Monday, July 27, 2020: Suffering from Three Viruses: Occupation, Corona, and Traditional Patriarchal Culture with Margo Okazawa-Rey

Today I continue what has turned out to be a series on colonization, militarism, and their impacts on women. Today also marks the 67th anniversary of the armistice that ended the war on the Korean Peninsula so let’s keep that in our hearts.

On past shows, my guests discussed Memorial Day, and US colonization and occupation of Okinawa and the Pacific. In our show titled Suffering from Three Viruses: Occupation, Corona, and Patriarchal Culture, we broaden the earlier discussions by shifting to Afghanistan and Palestine. In interviews recorded on July 22, my guests Sima Samar and Faiha Abdulhadi shared what’s happening in Afghanistan and Palestine respectively. Next month, we’ll hear about Sudan.

As you are listening, please ask yourselves these questions: How has it been possible to forget about Afghanistan and Afghan women? What do you know about Palestine and Palestinian women? And again, I am urging you to make the connections between “here” and “there”, the relationships between domestic policy and foreign policy, and ultimately to imagine what real security--all the way from in your lives and communities, to the entire country, and the world-- would look and feel like. Especially for women.

The latest in Afghanistan and Palestine, reported by wonderful feminist activists, women and human-rights defenders, visionaries, and my dear friends, Sima Samar and Faiha Abdulhadi. Given what you heard, as US-based feminists, what is the “common context of struggle,” as Chandra Mohanty asks, with Afghani and Palestinian women? How are our destinies bound up with theirs?

Dr. Faiha Abdulhadi has extensive experience as a writer, poet, oral-historian, researcher and research-consultant, community activist, and lecturer, and has been working on gender and other issues of human interest. She is the founder and director of Al Rowat for Studies and Research, which seeks to rewrite social history by documenting stories of marginalized groups and of witnesses to key historic events. She is a member of the Palestinian National Council, the Palestinian Central Council, the deputy Commissioner General for the Independent Commission for Human Rights in Palestine.

Dr. Sima Samar is a medical doctor for poor people by profession, and a women’s and human rights activist. She was the first Minister for Women’s Affair after the fall of the Taliban. Since 2004, she is the Chairperson of Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, the first established in the country, which holds human rights violators accountable, a commitment that has put her own life at great risk. She has established and nurtured the Shuhada Organization that, in 2012, operated more than one hundred schools and 15 clinics and hospitals dedicated to providing education and healthcare, particularly focusing on women and girls. She was the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award in 2012.

Resources:

Free Women Writers https://www.freewomenwriters.org/2016/09/14/afghan-women-history-post-taliban/

Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling www.wclac.org

Click here to listen to the show. 59:59 min