Malalai Joya

Malalai Joya, 2007

Malalai Joya (also spelled Malalai Dschoja ; born April 25, 1978 ) is an Afghan politician from the Farah province in the west of the country . She received the second highest number of votes in her province in the September 2005 election and has been the youngest member of parliament in Afghanistan since then.

Family background

Malalai Joya is the daughter of a former medical student who lost a leg while fighting the Soviet army . Malalai was four years old when she and her family fled to Iran in 1982 and later to Pakistan , where she graduated from school. After the withdrawal of the Soviet army, Joya returned to Afghanistan in 1998 under the rule of the Taliban. At the age of 19 she began teaching reading and writing classes to other women. In 2001 she also founded an orphanage and a hospital. She is the managing director of the non-governmental organization “Organization of Promoting Afghan Women's Capabilities” (OPAWC) in the western Afghan provinces of Herat and Farah .

Malalai Joya is married.

Political activity

Feb. 19, 2007 - Joya - Farah.

In December 2003, Malalai Joya called before the Grand Council ( Loja Jirga ) the prosecution of criminal warlords and drug smugglers , several of whom were classified by Human Rights Watch as war criminals, also sitting in parliament . In Afghanistan in particular, a very patriarchal country, women are almost excluded from public life, but Joya has made it a nationally known political figure. Because of her publicly expressed criticism of fundamentalists and warlords, she received numerous death threats as a result. She therefore always wears a burqa in public and is accompanied by 12 bodyguards. So far, Joya has survived four murder attempts.

On May 21, 2007, Joya was given a three-year ban by a large majority in the Afghan parliament. Furthermore, legal proceedings have been initiated against her and her freedom of travel has been restricted so that she cannot move freely inside and outside Afghanistan.

Malalai Joya sharply criticizes US foreign policy and the occupation of her country by NATO . She demands an immediate withdrawal of the armed forces from Afghanistan. She also accuses the US of bringing women's rights and democracy to Afghanistan under the pretext of pursuing its own strategic interests with its troop presence.

In mid-March 2011, she was refused an entry visa to the USA because she is unemployed and lives underground.

At the Northeast Socialist Conference in New York on October 23, 2009, she said:

“... They are not leaving my country. They are making their military base there, because of their own strategic policies. They do not care for the wishes of my people. "

"... The Nations, who pose them selfs as liberators to others, will lead them into slavery."

The documentary Enemies of Happiness , which Malalai Joya shows in her campaign for the 2005 election, has won several awards at international film festivals.

Awards

• 2007: She was counted among the "250 Young Global Leaders for 2007" of the World Economic Forum .
• 2008: Anna Politkovskaya Prize from the organization Reach All Women in War (RAW)

literature

• Malalai Joya: I raise my voice. A woman fights against the war in Afghanistan Piper, Munich Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3492052771 ; Translation by Dagmar Mallett of the English original: Raising My Voice. Random House UK Ltd, London 2009, ISBN 978-1846041495 .
• Malalai Joya: A Woman Among Warlords. Simon & Schuster Inc., 2009, ISBN 978-1439109465 .

Movies

• Eva Mulvad: Enemies of Happiness Documentation, Denmark, 2006, 58 minutes

Web links

Commons : Malalai Joya  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Defense Committee for Malalai Joya website
• Malalai Joya: The brave and historical speech in the Loya Jirga. (Video, 1:39 minutes) In: YouTube . December 17, 2003 (English). 
• Article by Malalai Joya. In: ZNet. Archived from the original on April 13, 2011 . 
• Search Results for: Malalai Joya. In: ZNet. (English). 
• Malalai Joya: The US brought fundamentalism back to Afghanistan. In: ZNet . April 10, 2007, archived from the original on July 20, 2012 (address given at the University of Los Angeles on April 10, 2007). 
• Anett Keller: Interview: “The USA is occupying Afghanistan”. In: taz.de . September 19, 2007 . 
• Katharina Teutsch: Afghanistan: Radically Civil. In: Der Tagesspiegel . September 27, 2007 . 
• Andin Tegen: Interview with Malalai Joya: No peace with fundamentalists. In: Qantara.de . September 10, 2009 . 

Footnotes

1. ↑ United Iranian-Canadian Society ( Memento of the original from May 21, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ Courage of Despair , Young World , September 21, 2007
3. ^ "The NS Interview: Malalai Joya" . Newstatesman.com. Retrieved July 14, 2010.
4. ^ Warlords and drug-lords oust Malalai Joya from the parliament , Defense Committee for Malalai Joya, May 22, 2007
5. ↑ Afghan women's rights icon denied US visa ( Memento of the original from March 24, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
6. ↑ Malalai Joya - Northeast Socialist Conference 2009
7. ↑ Enemies of Happiness - Screening ( Memento of the original from October 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
8. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from October 7, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.