Word: parlika
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...Soraya Parlika didn't have to run secret schools for young women when the Taliban ruled Kabul. She didn't have to open her home for meetings on women's rights in a place that spat on the concept. She is, after all, the daughter of wealthy parents, the sister of a former Foreign Minister, a university graduate; she could have fled to the West long ago. But her parents always told her to care about the poor, and Afghanistan's women are among the poorest. "I promised myself years ago that I would fight for the women of Afghanistan...
...sofa and chat--but the future of the nation's women remains uncertain. The interim government has two women in leadership roles, but in a chilling echo of the past, the Northern Alliance has asked for the names of the 4,000 women in her civil rights group. Still, Parlika is hopeful that this time her work will bear fruit. "This is just the beginning," she says...
...Parlika is used to challenging the status quo. She was imprisoned and tortured in 1979 for organizing a women's movement opposed to President Hafizullah Amin. During the Taliban years she organized a network of secret schools for girls in private apartments across the city...
...sure, the women gathering around Parlika represent Kabul's well-educated elite; many are teachers or doctors. But already her activities have attracted the attention of the U.N., which is urging the various Afghan factions to include women in their delegations to the upcoming peace talks...
After five years of forced invisibility, Parlika knows she is making some of the more conservative male leaders in Afghanistan uneasy. But so much the better, she thinks. "I just want to tell the world that women should be able to speak out about their own problems." And she is determined to make Afghans--and the world--listen...