jihadi groups were free to do whatever they wanted. You could see them openly collecting contributions and recruiting men. There was even a headmaster from Shangla who would boast that his greatest success was to send ten boys in Grade 9 for jihad training in Kashmir.

  The MMA government banned CD and DVD shops and wanted to create a morality police like the Afghan Taliban had set up. The idea was they would be able to stop a woman accompanied by a man and require her to prove that the man was her relative. Thankfully, our supreme court stopped this. Then MMA activists launched attacks on cinemas and tore down billboards with pictures of women or blacked them out with paint. They even snatched female mannequins from clothing shops. They harassed men wearing Western-style shirts and trousers instead of the traditional shalwar kamiz and insisted women cover their heads. It was as though they wanted to remove all traces of womankind from public life.

  My father’s high school opened in 2003. That first year they had boys and girls together, but by 2004 the climate had changed so it was unthinkable to have girls and boys in the same class. That changing climate made Ghulamullah bold. One of the school clerks told my father that the mufti kept coming into school and demanding why we girls were still using the main entrance. He said that one day, when a male member of staff took a female teacher out to the main road to get a rickshaw, the maulana asked, ‘Why did this man escort her to the road, is he her brother?’

  ‘No,’ replied the clerk, ‘he is a colleague.’

  ‘That is wrong!’ said the maulana.

  My father told the clerk to call him next time he saw the maulana. When the call came, my father and the Islamic studies teacher went out to confront him.

  ‘Maulana, you have driven me to the wall!’ my father said. ‘Who are you? You are crazy! You need to go to a doctor. You think I enter the school and take my clothes off? When you see a boy and a girl you see a scandal. They are schoolchildren. I think you should go and see Dr Haider Ali!’

  Dr Haider Ali was a well-known psychiatrist in our area, so to say, ‘Shall we take you to Dr Haider Ali?’ meant ‘Are you mad?’

  The mufti went quiet. He took off his turban and put it in my father’s lap. For us a turban is a public symbol of chivalry and Pashtunness, and for a man to lose his turban is considered a great humili– ation. But then he started up again. ‘I never said those things to your clerk. He is lying.’

  My father had had enough. ‘You have no business here,’ he shouted. ‘Go away!’

  The mufti had failed to close our school but his interference was an indication of how our country was changing. My father was worried. He and his fellow activists were holding endless meetings. These were no longer just about stopping people cutting down trees but were also about education and democracy.

  In 2004, after resisting pressure from Washington for more than two and a half years, General Musharraf sent the army into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), seven agencies that lie along the border with Afghanistan, where the government had little control. The Americans claimed that al-Qaeda militants who had fled from Afghanistan during the US bombing were using the areas as a safe haven, taking advantage of our Pashtun hospitality. From there they were running training camps and launching raids across the border on NATO troops. For us in Swat this was very close to home. One of the agencies, Bajaur, is next to Swat. The people who live in the FATA are all from Pashtun tribes like us Yousafzai, and live on both sides of the border with Afghanistan.

  The tribal agencies were created in British times as a buffer zone between Afghanistan and what was then India, and they are still run in the same way, administered by tribal chiefs or elders known as maliks. Unfortunately, the maliks make little difference. In truth the tribal areas are not governed at all. They are forgotten places of harsh rocky valleys where people scrape by on smuggling. (The average annual income is just $250 – half the Pakistani average.) They have very few hospitals and schools, particularly for girls, and political parties were not allowed there until recently. Hardly any women from these areas can read. The people are renowned for their fierceness and independence, as you can see if you read any of the old British accounts.

  Our army had never before gone into the FATA. Instead they had maintained indirect control in the same way the British had, relying on the Pashtun-recruited Frontier Corps rather than regular soldiers. Sending in the regular army was a tough decision. Not only did our army and ISI have long links with some of the militants, but it also meant our troops would be fighting their own Pashtun brothers. The first tribal area that the army entered was South Waziristan, in March 2004. Predictably the local people saw it as an attack on their way of life. All the men there carry weapons and hundreds of soldiers were killed when the locals revolted.

  The army was in shock. Some men refused to fight, not wishing to battle their own people. They retreated after just twelve days and reached what they called a ‘negotiated peace settlement’ with local militant leaders like Nek Mohammad. This involved the army bribing them to halt all attacks and keep out foreign fighters. The militants simply used the cash to buy more weapons and resumed their activities. A few months later came the first attack on Pakistan by a US drone.

  On 17 June 2004 an unmanned Predator dropped a Hellfire missile on Nek Mohammad in South Waziristan apparently while he was giving an interview by satellite phone. He and the men around him were killed instantly. Local people had no idea what it was – back then we did not know that the Americans could do such a thing. Whatever you thought about Nek Mohammad, we were not at war with the Americans and were shocked that they would launch attacks from the sky on our
soil. Across the tribal areas people were angry and many joined militant groups or formed lashkars, local militias.

  Then there were more attacks. The Americans said that bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri was hiding in Bajaur and had taken a wife there. In January 2006 a drone supposedly targeting him landed on a village called Damadola, destroying three houses and killing eighteen people. The Americans said he had been tipped off and escaped. That same year, on 30 October, another US Predator hit a madrasa on a hill near the main town of Khar, killing eighty-two people, many of them young boys. The Americans said it was the al-Qaeda training camp which had featured in the group’s videos and that the hill was riddled with tunnels and gun emplacements. Within a few hours of the attack, an influential local cleric called Faqir Mohammad, who had run the madrasa, announced that the deaths would be avenged by suicide bombings against Pakistani soldiers.

  My father and his friends were worried and called together local elders and leaders for a peace conference. It was a bitterly cold night in January but 150 people gathered.

  ‘It’s coming here,’ my father warned. ‘The fire is reaching the valley. Let’s put out the flames of militancy before they reach here.’

  But no one would listen. Some people even laughed, including a local political leader sitting in the front row.

  ‘Mr Khan,’ my father said to him, ‘you know what happened to the people of Afghanistan. They are now refugees and they’re living with us. The same is happening with Bajaur. The same will happen to us, mark my words, and we will have no shelter, no place to migrate to.’

  But the expression on the man’s face was mocking. ‘Look at this man,’ he seemed to be saying of my father. ‘I am a khan. Who would dare kick me out of this area?’

  My father came home frustrated. ‘I have a school, but I am neither a khan nor a political leader. I have no platform,’ he said. ‘I am only one small man.’

  8

  The Autumn of the Earthquake

  ONE FINE OCTOBER day when I was still in primary school our desks started to tremble and shake. Our classes were still mixed at that age, and all the boys and girls yelled, ‘Earthquake!’ We ran outside as we had been taught to do. All the children gathered around our teachers as chicks swarm to a mother hen.

  Swat lies on a geological fault line and we often had earthquakes, but this felt different. All the buildings around us seemed to be shaking and the rumbling didn’t stop. Most of us were crying and our teachers were praying. Miss Rubi, one of my favourite teachers, told us to stop crying and to stay calm; it would soon be over.

  Once the shaking had stopped we were all sent home. We found our mother sitting in a chair holding the Quran, reciting verses over and over. Whenever there is trouble people pray a lot. She was relieved to see us and hugged us, tears streaming down her face. But the aftershocks kept coming all afternoon so we remained very scared.

  We had moved again – we would move seven times by the time I was thirteen – and were living in an apartment building. It was high for Mingora, two storeys with a big water tank on the roof. My mother was terrified it would collapse on top of us so we kept going outside. My father did not get home till late that evening as he had been busy checking all the other school buildings.

  When nightfall came, there were still tremors and my mother was in a state of panic. Every time we felt a tremor we thought it was the Day of Judgement. ‘We will be buried in our beds!’ she cried. She insisted we leave, but my father was exhausted and we Muslims believe our fate is written by God. So he put me and my brothers Khushal and Atal, then just a baby, to bed.

  ‘Go wherever you want,’ he told my mother and cousin. ‘I am staying here. If you believe in God you will stay here.’ I think when there is a great disaster or our lives are in danger we remember our sins and wonder how we will meet God and whether we will be forgiven. But God has also given us the power to forget, so that when the tragedy is over we carry on as normal. I trusted in my father’s faith, but I also shared my mother’s very real concerns.

  That earthquake of 8 October 2005 turned out to be one of the worst in history. It was 7.6 on the Richter Scale and was felt as far away as Kabul and Delhi. Our town of Mingora was largely spared – just a few buildings collapsed – but neighbouring Kashmir and the northern areas of Pakistan were devastated. Even in Islamabad buildings collapsed.

  It took a while for us to realise how bad it was. When the TV news began to show the devastation we saw that entire villages had been turned to dust. Landslides blocked access to the worst affected parts and all the phones and power lines were down. The earthquake had affected 30,000 square kilometres, an area as big as the American state of Connecticut. The numbers were unbelievable. More than 73,000 people had been killed and 128,000 injured, many of them permanently disabled. Around three and a half million people had lost their homes. Roads, bridges, water and power had all gone. Places we had visited like Balakot were almost completely destroyed. Many of those killed were children who like me had been at school that morning. Some 6,400 schools were turned to rubble and 18,000 children lost their lives.

  We remembered how scared we had been that morning and started raising money at school. Everyone brought what they could. My father went to everybody he knew, asking for donations of food, clothing and money, and I helped my mother collect blankets. My father raised money from the Swat Association of Private Schools and the Global Peace Council to add to what we had collected at school. The total came to more than one million rupees. A publishing company in Lahore which supplied our schoolbooks sent five trucks of food and other essentials.

  We were terribly worried about our family in Shangla, jammed between those narrow mountains. Finally we got news from a cousin. In my father’s small village eight people had been killed and many homes destroyed. One of them was the house of the local cleric, Maulana Khadim, which fell down crushing his four beautiful daughters. I wanted to go to Shangla with my father and the trucks but he told me it would be too dangerous.

  When he returned a few days later he was ashen. He told us that the last part of the journey had been very difficult. Much of the road had collapsed into the river and large boulders had fallen and blocked the way. Our family and friends said they had thought it was the end of the world. They described the roar of rocks sliding down hills and everyone running out of their houses reciting the Quran, the screams as roofs crashed down and the howls of the buffaloes and goats. As the tremors continued they had spent the entire day outdoors and then the night too, huddling together for warmth, even though it was bitterly cold in the mountains.

  To start with the only rescue workers who came were a few from a locally based foreign aid agency and volunteers from the Tehrike-Nifaz-e-Sharia-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) or Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, the group founded by Sufi Mohammad that had sent men to fight in Afghanistan. Sufi Mohammad had been in jail since 2002 when Musharraf arrested a number of militant leaders after American pressure, but his organisation still continued and was being run by his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah. It was hard for the authorities to reach places like Shangla because most of the roads and bridges had gone and local government had been wiped out throughout the region. We saw an official from the United Nations say on television that it was the ‘worst logistical nightmare that the UN had ever faced’.

  General Musharraf called it a ‘test of the nation’ and announced that the army had set up Operation Lifeline – our army likes giving their operations names. There were lots of pictures on the news of army helicopters laden with supplies and tents, but in many of the small valleys the helicopters could not land and the aid packages they dropped often rolled down slopes into rivers. In some places, when the helicopters flew in the locals all rushed underneath them, which meant they could not drop supplies safely.

  But some aid did get in. The Americans were quick as they had thousands of troops and hundreds of helicopters in Afghanistan so could easily fly in supplies and show they were help
ing us in our hour of need, though some crews covered the American markings on their helicopters, fearing attack. For many in the remote areas it was the first time they had seen a foreigner.

  Most of the volunteers came from Islamic charities or organisations but some of these were fronts for militant groups. The most visible of all was Jamaat-ul-Dawa (JuD), the welfare wing of Lashkare-Taiba. LeT had close links to the ISI and was set up to liberate Kashmir, which we believe should be part of Pakistan not India as its population is mostly Muslim. The leader of LeT is a fiery professor from Lahore called Hafiz Saeed, who is often on television calling on people to attack India. When the earthquake happened and our government did little to help, JuD set up relief camps patrolled by men with Kalashnikovs and walkie-talkies. Everyone knew these men belonged to LeT, and soon their black and white banners with crossed swords were flying everywhere in the mountains and valleys. In the town of Muzaffarabad in Azad Kashmir the JuD even set up a large field hospital with X-ray machines, an operating theatre, a well-stocked pharmacy and a dental department. Doctors and surgeons offered their services along with thousands of young volunteers.

  Earthquake victims praised the activists who had trudged up and down mountains and through shattered valleys carrying medical help to remote regions no one else had bothered with. They helped clear and rebuild destroyed villages as well as leading prayers and burying bodies. Even today, when most of the foreign aid agencies have gone, shattered buildings still line the roadside and people are still waiting for compensation from the government to build new houses, the JuD banners and helpers are still present. My cousin who was studying in the UK said they raised lots of money from Pakistanis living there. People later said that some of this money had been diverted to finance a plot to bomb planes travelling from Britain to the US.