Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

15: Leaving the Valley

LEAVING THE VALLEY was harder than anything I had done before. I remembered the tapa my grandmother used to recite: ‘No Pashtun leaves his land of his own sweet will./ Either he leaves from poverty or he leaves for love.’ Now we were being driven out for a third reason the tapa writer had never imagined - the Taliban.

Leaving our home felt like having my heart ripped out. I stood on our roof looking at the mountains, the snow-topped Mount Elum where Alexander the Great had reached up and touched Jupiter. I looked at the trees all coming into leaf. The fruit of our apricot tree might be eaten by someone else this year. Everything was silent, pin-drop silent. There was no sound from the river or the wind; even the birds were not chirping.

I wanted to cry because I felt in my heart I might never see my home again. The documentary makers had asked me how I would feel if one day I left Swat and never came back. At the time I had thought it was a stupid question, but now I saw that everything I could not imagine happening had happened. I thought my school would not close and it had. I thought we would never leave Swat and we were just about to. I thought Swat would be free of the Taliban one day and we would rejoice, but now I realised that might not happen. I started to cry. It was as if everyone had been waiting for someone else to start. My cousin’s wife, Honey, started weeping, then all of us were crying. But my mother was very composed and courageous.

I put all my books and notebooks in my school bag then packed another bag of clothes. I couldn’t think straight. I took the trousers from one set and the top from another so I had a bag of things which didn’t match. I didn’t take any of my school awards or photos or personal belongings as we were travelling in someone else’s car and there was little room. We didn’t own anything expensive like a laptop or jewellery - our only valuable items had been our TV, a fridge and a washing machine. We didn’t lead a life of luxury - we Pashtuns prefer to sit on floors rather than chairs. Our house has holes in the walls, and every plate and cup is cracked.

My father had resisted leaving till the end. But then some of my parents’ friends had lost a relative in gunfire so they went to the house to offer prayers of condolences even though nobody was really venturing out. Seeing their grief made my mother determined to leave. She told my father, ‘You don’t have to come, but I am going and I will take the children to Shangla.’ She knew he couldn’t let her go alone. My mother had had enough of the gunfire and tension and called Dr Afzal and begged him to persuade my father to leave. He and his family were going so they offered us a lift. We didn’t have a car so we were lucky that our neighbours, Safina and her family, were also leaving and could fit some of us in their car while the rest would go with Dr Afzal.

On 5 May 2009 we became IDPs. Internally displaced persons. It sounded like a disease.

There were a lot of us - not just us five but also my grandmother, my cousin, his wife, Honey, and their baby. My brothers also wanted to take their pet chickens - mine had died because I washed it in cold water on a winter’s day. It wouldn’t revive even when I put it in a shoebox in the house to keep it warm and got everyone in the neighbourhood to pray for it. My mother refused to let the chickens come. What if they make a mess in the car? she asked. Atal suggested we buy them nappies! In the end we left them with a lot of water and corn. She also said I must leave my school bag because there was so little room. I was horrified. I went and whispered Quranic verses over the books to try and protect them.

Finally everyone was ready. My mother, father, grandmother, my cousin’s wife and baby and my brothers all squashed into the back of Dr Afzal’s van along with his wife and children. There were children in the laps of adults and smaller children in their laps. I was luckier - there were fewer people in Safina’s car - but I was devastated by the loss of my school bag. Because I had packed my books separately, I had had to leave them all behind.

We all said surahs from the Quran and a special prayer to protect our sweet homes and school.

Then Safina’s father put his foot on the pedal and away we drove out of the small world of our street, home and school and into the unknown. We did not know if we would ever see our town again. We had seen pictures of how the army had flattened everything in an operation against militants in Bajaur and we thought everything we knew would be destroyed.

The streets were jam-packed. I had never seen them so busy before. There were cars everywhere, as well as rickshaws, mule carts and trucks laden with people and their belongings. There were even motorbikes with entire families balanced on them. Thousands of people were leaving with just the clothes they had on their backs. It felt as if the whole valley was on the move. Some people believe that the Pashtuns descend from one of the lost tribes of Israel, and my father said, ‘It is as though we are the Israelites leaving Egypt, but we have no Moses to guide us.’ Few people knew where they were going, they just knew they had to leave. This was the biggest exodus in Pashtun history.

Usually there are many ways out of Mingora, but the Taliban had cut down several huge apple trees and used them to block some routes so everyone was squashed onto the same road. We were an ocean of people. The Taliban patrolled the roads with guns and watched us from the tops of buildings. They were keeping the cars in lines but with weapons not whistles. ‘Traffic Taliban,’ we joked to try and keep our spirits up. At regular intervals along the road we passed army and Taliban checkpoints side by side. Once again the army was seemingly unaware of the Taliban’s presence.

‘Maybe they have poor eyesight,’ we laughed, ‘and can’t see them.’

The road was heaving with traffic. It was a long slow journey and we were all very sweaty crammed in together. Usually car journeys are an adventure for us children as we rarely go anywhere.

But this was different. Everyone was depressed.

Inside Dr Afzal’s van my father was talking to the media, giving a running commentary on the exodus from the valley. My mother kept telling him to keep his voice down for fear the Taliban would hear him. My father’s voice is so loud my mother often jokes that he doesn’t need to make phone calls, he can just shout.

Finally we got through the mountain pass at Malakand and left Swat behind. It was late afternoon by the time we reached Mardan, which is a hot and busy city.

My father kept insisting to everyone ‘in a few days we will return. Everything will be fine.’ But we knew that was not true.

In Mardan there were already big camps of white UNHCR tents like those for Afghan refugees in Peshawar. We weren’t going to stay in the camps because it was the worst idea ever. Almost two million of us were fleeing Swat and you couldn’t have fitted two million people in those camps. Even if there was a tent for us, it was far too hot inside and there was talk that diseases like cholera were spreading. My father said he had heard rumours that some Taliban were even hiding inside the camps and harassing the women.

Those who could, stayed in the homes of local people or with family and friends. Amazingly threequarters of all the IDPs were put up by the people of Mardan and the nearby town of Swabi. They opened the doors of their homes, schools and mosques to the refugees. In our culture women are expected not to mix with men they are not related to. In order to protect women’s purdah, men in families hosting the refugees even slept away from their own homes. They became voluntary IDPs. It was an astonishing example of Pashtun hospitality. We were convinced that if the exodus had been managed by the government many more would have died of hunger and illness.

As we had no relatives in Mardan we were planning to make our way to Shangla, our family village. So far we had driven in the opposite direction, but we had had to take the only lift we could get out of Swat.

We spent that first night in the home of Dr Afzal. My father then left us to go to Peshawar and alert people to what was happening. He promised to meet us later in Shangla. My mother tried very hard to persuade him to come with us but he refused. He wanted the people of Peshawar and Islamabad to be aware of the terrible conditions in which IDPs were living and that the military were doing nothing.

We said goodbye and were terribly worried we wouldn’t see him again.

The next day we got a lift to Abbottabad, where my grandmother’s family lived. There we met up with my cousin Khanjee, who was heading north like us. He ran a boys’ hostel in Swat and was taking seven or eight boys to Kohistan by coach. He was going to Besham, from where we would need another lift to take us to Shangla.

It was nightfall by the time we reached Besham as many roads were blocked. We spent the night in a cheap dirty hotel while my cousin tried to arrange a van to take us to Shangla. A man came near my mother and she took her shoe off and hit him once then twice and he ran away. She had hit him so hard that when she looked at the shoe it was broken. I always knew my mother was a strong woman but I looked at her with new respect.

It was not easy to get from Besham to our village and we had to walk twenty-five kilometres carrying all our things. At one point we were stopped by the army, who told us we could go no further and must turn back. ‘Our home is in Shangla. Where will we go?’ we begged. My grandmother started crying and saying her life had never been so bad. Finally, they let us through. The army and their machine guns were everywhere. Because of the curfew and the checkpoints there was not one other vehicle on the road that didn’t belong to the military. We were afraid that the army wouldn’t know who we were and would shoot us.

When we reached the village our family was astonished to see us. Everyone believed the Taliban would return to Shangla so they couldn’t understand why we hadn’t remained in Mardan.

We stayed in my mother’s village, Karshat, with my uncle Faiz Mohammad and his family. We had to borrow clothes from our relatives as we hadn’t brought much. I was happy to be with my cousin Sumbul, who is a year older than me. Once we were settled I started going to school with her. I was in Year 6 but started in Year 7 to be with Sumbul. There were only three girls in that year as most of the village girls of that age do not go to school, so we were taught with boys as they didn’t have enough room or staff to teach just three girls separately. I was different to the other girls as I didn’t cover my face and I used to talk to every teacher and ask questions. But I tried to be obedient and polite, always saying, ‘Yes, sir.’

It took over half an hour to walk to school, and because I am bad at getting up in the morning the second day we were late. I was shocked when the teacher hit my hand with a stick to punish me, but then decided that at least it meant they were accepting me and not treating me differently. My uncle even gave me pocket money to buy snacks at school - they sold cucumber and watermelon not sweets and crisps like in Mingora.

One day at school there was a parents’ day and prize-giving ceremony, and all the boys were encouraged to make speeches. Some of the girls also took part, but not in public. Instead we spoke into a microphone in our classrooms and our voices were then projected into the main hall. But I was used to speaking in public so I came out and in front of all the boys I recited one naat, a poem in which I praised the Prophet. Then I asked the teacher if I could read some more poetry. I read a poem about working hard to achieve your heart’s desires. ‘A diamond must be cut many times before it yields even a tiny jewel,’ I said. After that I spoke of my namesake, Malalai of Maiwand, who had strength and power equal to hundreds and thousands of brave men because her few lines of poetry changed everything so the British were defeated.

People in the audience seemed surprised and I wondered whether they thought I was showing off or whether they were asking themselves why I wasn’t wearing a veil.

It was nice being with my cousins but I missed my books. I kept thinking of my school bag at home with copies of Oliver Twist and Romeo and Juliet waiting to be read and the Ugly Betty DVDs on the shelf. But now we were living our own drama. We had been so happy, then something very bad had come into our lives and we were now waiting for our happy ending. When I complained about my books my brothers whined about their chickens.

We’d heard on the radio that the army had started the battle for Mingora. They had parachuted in soldiers and there had been hand-to-hand fighting in the streets. The Taliban were using hotels and government buildings as bunkers. After four days the military took three squares including Green Chowk, where the Taliban used to display the beheaded bodies of their victims. Then they captured the airport and in a week they had taken back the city.

We continued to worry about my father. In Shangla it was hard to find a mobile phone signal. We had to climb onto a huge boulder in a field, and even then we rarely had more than one bar of reception so we hardly ever spoke to him. But after we had been in Shangla for about six weeks, my father said we could travel to Peshawar, where he had been staying in one room with three friends.

It was very emotional to see him again. Then, a complete family once more, we travelled down to Islamabad, where we stayed with the family of Shiza, the lady who had called us from Stanford.

While we were there we heard that Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the American envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, was holding a meeting in the Serena Hotel about the conflict, and my father and I managed to get inside.

We almost missed it as I hadn’t set the alarm properly so my father was barely speaking to me.

Holbrooke was a big gruff man with a red face but people said he had helped bring peace to Bosnia. I sat next to him and he asked me how old I was. ‘I am twelve,’ I replied, trying to look as tall as possible. ‘Respected Ambassador, I request you, please help us girls to get an education,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘You already have lots of problems and we are doing lots for you,’ he replied. ‘We have pledged billions of dollars in economic aid; we are working with your government on providing electricity, gas . but your country faces a lot of problems.’

I did an interview with a radio station called Power 99. They liked it very much and told us they had a guesthouse in Abbottabad where we could all go. We stayed there for a week and to my joy I heard Moniba was also in Abbottabad, as was one of our teachers and another friend. Moniba and I had not spoken since our fight on the last day before becoming IDPs. We arranged to meet in a park, and I brought her Pepsi and biscuits. ‘It was all your fault,’ she told me. I agreed. I didn’t mind; I just wanted to be friends.

Our week at the guesthouse soon ended and we went to Haripur, where one of my aunts lived. It was our fourth city in two months. I knew we were better off than those who lived in the camps, queuing for food and water for hours under the hot sun, but I missed my valley. It was there I spent my twelfth birthday. Nobody remembered. Even my father forgot, he was so busy hopping about. I was upset and recalled how different my eleventh birthday had been. I had shared a cake with my friends.

There were balloons and I had made the same wish I was making on my twelfth birthday, but this time there was no cake and there were no candles to blow out. Once again I wished for peace in our valley.

PART THREE: Three Girls, Three Bullets

Sir de pa lowara tega kegda Praday watan de paki nishta balakhtona

O Wayfarer! Rest your head on the stony cobblestone It is a foreign land - not the city of your kings!

16: The Valley of Sorrows

IT ALL SEEMED like a bad dream. We had been away from our valley for almost three months and as we drove back past Churchill’s Picket, past the ancient ruins on the hill and the giant Buddhist stupa, we saw the wide Swat River and my father began to weep. Swat seemed to be under complete military control. The vehicle we were in even had to pass through an explosives check before we could head up the Malakand Pass. Once we got over the other side and down into the valley it seemed there were army checkpoints everywhere and soldiers had made nests for their machine guns on so many of the rooftops.

As we drove through villages we saw buildings in ruins and burned-out vehicles. It made me think of old war movies or the video games my brother Khushal loves to play. When we reached Mingora we were shocked. The army and Taliban had fought street to street and almost every wall was pockmarked with bullet holes. There was the rubble of blown-up buildings which the Taliban had used as hideouts, and piles of wreckage, twisted metal and smashed-up signs. Most of the shops had heavy metal shutters; those that didn’t had been looted. The city was silent and emptied of people and traffic as if a plague had descended. The strangest sight of all was the bus station. Usually it’s a complete confusion of Flying Coaches and rickshaws, but now it was completely deserted. We even saw plants growing up through the cracks in the paving. We had never seen our city like this.

At least there was no sign of the Taliban.

It was 24 July 2009, a week after our prime minister had announced that the Taliban had been cleared out. He promised that the gas supply had been restored and that the banks were reopening, and called on the people of Swat to return. In the end as many as half of its 1.8 million population had left our valley. From what we could see, most of them weren’t convinced it was safe to return.

As we drew close to home we all fell silent, even my little brother, Atal the chatterbox. Our home was near Circuit House, the army headquarters, so we were worried it might have been destroyed in the shelling. We’d also heard that many homes had been looted. We held our breath as my father unlocked the gate. The first thing we saw was that in the three months we’d been away the garden had become a jungle.

My brothers immediately rushed off to check on their pet chickens. They came back crying. All that remained of the chickens was a pile of feathers and the bones of their small bodies entangled as if they had died in an embrace. They had starved to death.

I felt so sad for my brothers but I had to check on something of my own. To my joy I found my school bag still packed with my books, and I gave thanks that my prayers had been answered and that they were safe. I took out my books one by one and just stared at them. Maths, physics, Urdu, English, Pashto, chemistry, biology, Islamiyat, Pakistan studies. Finally I would be able to return to school without fear.

Then I went and sat on my bed. I was overwhelmed.

We were lucky our house had not been broken into. Four or five of the houses on our street had been looted and TVs and gold jewellery had been taken. Safina’s mother next door had deposited her gold in a bank vault for safekeeping and even that had been looted.

My father was anxious to check on the school. I went with him. We found that the building opposite the girls’ school had been hit by a missile but the school itself looked intact. For some reason my father’s keys would not work so we found a boy who climbed over the wall and opened it from the inside. We ran up the steps anticipating the worst.

‘Someone has been in here,’ my father said as soon as we entered the courtyard. There were cigarette stubs and empty food wrappers all over the floor. Chairs had been upended and the space was a mess. My father had taken down the Khushal School sign and left it in the courtyard. It was leaning against the wall and I screamed as we lifted it. Underneath were the rotting heads of goats. It looked like the remains of someone’s dinner.

Then we went into the classrooms. Anti-Taliban slogans were scrawled all over the walls.

Someone had written army zindabad (Long live the army) on a whiteboard in permanent marker. Now we knew who had been living there. One soldier had even written corny love poems in one of my classmate’s diaries. Bullet casings littered the floor. The soldiers had made a hole in the wall through which you could see the city below. Maybe they had even shot at people through that hole. I felt sorry that our precious school had become a battlefield.

While we were looking around we heard someone banging on the door downstairs. ‘Don’t open it, Malala!’ my father ordered.

In his office my father found a letter left by the army. It blamed citizens like us for allowing the Taliban to control Swat. ‘We have lost so many of the precious lives of our soldiers and this is due to your negligence. Long live Pak Army,’ he read.

‘This is typical,’ he said. ‘We people of Swat were first seduced by the Taliban, then killed by them and now blamed for them. Seduced, killed and blamed.’

In some ways the army did not seem very different to the militants. One of our neighbours told us he had even seen them leaving the bodies of dead Taliban in the streets for all to see. Now their helicopters flew in pairs overhead like big black buzzing insects, and when we walked home we stayed close to the walls so they wouldn’t see us.

We heard that thousands of people had been arrested including boys as young as eight who had been brainwashed to train for suicide bombing missions. The army was sending them to a special camp for jihadis to de-radicalise them. One of the people arrested was our old Urdu teacher who had refused to teach girls and had instead gone to help Fazlullah’s men collect and destroy CDs and DVDs.

Fazlullah himself was still at large. The army had destroyed his headquarters in Imam Deri and then claimed to have him surrounded in the mountains of Peochar. Then they said he was badly injured and that they had his spokesman, Muslim Khan, in custody. Later the story changed and they reported that Fazlullah had escaped into Afghanistan and was in the province of Kunar. Some people said that Fazlullah had been captured but that the army and the ISI couldn’t agree on what to do with him. The army had wanted to imprison him, but the intelligence service had prevailed and taken him to Bajaur so that he could slip across the border to Afghanistan.

Muslim Khan and another commander called Mehmud seemed to be the only members of the Taliban leadership who were in custody - all the others were still free. As long as Fazlullah was still around I was afraid the Taliban would regroup and return to power. I sometimes had nightmares, but at least his radio broadcasts had stopped.

My father’s friend Ahmad Shah called it a ‘controlled peace, not a durable peace’. But gradually people returned to the valley because Swat is beautiful and we cannot bear to be away from it for long.

Our school bell rang again for the first time on 1 August. It was wonderful to hear that sound and run through the doorway and up the steps as we used to. I was overjoyed to see all my old friends. We had so many stories from our time as IDPs. Most of us had stayed with friends or family but some had been in the camps. We knew we were lucky. Many children had to have their classes in tents because the Taliban had destroyed their schools. And one of my friends, Sundus, had lost her father, who had been killed in an explosion.

It seemed like everyone knew I had written the BBC diary. Some thought my father had done it for me but Madam Maryam, our principal, told them, ‘No. Malala is not just a good speaker but also a good writer.’

That summer there was only one topic of conversation in my class. Shiza Shahid, our friend from Islamabad, had finished her studies in Stanford and invited twenty-seven girls from the Khushal School to spend a few days in the capital seeing the sights and taking part in workshops to help us get over the trauma of living under the Taliban. Those from my class were me, Moniba, Malka-e-Noor, Rida, Karishma and Sundus, and we were chaperoned by my mother and Madam Maryam.

We left for the capital on Independence Day, 14 August, and travelled by bus, everyone brimming with excitement. Most of the girls had only ever left the valley when we became IDPs. This was different and very much like the holidays we read about in novels. We stayed in a guesthouse and did lots of workshops on how to tell our stories so people outside would know what was going on in our valley and help us. Right from the first session I think Shiza was surprised how strong-willed and vocal we all were. ‘It’s a room full of Malalas!’ she told my father.

We also had fun doing things like going to the park and listening to music, which might seem ordinary for most people but which in Swat had become acts of political protest. And we saw the sights. We visited the Faisal Mosque at the base of the Margalla Hills, which was built by the Saudis for millions of rupees. It is huge and white and looks like a shimmering tent suspended between minarets. We went on our first ever visit to the theatre to see an English play called Tom, Dick and Harry and had art classes. We ate at restaurants and had our first visit to a McDonald’s. There were lots of firsts although I had to miss a meal in a Chinese restaurant because I was on a TV show called Capital Talk. To this day I still haven’t got to try duck pancakes!

Islamabad was totally different to Swat. It was as different for us as Islamabad is to New York.

Shiza introduced us to women who were lawyers and doctors and also activists, which showed us that women could do important jobs yet still keep their culture and traditions. We saw women in the streets without purdah, their heads completely uncovered. I stopped wearing my shawl over my head in some of the meetings, thinking I had become a modern girl. Later I realised that simply having your head uncovered isn’t what makes you modern.

We were there one week and predictably Moniba and I quarrelled. She saw me gossiping with a girl in the year above and told me, ‘Now you are with Resham and I am with Rida.’

Shiza wanted to introduce us to influential people. In our country of course this often means the military. One of our meetings was with Major General Athar Abbas, the chief spokesman for the army and its head of public relations. We drove to Islamabad’s twin city of Rawalpindi to see him in his office. Our eyes widened when we saw that the army headquarters was so much neater than the rest of the city with perfect green lawns and blossoming flowers. Even the trees were all the same size with the trunks painted white to exactly halfway up - we didn’t know why. Inside the HQ we saw offices with banks of televisions, men monitoring every channel, and one officer showed my father a thick file of cuttings which contained every mention of the army in that day’s papers. He was amazed. The army seemed much more effective at PR than our politicians.

We were taken into a hall to wait for the general. On the walls were photographs of all our army chiefs, the most powerful men in our country including dictators like Musharraf and scary Zia. A servant with white gloves brought us tea and biscuits and small meat samosas that melted in our mouths. When General Abbas came in we all stood up.

He began by telling us about the military operation in Swat, which he presented as a victory. He said 128 soldiers and 1,600 terrorists had been killed in the operation.

After he finished we could ask questions. We had been told to prepare questions in advance and I had made a list of seven or eight. Shiza had laughed and said he wouldn’t be able to answer so many.

I sat in the front row and was the first to be called on. I asked, ‘Two or three months ago you told us Fazlullah and his deputy were shot and injured, and then you said they were in Swat and sometimes you say they’re in Afghanistan. How did they get there? If you have so much information, why can’t you catch them?’

His reply went on for about ten to fifteen minutes and I couldn’t work out what his answer was!

Then I asked about reconstruction. ‘The army must do something for the future of the valley, not just focus on the military operation,’ I said.

Moniba asked something similar. ‘Who will reconstruct all these buildings and schools?’ she wanted to know.

The general replied in a very military way. ‘After the operation, first we will have recovery, then rehabilitation, then hold and transfer to civil authorities.’

All of us girls made it clear that we wanted to see the Taliban brought to justice, but we weren’t very convinced this would happen.

Afterwards General Abbas gave some of us his visiting card and told us to contact him if we ever needed anything.

On the last day we all had to give a speech at the Islamabad Club about our experiences in the valley under Taliban rule. When Moniba spoke she couldn’t control her tears. Soon everyone was weeping. We had enjoyed a glimpse of a different life in Islamabad. In my speech I told the audience that until I had watched the English play I had no idea there were so many talented people in Pakistan.

‘Now we realise we don’t need to watch Indian movies,’ I joked. We’d had a wonderful time, and when we got back to Swat I felt so hopeful about the future I planted a mango seed in the garden during Ramadan as they are a favourite fruit to eat after breaking the fast.

But my father had a big problem. While we had been IDPs and for all the months the school had been closed he had collected no fees, but the teachers still expected to be paid. Altogether that would be over one million rupees. All the private schools were in the same boat. One school gave its teachers salaries for a month, but most didn’t know what to do as they couldn’t afford to pay. The teachers at the Khushal School demanded something. They had their own expenses, and one of them, Miss Hera, was about to get married and had been relying on her salary to help pay for the ceremony.

My father was in a fix. Then we remembered General Abbas and his visiting card. It was because of the army operation to expel the Taliban that we had all had to leave and found ourselves in this situation now. So Madam Maryam and I wrote an email to General Abbas explaining the situation. He was very kind and sent us 1,100,000 rupees so my father could pay everyone three months’ back pay.

The teachers were so happy. Most had never received so much money at once. Miss Hera called my father in tears, grateful that her wedding could go ahead as planned.

This didn’t mean we went easy on the army. We were very unhappy about the army’s failure to capture the Taliban leadership, and my father and I continued to give lots of interviews. We were often joined by my father’s friend Zahid Khan, a fellow member of the Swat Qaumi Jirga. He was also the president of the All Swat Hotels Association, so he was particularly eager for life to go back to normal so that tourists could return. Like my father he was very outspoken and had been threatened too. One night in November 2009 he had had a very narrow escape. Zahid Khan was returning to his home from a meeting with army officials at Circuit House late at night when he was ambushed.

Fortunately, many of his family live in the same area and they exchanged fire with the attackers, forcing them to flee.

Then on 1 December 2009 there was a suicide attack on a well-known local ANP politician and member of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assembly, Dr Shamsher Ali Khan. He had been greeting friends and constituents for Eid at his hujra, just a mile from Imam Deri where Fazlullah’s headquarters had been, when the bomb went off. Dr Shamsher had been an outspoken critic of the Taliban. He died on the spot and nine other people were injured. People said the bomber was about eighteen years old.

The police found his legs and other parts of his body.

A couple of weeks after that our school was asked to take part in the District Child Assembly Swat, which had been set up by the charity UNICEF and by the Khpal Kor (My Home) Foundation for orphans. Sixty students from all over Swat had been chosen as members. They were mostly boys although eleven girls from my school went along. The first meeting was in a hall with lots of politicians and activists. We held an election for speaker and I won! It was strange to stand up there on the stage and have people address me as Madam Speaker, but it felt good to have our voices heard.

The assembly was elected for a year and we met almost every month. We passed nine resolutions calling for an end to child labour and asking for help to send the disabled and street children to school, as well as for the reconstruction of all the schools destroyed by the Taliban. Once the resolutions were agreed, they were sent to officials and a handful were even acted on.

Moniba, Ayesha and I also started learning about journalism from a British organisation called the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which ran a project called Open Minds Pakistan. It was fun learning how to report issues properly. I had become interested in journalism after seeing how my own words could make a difference and also from watching the Ugly Betty DVDs about life at an American magazine. This was a bit different - when we wrote about subjects close to our hearts these were topics like extremism and the Taliban rather than clothes and hairstyles.

All too soon it was another year of exams. I beat Malka-e-Noor for first place again although it was close. Our headmistress had tried to persuade her to be a school prefect but she said she couldn’t do anything that might distract her from her studies. ‘You should be more like Malala and do other things,’ said Madam Maryam. ‘It’s just as important as your education. Work isn’t everything.’ But I couldn’t blame her. She really wanted to please her parents, particularly her mother.

It wasn’t the same Swat as before - maybe it never would be - but it was returning to normal. Even some of the dancers of Banr Bazaar had moved back, although they were mostly making DVDs to sell, rather than performing live. We enjoyed peace festivals with music and dancing, unheard of under the Taliban. My father organised one of the festivals in Marghazar and invited those who had hosted the IDPs in the lower districts as a thank you. There was music all night long.

Things often seemed to happen around my birthday, and around the time I turned thirteen in July 2010 the rain came. We normally don’t have monsoons in Swat and at first we were happy, thinking the rain would mean a good harvest. But it was relentless and so heavy that you couldn’t even see the person standing in front of you. Environmentalists had warned that our mountains had been stripped of trees by the Taliban and timber smugglers. Soon muddy floods were raging down the valleys, sweeping away everything in their wake.

We were in school when the floods started and were sent home. But there was so much water that the bridge across the dirty stream was submerged so we had to find another way. The next bridge we came to was also submerged but the water wasn’t too deep so we splashed our way across. It smelt foul. We were wet and filthy by the time we got home.

The next day we heard that the school had been flooded. It took days for the water to drain away and when we returned we could see chest-high tide marks on the walls. There was mud, mud, mud everywhere. Our desks and chairs were covered with it. The classrooms smelt disgusting. There was so much damage that it cost my father 90,000 rupees to repair - equivalent to the monthly fees for ninety students.

It was the same story throughout Pakistan. The mighty Indus River, which flows from the Himalayas down through KPK and Punjab to Karachi and the Arabian Sea, and of which we are so proud, had turned into a raging torrent and burst its banks. Roads, crops and entire villages were washed away.

Around 2,000 people drowned and 14 million people were affected. Many of them lost their homes and 7,000 schools were destroyed. It was the worst flood in living memory. The head of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, called it a ‘slow-motion tsunami’. We read that more lives had been affected and more damage had been caused by the floods than the Asian tsunami, our 2005 earthquake, Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake combined.

Swat was one of the places most affected. Thirty-four of our forty-two bridges had been washed away, cutting off much of the valley. Electric pylons had been smashed into pieces so we had no power. Our own street was on a hill so we were a bit better protected from the overflowing river, but we shivered at the sound of it, a growling, heavy-breathing dragon devouring everything in its path.

The riverside hotels and restaurants where tourists used to eat trout and enjoy the views were all destroyed. The tourist areas were the hardest hit parts of Swat. Hill station resorts like Malam Jabba, Madyan and Bahrain were devastated, their hotels and bazaars in ruins.

We soon heard from our relatives that the damage in Shangla was unimaginable. The main road to our village from Alpuri, the capital of Shangla, had been washed away, and entire villages were submerged. Many of the houses on the hilly terraces of Karshat, Shahpur and Barkana had been taken by mudslides. My mother’s family home, where Uncle Faiz Mohammad lived, was still standing but the road it stood on had vanished.

People had desperately tried to protect what little they owned, moving their animals to higher ground, but the floods saturated the corn they had harvested, destroyed the orchards and drowned many of the buffaloes. The villagers were helpless. They had no power, as all their makeshift hydroelectric projects had been smashed to pieces. They had no clean water as the river was brown with wreckage and debris. So strong was the force of the water that even concrete buildings had been reduced to rubble. The school, hospital and electricity station along the main road were all razed to the ground.

No one could understand how this had happened. People had lived by the river in Swat for 3,000 years and always seen it as our lifeline, not a threat, and our valley as a haven from the outside world.

Now we had become ‘the valley of sorrows’, said my cousin Sultan Rome. First the earthquake, then the Taliban, then the military operation and now, just as we were starting to rebuild, devastating floods arrived to wash all our work away. People were desperately worried that the Taliban would take advantage of the chaos and return to the valley.

My father sent food and aid to Shangla using money collected by friends and the Swat Association of Private Schools. Our friend Shiza and some of the activists we had met in Islamabad came to Mingora and distributed lots of money. But just like during the earthquake, it was mainly volunteers from Islamic groups who were the first to arrive in the more remote and isolated areas with aid. Many said the floods were another reproof from God for the music and dancing we had enjoyed at the recent festivals. The consolation this time, however, was that there was no radio to spread this message!

While all this suffering was going on, while people were losing their loved ones, their homes and their livelihoods, our president, Asif Zardari, was on holiday at a chateau in France. ‘I am confused, Aba,’ I told my father. ‘What’s stopping each and every politician from doing good things? Why would they not want our people to be safe, to have food and electricity?’

After the Islamic groups the main help came from the army. Not just our army. The Americans also sent helicopters, which made some people suspicious. One theory was that the devastation had been created by the Americans using something called HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) technology, which causes huge waves under the ocean, thus flooding our land. Then, under the pretext of bringing in aid, they could legitimately enter Pakistan and spy on all our secrets.

Even when the rains finally ceased life was still very difficult. We had no clean water and no electricity. In August we had our first case of cholera in Mingora and soon there was a tent of patients outside the hospital. Because we were cut off from supply routes, what little food was available was extremely expensive. It was the peach and onion season and farmers were desperate to save their harvests. Many of them made hazardous journeys across the churning, swollen river on boats made from rubber tyres to try to bring their produce to market. When we found peaches for sale we were so happy.

There was less foreign help than there might have been at another time. The rich countries of the West were suffering from an economic crisis, and President Zardari’s travels around Europe had made them less sympathetic. Foreign governments pointed out that most of our politicians weren’t paying any income tax, so it was a bit much to ask hard-pressed taxpayers in their own countries to contribute. Foreign aid agencies were also worried about the safety of their staff after a Taliban spokesperson demanded that the Pakistan government reject help from Christians and Jews. No one doubted they were serious. The previous October, the World Food Programme office in Islamabad had been bombed and five aid workers were killed.

In Swat we began to see more signs that the Taliban had never really left. Two more schools were blown up and three foreign aid workers from a Christian group were kidnapped as they returned to their base in Mingora and then murdered. We received other shocking news. My father’s friend Dr Mohammad Farooq, the vice chancellor of Swat University, had been killed by two gunmen who burst into his office. Dr Farooq was an Islamic scholar and former member of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, and as one of the biggest voices against Talibanisation he had even issued a fatwa against suicide attacks.

We felt frustrated and scared once again. When we were IDPs I had thought about becoming a politician and now I knew that was the right choice. Our country had so many crises and no real leaders to tackle them.