17: Praying to Be Tall
WHEN I WAS thirteen I stopped growing. I had always looked older than I was but suddenly all my friends were taller than me. I was one of the three shortest girls in my class of thirty. I felt embarrassed when I was with my friends. Every night I prayed to Allah to be taller. I measured myself on my bedroom wall with a ruler and a pencil. Every morning I would stand against it to check if I had grown. But the pencil mark stayed stubbornly at five feet. I even promised Allah that if I could grow just a tiny bit taller I would offer a hundred raakat nafl, extra voluntary prayers on top of the five daily ones.
I was speaking at a lot of events but because I was so short it wasn’t easy to be authoritative.
Sometimes I could hardly see over the lectern. I did not like high-heeled shoes but I started to wear them.
One of the girls in my class did not return to school that year. She had been married off as soon as she entered puberty. She was big for her age but was still only thirteen. A while later we heard that she had two children. In class, when we were reciting hydrocarbon formulae during our chemistry lessons, I would daydream about what it would be like to stop going to school and instead start looking after a husband.
We had begun to think about other things besides the Taliban, but it wasn’t possible to forget completely. Our army, which already had a lot of strange side businesses, like factories making cornflakes and fertilisers, had started producing soap operas. People across Pakistan were glued to a series on prime-time TV called Beyond the Call of Duty, which was supposed to consist of real-life stories of soldiers battling militants in Swat.
Over a hundred soldiers had been killed in the military operation and 900 injured, and they wanted to show themselves as heroes. But though their sacrifice was supposed to have restored government control, we were still waiting for the rule of law. Most afternoons when I came home from school there were women at our house in tears. Hundreds of men had gone missing during the military campaign, presumably picked up by the army or ISI, but no one would say. The women could not get information; they didn’t know if their husbands and sons were dead or alive. Some of them were in desperate situations as they had no way to support themselves. A woman can only remarry if her husband is declared dead, not missing.
My mother gave them tea and food but that wasn’t why they came. They wanted my father’s help.
Because of his role as spokesman for the Swat Qaumi Jirga, he acted as a kind of liaison between the people and the army.
‘I just want to know if my husband is dead or not,’ pleaded one lady I met. ‘If they killed him then I can put the children in an orphanage. But now I’m neither a widow nor a wife.’ Another lady told me her son was missing. The women said the missing men had not collaborated with the Taliban; maybe they had given them a glass of water or some bread when they’d been ordered to do so. Yet these innocent men were being held while the Taliban leaders went free.
There was a teacher in our school who lived just a ten-minute walk from our house. Her brother had been picked up by the army, put in leg irons and tortured, and then kept in a fridge until he died.
He’d had nothing to do with the Taliban. He was just a simple shopkeeper. Afterwards the army apologised to her and said they’d been confused by his name and picked up the wrong person.
It wasn’t just poor women who came to our house. One day a rich businessman arrived from Muscat in the Gulf. He told my father that his brother and five or six nephews had all disappeared, and he wanted to know if they had been killed or were being held so he knew whether to find new husbands for their wives. One of them was a maulana and my father managed to get him freed.
This wasn’t just happening in Swat. We heard there were thousands of missing all over Pakistan.
Many people protested outside courthouses or put up posters of their missing but got nowhere.
Meanwhile our courts were busy with another issue. In Pakistan we have something called the Blasphemy Law, which protects the Holy Quran from desecration. Under General Zia’s Islamisation campaign, the law was made much stricter so that anyone who ‘defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet’ can be punished by death or life imprisonment.
One day in November 2010 there was a news report about a Christian woman called Asia Bibi who had been sentenced to death by hanging. She was a poor mother of five who picked fruit for a living in a village in Punjab. One hot day she had fetched water for her fellow workers but some of them refused to drink it, saying that the water was ‘unclean’ because she was a Christian. They believed that as Muslims they would be defiled by drinking with her. One of them was her neighbour, who was angry because she said Asia Bibi’s goat had damaged her water trough. They had ended up in an argument, and of course just as in our arguments at school there were different versions of who said what. One version was that they tried to persuade Asia Bibi to convert to Islam. She replied that Christ had died on the cross for the sins of Christians and asked what the Prophet Mohammad had done for Muslims. One of the fruit pickers reported her to the local imam, who informed the police.
She spent more than a year in jail before the case went to court and she was sentenced to death.
Since Musharraf had allowed satellite television, we now had lots of channels. Suddenly we could witness these events on television. There was outrage round the world and all the talk shows covered the case. One of the few people who spoke out for Asia Bibi in Pakistan was the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer. He himself had been a political prisoner as well as a close ally of Benazir. Later on he became a wealthy media mogul. He went to visit Asia Bibi in jail and said that President Zardari should pardon her. He called the Blasphemy Law a ‘black law’, a phrase which was repeated by some of our TV anchors to stir things up. Then some imams at Friday prayers in the largest mosque in Rawalpindi condemned the governor.
A couple of days later, on 4 January 2011, Salman Taseer was gunned down by one of his own bodyguards after lunch in an area of fashionable coffee bars in Islamabad. The man shot him twentysix times. He later said that he had done it for God after hearing the Friday prayers in Rawalpindi.
We were shocked by how many people praised the killer. When he appeared in court even lawyers showered him with rose petals. Meanwhile the imam at the late governor’s mosque refused to perform his funeral prayers and the president did not attend his funeral.
Our country was going crazy. How was it possible that we were now garlanding murderers?
Shortly after that my father got another death threat. He had spoken at an event to commemorate the third anniversary of the bombing of the Haji Baba High School. At the event my father had spoken passionately. ‘Fazlullah is the chief of all devils!’ he shouted. ‘Why hasn’t he been caught?’
Afterwards people told him to be very careful. Then an anonymous letter came to our house addressed to my father. It started with ‘Asalaamu alaikum’ - ‘Peace be upon you’ - but it wasn’t peaceful at all. It went on, ‘You are the son of a religious cleric but you are not a good Muslim. The mujahideen will find you wherever you go.’ When my father received the letter he seemed worried for a couple of weeks, but he refused to give up his activities and was soon distracted by other things.
In those days it seemed like everyone was talking about America. Where once we used to blame our old enemy India for everything, now it was the US. Everyone complained about the drone attacks which were happening in the FATA almost every week. We heard lots of civilians were being killed.
Then a CIA agent called Raymond Davis shot and killed two men in Lahore who had approached his car on a motorbike. He said they had attempted to rob him. The Americans claimed he was not CIA but an ordinary diplomat, which made everyone very suspicious. Even we schoolchildren know that ordinary diplomats don’t drive around in unmarked cars carrying Glock pistols.
Our media claimed Davis was part of a vast secret army that the CIA had sent to Pakistan because they didn’t trust our intelligence agencies. He was said to be spying on a militant group called Lashkar-e-Taiba based in Lahore that had helped our people a lot during the earthquake and floods.
They were thought to be behind the terrible Mumbai massacre of 2008. The group’s main objective was to liberate Kashmir’s Muslims from Indian rule, but they had recently also become active in Afghanistan. Other people said Davis was really spying on our nuclear weapons.
Raymond Davis quickly became the most famous American in Pakistan. There were protests all over the country. People imagined our bazaars were full of Raymond Davises, gathering intelligence to send back to the States. Then the widow of one of the men Davis had murdered took rat poison and killed herself, despairing of receiving justice.
It took weeks of back and forth between Washington and Islamabad, or rather army headquarters in Rawalpindi, before the case was finally resolved. What they did was like our traditional jirgas - the Americans paid ‘blood money’ amounting to $2.3 million and Davis was quickly spirited out of court and out of the country. Pakistan then demanded that the CIA send home many of its contractors and stopped approving visas. The whole affair left a lot of bad feeling, particularly because on 17 March, the day after Davis was released, a drone attack on a tribal council in North Waziristan killed about forty people. The attack seemed to send the message that the CIA could do as it pleased in our country.
One Monday I was about to measure myself against the wall to see if I had miraculously grown in the night when I heard loud voices next door. My father’s friends had arrived with news that was hard to believe. During the night American special forces called Navy Seals had carried out a raid in Abbottabad, one of the places we’d stayed as IDPs, and had found and killed Osama bin Laden. He had been living in a large walled compound less than a mile from our military academy. We couldn’t believe the army had been oblivious to bin Laden’s whereabouts. The newspapers said that the cadets even did their training in the field alongside his house. The compound had twelve-foot-high walls topped with barbed wire. Bin Laden lived on the top floor with his youngest wife, a Yemeni woman named Amal. Two other wives and his eleven children lived below them. An American senator said that the only thing missing from bin Laden’s hideaway was a ‘neon sign’.
In truth, lots of people in Pashtun areas live in walled compounds because of purdah and privacy, so the house wasn’t really unusual. What was odd was that the residents never went out and the house had no phone or Internet connections. Their food was brought in by two brothers who also lived in the compound with their wives. They acted as couriers for bin Laden. One of the wives was from Swat!
The Seals had shot bin Laden in the head and his body had been flown out by helicopter. It didn’t sound as though he had put up a fight. The two brothers and one of bin Laden’s grown-up sons had also been killed, but bin Laden’s wives and other children had been tied up and left behind and were then taken into Pakistani custody. The Americans dumped bin Laden’s body at sea. President Obama was very happy, and on TV we watched big celebrations take place outside the White House.
At first we assumed our government had known and been involved in the American operation. But we soon found out that the Americans had gone it alone. This didn’t sit well with our people. We were supposed to be allies and we had lost more soldiers in their War on Terror than they had. They had entered the country at night, flying low and using special quiet helicopters, and had blocked our radar with electronic interference. They had only announced their mission to the army chief of staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, and President Zardari after the event. Most of the army leadership learned about it on TV.
The Americans said they had no choice but to do it like that because no one really knew which side the ISI was on and someone might have tipped off bin Laden before they reached him. The director of the CIA said Pakistan was ‘either involved or incompetent. Neither place is a good place to be.’
My father said it was a shameful day. ‘How could a notorious terrorist be hiding in Pakistan and remain undetected for so many years?’ he asked. Others were asking the same thing.
You could see why anyone would think our intelligence service must have known bin Laden’s location. ISI is a huge organisation with agents everywhere. How could he have lived so close to the capital - just sixty miles away? And for so long! Maybe the best place to hide is in plain sight, but he had been living in that house since the 2005 earthquake. Two of his children were even born in the Abbottabad hospital. And he’d been in Pakistan for more than nine years. Before Abbottabad he’d been in Haripur and before that hidden away in our own Swat Valley, where he met Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11.
The way bin Laden was found was like something out of the spy movies my brother Khushal likes.
To avoid detection he used human couriers rather than phone calls or emails. But the Americans had discovered one of his couriers, tracked the number plate of his car and followed it from Peshawar to Abbottabad. After that they monitored the house with a kind of giant drone that has X-ray vision, which spotted a very tall bearded man pacing round the compound. They called him the Pacer.
People were intrigued by the new details that came every day, but they seemed angrier at the American incursion than at the fact that the world’s biggest terrorist had been living on our soil. Some newspapers ran stories saying that the Americans had actually killed bin Laden years before this and kept his body in a freezer. The story was that they had then planted the body in Abbottabad and faked the raid to embarrass Pakistan.
We started to receive text messages asking us to rally in the streets and show our support of the army. ‘We were there for you in 1948, 1965 and 1971,’ said one message, referring to our three wars with India. ‘Be with us now when we have been stabbed in the back.’ But there were also text messages which ridiculed the army. People asked how we could be spending $6 billion a year on the military (seven times more than we were spending on education), if four American helicopters could just sneak in under our radar? And if they could do it, what was to stop the Indians next door? ‘Please don’t honk, the army is sleeping,’ said one text, and ‘Second-hand Pakistani radar for sale . can’t detect US helicopters but gets cable TV just fine,’ said another.
General Kayani and General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the head of ISI, were called to testify in parliament, something that had never happened. Our country had been humiliated and we wanted to know why.
We also learned that American politicians were furious that bin Laden had been living under our noses when all along they had imagined he was hiding in a cave. They complained that they had given us $20 billion over an eight-year period to cooperate and it was questionable which side we were on.
Sometimes it felt as though it was all about the money. Most of it had gone to the army; ordinary people received nothing.
A few months after that, in October 2011 my father told me he had received an email informing him I was one of five nominees for the international peace prize of KidsRights, a children’s advocacy group based in Amsterdam. My name had been put forward by Archbishop Desmond Tutu from South Africa. He was a great hero of my father for his fight against apartheid. My father was disappointed when I didn’t win but I pointed out to him that all I had done was speak out; we didn’t have an organisation doing practical things like the award winners had.
Shortly after that I was invited by the chief minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, to speak in Lahore at an education gala. He was building a network of new schools he calls Daanish Schools and giving free laptops to students, even if they did have his picture on their screens when you switched them on.
To motivate students in all provinces he was giving cash awards to girls and boys who scored well in their exams. I was presented with a cheque for half a million rupees, about $4,500, for my campaign for girls’ rights.
I wore pink to the gala and for the first time talked publicly about how we had defied the Taliban edict and carried on going to school secretly. ‘I know the importance of education because my pens and books were taken from me by force,’ I said. ‘But the girls of Swat are not afraid of anyone. We have continued with our education.’
Then I was in class one day when my classmates said, ‘You have won a big prize and half a million rupees!’ My father told me the government had awarded me Pakistan’s first ever National Peace Prize. I couldn’t believe it. So many journalists thronged to the school that day that it turned into a news studio.
The ceremony was on 20 December 2011 at the prime minister’s official residence, one of the big white mansions on the hill at the end of Constitution Avenue which I had seen on my trip to Islamabad. By then I was used to meeting politicians. I was not nervous though my father tried to intimidate me by saying Prime Minister Gilani came from a family of saints. After the PM presented me with the award and cheque, I presented him with a long list of demands. I told him that we wanted our schools rebuilt and a girls’ university in Swat. I knew he would not take my demands seriously so I didn’t push very hard. I thought, One day I will be a politician and do these things myself.
It was decided that the prize should be awarded annually to children under eighteen years old and be named the Malala Prize in my honour. I noticed my father was not very happy with this. Like most Pashtuns he is a bit superstitious. In Pakistan we don’t have a culture of honouring people while they are alive, only the dead, so he thought it was a bad omen.
I know my mother didn’t like the awards because she feared I would become a target as I was becoming more well known. She herself would never appear in public. She refused even to be photographed. She is a very traditional woman and this is our centuries-old culture. Were she to break that tradition, men and women would talk against her, particularly those in our own family. She never said she regretted the work my father and I had undertaken, but when I won prizes, she said, ‘I don’t want awards, I want my daughter. I wouldn’t exchange a single eyelash of my daughter for the whole world.’
My father argued that all he had ever wanted was to create a school in which children could learn.
We had been left with no choice but to get involved in politics and campaign for education. ‘My only ambition,’ he said, ‘is to educate my children and my nation as much as I am able. But when half of your leaders tell lies and the other half is negotiating with the Taliban, there is nowhere to go. One has to speak out.’
When I returned home I was greeted with the news that there was a group of journalists who wanted to interview me at school and that I should wear a nice outfit. First I thought of wearing a very beautiful dress, but then I decided to wear something more modest for the interview as I wanted people to focus on my message and not my clothes. When I arrived at school I saw all my friends had dressed up. ‘Surprise!’ they shouted when I walked in. They had collected money and organised a party for me with a big white cake on which was written SUCCESS FOREVER in chocolate icing. It was wonderful that my friends wanted to share in my success. I knew that any of the girls in my class could have achieved what I had achieved if they had had their parents’ support.
‘Now you can get back to school work,’ said Madam Maryam as we finished off the cake. ‘Exams in March!’
But the year ended on a sad note. Five days after I got the award, Aunt Babo, my mother’s eldest sister, died suddenly. She wasn’t even fifty years old. She was diabetic and had seen a TV advert for a doctor in Lahore with some miracle treatment and persuaded my uncle to take her there. We don’t know what the doctor injected her with but she went into shock and died. My father said the doctor was a charlatan and this was why we needed to keep struggling against ignorance.
I had amassed a lot of money by the end of that year - half a million rupees each from the prime minister, the chief minister of Punjab, the chief minister of our state Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Sindh government. Major General Ghulam Qamar, the local army commander, also gave our school 100,000 rupees to build a science laboratory and a library. But my fight wasn’t over. I was reminded of our history lessons, in which we learned about the loot or bounty an army enjoys when a battle is won. I began to see the awards and recognition just like that. They were little jewels without much meaning. I needed to concentrate on winning the war.
My father used some of the money to buy me a new bed and cabinet and pay for tooth implants for my mother and a piece of land in Shangla. We decided to spend the rest of the money on people who needed help. I wanted to start an education foundation. This had been on my mind ever since I’d seen the children working on the rubbish mountain. I still could not shake the image of the black rats I had seen there, and the girl with matted hair who had been sorting rubbish. We held a conference of twenty-one girls and made our priority education for every girl in Swat with a particular focus on street children and those in child labour.
As we crossed the Malakand Pass I saw a young girl selling oranges. She was scratching marks on a piece of paper with a pencil to account for the oranges she had sold as she could not read or write. I took a photo of her and vowed I would do everything in my power to help educate girls just like her.
This was the war I was going to fight.
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Author: Malala Yousafzai
