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Afghan Activist Wins Salem Award, Honored for Dedication to Women's Rights
- The Salem News (February 23, 2005)
- By Alan Burke, Staff Writer
SALEM – When the witchcraft terror swept Salem in 1692, women were the prime targets of religious fanatics who imprisoned hundreds and eventually executed 20 people, most of them women.
On April 4, the 13th annual Salem Award for Human Rights and Social Justice, given in memory of those victims, will go to Fahima Vorgetts in recognition of her work on behalf of the women of Afghanistan, women who have also been persecuted.
The Award is given by the Salem Award Foundation, under the leadership of the mayor and the president of Salem State College.
Vorgetts, a native of Afghanistan, has worked for many years for rights for Afghan women, most recently as a board member of Women for Afghan Women and director of their Afghan Women's Fund.
When American troops invaded Afghanistan in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Taliban government's brutality and treatment of women became better known.
Under the Taliban's interpretation of Islam, women in Afghanistan were forced to wear clothing that covered them from head to toe. They were forbidden to travel in public unless escorted by a man. This ruled out employment for some, condemning them to poverty or even death.
"My life's work has involved empowering women in Afghanistan by helping to build their educational and financial resources," Vorgetts says on her Web site. "My focus has always been on giving women the tools they need to be self-sufficient."
Before Sept. 11, Vorgetts and her group were already trying to help. At that time, says Meg Twohey of the Salem Award Foundation, much of their aid went to Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Ventures into Afghanistan risked execution at the hands of the Taliban.
The American-led liberation changed the government in Kabul, but not the oppressive culture in the countryside. Thus Vorgetts continues to work tirelessly, speaking in the United States, raising thousands of dollars and then traveling back and forth from her home in Maryland to Afghanistan, trying to help women who are still oppressed and/or devastated by decades of war.
Twohey said Vorgetts received the award based on her long history of helping Afghan women.
"We were interested in explaining what must be going on with Muslim women around the world," Twohey said. "And one of the things we learned was how little all of us know about Afghanistan."
Her reaction to winning the award was "modest," according to Twohey. "She said, 'I hope I'm worthy.'"
Vorgetts' efforts seem to center on small, simple improvements.
"We laid concrete in an alley in this village with a drain that will carry wastes to an isolated area," she wrote after one recent trip. "I opened two literacy classes and two sewing classes in the Kunduz district. We paid four months of expenses for a widow with three blind children. I bought carpets for students enrolled in seven literacy classes."
Perhaps her most pitiful report comes from the women's hospital in Heart, understaffed, undersupplied and filthy, where she watched a women die an agonizing death from burns.
"This was the fourth woman to die from self-immolation with three weeks," Vorgetts writes. "These desperate women see no hope for their future. No laws protect them from their abusive families or abusive husbands, so they try to commit suicide by burning themselves with cooking oil or gasoline."
A History of Helping
Vorgetts was born in a traditional Afghan family in 1955. At an early age she was already fighting tradition, demanding an education. Eventually she earned a degree in chemistry. She also attended one of the first women's rights meetings ever held in the country.
Vorgetts left her Afghan home in 1979, at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Eventually, she married an American and settled here. She remains a Muslim.
If religion has contributed to the problems of Afghan women, Twohey is careful to separate the repression of the Taliban from Islam in general.
"Their interpretation of Islam is most strict and most repressive—far worse than any country I know of," she says.
Reprinted with permission from The Salem News.