I am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban (18 page)

The next day he went on a live show on the Voice of America and angrily condemned the attacks. Muslim Khan, the Taliban spokesman, was on the phone. ‘What was so wrong with these two schools that you should bomb them?’ my father asked him.

Muslim Khan said that Sangota was a convent school teaching Christianity and that Excelsior was co-educational, teaching girls and boys together. ‘Both things are false!’ replied my father. ‘Sangota school has been there since the 1960s and never converted anyone to Christianity – in fact some of them converted to Islam. And Excelsior is only co-educational in the primary section.’

Muslim Khan didn’t answer. ‘What about their own daughters?’ I asked my father. ‘Don’t they want them to learn?’

Our headmistress Madam Maryam had studied at Sangota, and her younger sister Ayesha was a pupil there, so she and some of the other Sangota girls transferred to our school. The monthly school fees were never enough to cover all our outgoings so the extra fees were welcome, but my father was unhappy. He went everywhere he could demanding the reconstruction of both schools. Once he spoke at a big gathering and held up an audience member’s baby girl and said, ‘This girl is our future. Do we want her to be ignorant?’ The crowd agreed that they would sacrifice themselves before giving up their daughters’ education. The new girls had horrible stories. Ayesha told us how one day on the way home from Sangota she had seen a Taliban holding up the severed head of a policeman by its hair, blood dripping from the neck. The Sangota girls were also very bright, which meant more competition. One of them, Rida, was excellent at making speeches. She became a good friend of mine and of Moniba’s, which sometimes caused fights as three is a tricky number. Moniba often brought food to school and would
just bring one spare fork. ‘Are you my friend or Rida’s?’ I asked Moniba.

She laughed and said, ‘We are all three good friends.’

By the end of 2008, around 400 schools had been destroyed by the Taliban. We had a new government under President Asif Zardari, the widower of Benazir, but they didn’t seem to care about Swat. I told people things would be different if Zardari’s own daughters were at school in Swat. There were suicide bombings all over the country: even the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad had been blown up.

In Swat it was safer in the town than in the remote areas and many of our family came from the countryside to stay with us. The house was small and got very crowded with the cousins who already lived with us. There was little to do. We couldn’t play cricket in the street or on the roof like we used to. We played marbles in the yard over and over again. I fought non-stop with my brother Khushal, and he would go crying to our mother. Never in history have Khushal and Malala been friends.

I liked doing my hair in different styles and would spend ages in the bathroom in front of the mirror trying out looks I had seen in movies. Until I was eight or nine my mother used to cut my hair short like my brothers because of lice and also to make it easier to wash and brush as it would get messed up under my shawl. But finally I had persuaded her to let me grow it to my shoulders. Unlike Moniba, who has straight hair, mine is wavy, and I liked to twist it into curls or tie it into plaits. ‘What are you doing in there
Pisho
?’ my mother would shout. ‘Our guests need the bathroom and everyone is having to wait for you.’

One of the worst times was the fasting month of Ramadan in 2008. During Ramadan no food or drink can pass a Muslim’s lips in daylight hours. The Taliban bombed the power station so we had no electricity, then a few days later they blasted the pipeline so we had no gas either. The price of the gas cylinders we used to buy from the market doubled so my mother had to cook on a fire
like we did in the village. She didn’t complain – food needed to be cooked and she cooked it, and there were others worse off than us. But there was no clean water and people started dying from cholera. The hospital could not cope with all the patients and had to erect big tents outside to treat people.

Though we had no generator at home, my father bought one to install at the school, and fresh water was pumped from a bore-hole, which all the children in the neighbourhood went to collect. Every day there would be lines of people waiting to fill jugs, bottles and drums. One of the neighbours got frightened. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘If the Taliban find out you’re giving water in the month of Ramadan they will bomb us!’

My father replied that people would die either of thirst or bombings.

The days when we used to go for trips or for picnics seemed like a dream. No one would venture from their homes after sunset. The terrorists even blew up the ski lift and the big hotel in Malam Jabba where tourists used to stay. A holiday paradise turned into a hell where no tourist would venture.

Then, at the end of 2008, Fazlullah’s deputy Maulana Shah Dauran announced on the radio that all girls’ schools would close. From 15 January girls must not go to school, he warned. First I thought it was a joke. ‘How can they stop us from going to school?’ I asked my friends. ‘They don’t have the power. They are saying they will destroy the mountain but they can’t even control the road.’

The other girls didn’t agree with me. ‘Who will stop them?’ they asked. ‘They have already blown up hundreds of schools and no one has done anything.’

My father used to say the people of Swat and the teachers would continue to educate our children until the last room, the last teacher and the last student was alive. My parents never once suggested I should withdraw from school, ever. Though we loved school, we hadn’t realised how important education was until the Taliban tried to stop us. Going to school, reading and doing our
homework wasn’t just a way of passing time, it was our future.

That winter it snowed and we built snow bears but without much joy. In winter the Taliban used to disappear into the mountains, but we knew they would be back and had no idea what was coming next. We believed school would start again. The Taliban could take our pens and books, but they couldn’t stop our minds from thinking.

12

The Bloody Square

T
HE BODIES WOULD
be dumped in the square at night so that everyone would see them the next morning on their way to work. There was usually a note pinned to them saying something like, ‘This is what happens to an army agent’, or ‘Do not touch this body until 11 a.m. or you will be next.’ On some of the nights of the killings there would also be earthquakes, which made people even more scared as we connect every natural disaster with a human disaster.

They killed Shabana on a bitterly cold night in January 2009. She lived in Banr Bazaar, a narrow street in our town of Mingora which is famous for its dancers and musicians. Shabana’s father said a group of men had knocked at her door and asked her to dance for them. She went to put on her dancing clothes, and when she returned to dance for them, they pulled out their guns and threatened to slit her throat. This happened after the 9 p.m. curfew and people heard her screaming, ‘I promise I’ll stop! I promise I won’t sing and dance again. Leave me, for God’s sake! I am a woman, a Muslim. Don’t kill me!’ Then shots rang out and her bullet-ridden body was dragged to Green Chowk. So many bodies had been left there that people started calling it the Bloody Square.

We heard about Shabana’s death the next morning. On Mullah FM, Fazlullah said she deserved to die for her immoral character and any other girls found performing in Banr Bazaar would be killed one by one. We used to be proud of our music and art in Swat, but now most of the dancers fled to Lahore or to Dubai. Musicians
took out adverts in the papers saying they had stopped playing and were pledging to live pious lives to appease the Taliban.

People used to talk about Shabana’s bad character, but our men both wished to see her dance and also despised her because she was a dancer. A khan’s daughter can’t marry a barber’s son and a barber’s daughter can’t marry a khan’s son. We Pashtuns love shoes but don’t love the cobbler; we love our scarves and blankets but do not respect the weaver. Manual workers made a great contribution to our society but received no recognition, and this is the reason so many of them joined the Taliban – to finally achieve status and power.

So people loved to see Shabana dance but didn’t respect her, and when she was murdered they said nothing. Some even agreed with her killing, out of fear of the Taliban or because they were in favour of them. ‘Shabana was not a Muslim,’ they said. ‘She was bad, and it was right that she was killed.’

I can’t say that was the worst day. Around the time of Shabana’s murder every day seemed like the worst day; every moment was the worst. The bad news was everywhere: this person’s place bombed, this school blown up, public whippings. The stories were endless and overwhelming. A couple of weeks after Shabana’s murder, a teacher in Matta was killed when he refused to pull his shalwar above the ankle the way the Taliban wore theirs. He told them that nowhere in Islam is this required. They hung him and then they shot his father.

I couldn’t understand what the Taliban were trying to do. ‘They are abusing our religion,’ I said in interviews. ‘How will you accept Islam if I put a gun to your head and say Islam is the true religion? If they want every person in the world to be Muslim why don’t they show themselves to be good Muslims first?’

Regularly my father would come home shaken up due to the terrible things he had witnessed and heard about such as policemen beheaded, their heads paraded through the town. Even those who had defended Fazlullah at the start, believing his men were the real standard-bearers of Islam, and given him their gold, began to turn against him. My father told me about a woman who had donated
generously to the Taliban while her husband was working abroad. When he came back and found out she had given away her gold he was furious. One night there was a small explosion in their village and the wife cried. ‘Don’t cry,’ said her husband. ‘That is the sound of your earrings and nose studs. Now listen to the sound of your lockets and bangles.’

Yet still so few people spoke out. My father’s old rival in college politics Ihsan ul-Haq Haqqani had become a journalist in Islamabad and organised a conference on the situation in Swat. None of the lawyers and academics he invited from Swat to speak turned up. Only my father and some journalists went. It seemed that people had decided the Taliban were here to stay and they had better get along with them. ‘When you are in the Taliban you have 100 per cent life security,’ people would say. That’s why they volunteered their young men. The Taliban would come to peoples’ houses, demanding money to buy Kalashnikovs, or they would ask them to hand over their sons to fight with them. Many of the rich fled. The poor had no choice but to stay and survive the best they could. So many of our men had gone to the mines or to the Gulf to work, leaving their families fatherless, the sons were easy prey.

The threats began to come closer to home. One day Ahmad Shah received a warning from unknown people that they would kill him, so for a while he left for Islamabad to try to raise awareness there of what was happening to our valley. One of the worst things about that period was when we started to doubt one another. Fingers were even pointed at my father. ‘Our people are being killed, but this Ziauddin is so outspoken and he’s still alive! He must be a secret agent!’ Actually he had been threatened too but hadn’t told us. He had given a press conference in Peshawar demanding that the military act against the Taliban and go after their commanders. Afterwards people told him his name was heard on Mullah FM in a threat from Shah Douran.

My father brushed it off. But I was worried. He was outspoken and involved in so many groups and committees that he often
wouldn’t come home till midnight. He started to sleep at one of his friend’s houses to protect us in case the Taliban came for him. He couldn’t bear the thought of being killed in front of us. I could not sleep until he returned and I could lock the gate. When he was at home my mother would place a ladder in the back yard up to the outside wall so he could get down to the street below if he was in sudden danger. He laughed at the idea. ‘Maybe Atal the squirrel could make it but not me!’

My mother was always trying to think up plans for what she would do if the Taliban came. She thought of sleeping with a knife under her pillow. I said I could sneak into the toilet and call the police. My brothers and I thought of digging a tunnel. Once again I prayed for a magic wand to make the Taliban disappear.

One day I saw my little brother Atal digging furiously in the garden. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.‘Making a grave,’ he said. Our news bulletins were full of killings and death so it was natural for Atal to think of coffins and graves. Instead of hide and seek and cops and robbers, children were now playing Army vs Taliban. They made rockets from branches and used sticks for Kalashnikovs; these were their sports of terror.

There was no one to protect us. Our own deputy commissioner, Syed Javid, was going to Taliban meetings, praying in their mosque and leading their meetings. He became a perfect
talib
. One target of the Taliban were non-governmental organisations or NGOs, which they said were anti-Islam. When the NGOs received threatening letters from the Taliban and went to the DC to ask for his help, he wouldn’t even listen to them. Once in a meeting my father challenged him: ‘Whose orders are you representing? Fazlullah’s or the government’s?’ We say in Arabic, ‘People follow their king.’ When the highest authority in your district joins the Taliban, then Talibanisation becomes normal.