ON THIS DAY a year ago some 11,000 women, brought out by Sitara Achakzai, gathered across Afghanistan for a “prayer for peace” to mark International Women’s Day. A month later, on April 12th, 52-year-old Achakzai, a leading womens rights activists and member of the Kandahar provincial council, was shot dead in the street by Taliban gunmen.
She was on her way home from a meeting of the council which friends had advised her not to attend because of the €5,000 price on her head. She had told them barely an hour before she died “I'm not afraid of death”.
In a statement the Taliban claimed just she was involved in “bad things”. Bad things. Achakzai, who spent the years of Taliban rule in exile in Europe, returned home six years ago to campaign for justice for women, and for the rights of girls to be educated. She was encouraging women into the workforce.
But campaigning is a dangerous business in Afghanistan and there have been many other attacks on women in the province including the 2006 assassination of Safia Amajan, head of the province’s women’s affairs department. Malalai Kakar, a top policewoman in the city, was killed in 2008, and schoolgirls have had acid thrown in their faces as punishment for attending school.
One hundred ago, Clara Zetkin of the German Social Democratic Party proposed to a conference of women in Copenhagen that the struggle for women’s rights be marked annually. It has happened every year since then, and it is fitting on Zetkin’s day, today, to honour the likes of Sitara Achakzai in many parts of the world. Like Sawsan Salim, condemned by the Saudi authorities to 300 lashes and a year and a half in prison for filing harassment complaints without being accompanied by the required male guardian. Like the women of Sierra Leone, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, and Rwanda, raped in war by combatants with near complete impunity...
Closer to home, all too many, women included, choose to assume the battles of the past are won, rights assured. The EU on Friday reported a pay gap (gross hourly earnings) between men and women that ranged from 4 to 30 per cent from Italy to Estonia. Ireland is close to the union-wide average at 17 per cent. That gap has barely fallen over the last 15 years – in some countries it is even increasing and, not surprisingly 82 per cent of Europeans told Eurobarometer they think that urgent action should be taken to tackle the gap.
Today we should reflect on such realities.