Arnold Hottinger:
Laudatio for Sima Samar

In the past Afghanistan used to be something close to a paradise. I personally owe it some of the best memories from all my travels in the East. High mountains of grey naked rocks looking down on long streched out valleys of lucid green. People living a simple life but one that made sense to them, they could sing working their fields or travelling with their animals through their valleys and mountains. Anchored securely and proudly in their customary lives they were nevertheless open to the stranger, hospitality being one of the basic principles of their life. The cup of green tea was the first expression of it. They seemed to live in close harmony with their surroundings. What people did and how it fitted into their Central Asiatic geography and surroundings was intimately linked. Their artistic traditions, cups and jugs of turquoise blue glazing, brown and red carpets with bold geometric designs were part of those lives. « Khaste na bashid », « may you not get weary », was their greeting on their mountain paths.
I have said close to a paradise, because a complete paradise can not be found on this earth. I came to know also some of the less than perfect aspects. The European visitor was disturbed by the sight of the women in cities and villages who were deeply veiled, even more so and even more separated and isolated in body and mind, it would appear, than in other countries of the Middle East. It was as if the men were ashamed to be found in public in the company of a women, as if this were seen as a weakness. But in those days, 40 years ago, one could believe that such disquieting inequalities were on the wane and would gradually disappear. There were after all the nomadic people whose women knew no chador and no grate in front of their faces, while in the cities quite a few women could be seen who had liberated themselves from such compulsions.
In the cities I found a kind of administration that I became anxious to avoid: it was as burocratic as it was incompetent. There were a few powerful rich families and a great many poor people, too many in fact for the rich to bother about; whether they could not help, or did not want to.. in any case they did nothing about them. Already in these days there were reports of terrible famines decimating the poor. In the cities there seemed to be more misery than in the country side, but possibly it was simply more hidden there.
There were also the Hazara people who looked a bit different from the majority their faces were more of the Asiatic type. At that time in Kabul they were treated as if they did not belong to humanity, they were just good enough to carry loads. At the time however such defects could be seen as imperfections belonging to a dark past that would brighten eventually. The enchantment of the mountainous country under a luminous sky and its people moving freely and proudly through its valleys and passes, could not be obscured by some obvious and undeniable negative traits.

Ladies and gentlemen: in the meantime Afghanistan has become a country of destruction and darkness. Destroyed not only physiclly, morally as well the solidity of its uses and costums has at least partially broken down. Despair menaces to replace all hope, and fraternity turns into perfidy. There had always been a cult of arms and a proud tradition of hard tribal warfare, but the warlike traditions had rules and conventions. Those have disappeared and pure violence and crudelity have overcome the restraints that prevously existed in war... More and more misery has engulfed the Afghans. Years and years of war have destroyed the old concepts of order. War has been imposed on the country from the outside and was then steadily nourished by foreign forces till it has burned everything.
The cold war of Europe has been fought as a hot war in Afghanistan for 9 years, 1979 to 1988. When that ended after terrible destruction and losses it was not the end. The Afghan war parties continued to fight each other. In the previous 9 years they had obtained arms and most of them had come to sacrifce everything to the compulsion to liquidate all rivals and to expand their own sphere of power. The foreign powers retreated only in name, and the war of the « commanders » for supremacy in the country lasted another five years in a permanent game of changing alliances.
After that there was no end either. Pakistans protégé, the fanatic and murderous Islamist, Hekmatiyar, had failed signally to impose himself. So Islamabad intervened even more massively than before. Its secret services and interior ministry mobilised the so called Taleban from the traditional Islamic madrasas in the countryside of backward Baluchistan and the Pakhtun border zones, trained them, armed them and injected them into the civil war of Afghanistan. These Taleban have managed to conquer most of the country between 1996 and 1999 with the aid of the Pakistani military and military technicians and with money from Saudi Arabia. They have imposed an obscurantist, dim, violent and arbitrary regime which they disguise as Islamic. In reality the Islamic cover serves them to stabilise their power while avoiding to do anything helpful at all for their country and their people in distress. The prejudices existing against women and against the Hazaras have been spread out and reinforced by them in order to subdue the whole of Afghan society by playing the religious creeds and the genders against each other. Recently all this misery has been further increased catastrophically by famine due to longstanding drought. The regime continues never the less with the civil war and leads a foreign policy apt to alienate all foreign powers and aid organisations. Notwithstanding some recent well publicised gestures of reducing the opium crop its main income today seems to come still from the cultivation of opium and the export of heroin.

The present situation appears to be more hopeless than ever. Those people who can take their distance and try to build a new existence somewhere far form Afghanistan and its misery. Nobody can blame them for that because real reconstruction inside the ruined country seems an impossibility.

But there are people who have not given up. Dr. Sima Samar continues to work with full dedication for her people. She says of herself that she suffers from double or triple discrimination for being a woman, being a Hazara and speaking up for the women. With about an other two millions of her fellow citizens, men, women und many children, she saw herself forced to quit the country in 1984. As a medical doctor she would have had ample chances to turn her back to all Afghan misery and to settle in some of the more confortable parts of the world somewhere between Newzealand and Canada, California and Argentina. But she did not do it. Instead she has dedicated herself to constructive work that appears all but impossible. Chosing the field where such work is most difficult but, as she has recognized, also most needed if the aid is to be of real expediency. This is in the field of the education and health care for women inside Afghanistan and on the borders in nearby Quetta where many Afghan refugee men and especially women have to live with insufficiant health care.
Her work is done notwithstanding the prohibiton of the Taleban rulers to school girls and women. She manages to circumvent it not by confronting the tyrants - this would only stimulate them to more violence and repression - but by moving laterally avoding direct clashes and taking advantage of the will of the Afghan people men and women alike and not last of those suffering under double discrimination being Hazara and women - to learn and to teach and to do something for the health of their ignored and neglected fellow sufferers notwithstanding the prohibitions.

The newly established Paul Grüninger Foundation has in a certain way an inbuilt interest to recognise such enterprise. It has been set up in memory of a man who had the courage and the intergrity to help suffering and endangered people in spite of the orders of state authorities who for their part were keen to hold up narrowly conceived rules in ill conceived self-interest of the state. Human rights taking precedence over the restrictions of officialdom, this is also the situation of the dedicated work of Dr. Samar. Or, if to you, as it happens sometimes to me, the concept of « human rights » appears a bit too judicial and abstract in face of the inhuman suffering of a whole people, let us say: the need to respond to human suffering even though legislators and rulers want to ignore it and - as it happens - even want to prohibit to come to the aid of the victims.
The foundation thinks that it wants to honour above all such persons as do not have a quasi professional obligation to hold up human rights, such as lawyers or theologians, or social workes would have, but rather personalities who could easily and honestly follow their chosen profession without renouncing a comfortable life. This is clearly the case of Dr. Samar. She has chosen to stand up to the black misery and dispair that covers her country like a dark shroud even though the forces imposing their rule do not only despise activities such as hers but even try to prohibit them. She obtains results in spite of the efforts of the powers that be to stop her helping the neglected and intentionally marginised women and the discriminated Hazara people. How she achieves this has to remain her own secret in many cases. But she can demonstrate that it is feasible to send 16 000 girl and boys into school and to run a whole chain of hospitals and clincs with extension services and the possibility to teach nursing care to treat Afghan women in the interior and in the border region of Quetta, notwithstanding the egotistical selfinterest of the ruling powers.
Such achievements in the face of all official obstruction throw a ray of light into the dark despair of one of the provinces exposed to even more suffering than the rest of the unhappy country. The results are there and she carries them into the future. We are grateful to her for this and appreciate to be able to contribute at least in a small proportion to reducing the misery - not least because on closer inspection we are not innocent of the events in Afghanistan. It was from our part of the world, proud of its technological achievements, that the arms have been brought into Afghanistan that served to ruin the county, and also: we Europeans including the Russians have shown an unjustifaible inclination to accept the propaganda of the Taleban when they pretend to represent « Islam », because we tend to stick to old prejudices derived from the middle ages and like to believe them confirmed.

Ladies and gentlemen, the suffering of Afghanistan has not stopped. At present new miseries are added to the old ones because of the famine which causes casualties every day and appears to be only in its initial stage. Again it will be the weakest who are most dangerously exposed, women and children. But today for a short moment let us look at the ray of hope thrown by the work of one courageous and decided woman who dared to confront the black forces of misery and the fact that she has bee able and - so we hope and should help - will be able in future to impact successfully just on the point of their deepest darkness and density precisely in those fields of action which had seemed the most difficult and defiant of all.