Last week we got another reason to celebrate an international victory (you must be living under a rock if you don’t know about Mangalyaan). India’s Kailash Satyarthi was given a Nobel Prize along with Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai. Our first reaction was pride, our second was to tweet about the irony of the situation. Imagine sharing a peace prize while we are still fighting over Kashmir!
Malala’s name came as no surprise. Who hadn’t heard of the brave 15-year-old girl (she is 17 now) who championed for the cause of women’s rights, standing up against the Taliban? She became a global symbol for hope for women when a Taliban gunman shot her for her passionate perusal for her right to education.
Malala deserves the Nobel Prize every bit as does Kailash Satyarthi who struggled against exploitation of children for financial gain. However, a question asked by Murtaza Hussain in Al-Jazeera (Doha’s newspaper) ‘What about Nabila Rehman?’ does make you wonder.
Who has heard of the brave story of the 10-year-old girl who survived a drone attack in 2012 (she was eight then) in the North Waziristan, and testified before the US Congress describing the horror that she faced? The strike killed Nabila’s grandmother and severely injured seven other children. Nabila, along with her 13-year-old bother (who survived the attack) and her father, Rafiq ur Rehman, a primary school teacher, testified against the US drone strike, last November. While the US Congress was moved by the horrors that the child faced and awarded her a Congressional medal, only 5 out of 430 representatives showed up to hear her testimony. So why was she ignored?
Is the global world in oblivion when it comes to Nabila because her story puts a face to what we often call ‘war victims’? Are we too insensitive to see the consequences of war and refuse to acknowledge the fact that these civilians are not even given the basic right to live, forget everything else. “When I hear that they are going after people who have done wrong to America, then what have I done wrong to them? What did my grandmother do wrong to them? I didn’t do anything wrong,” said Nabeela in her testimony. Well, no one has bothered to answer that question.
We salute Malala but we also feel for Nabila who has simply become another of the millions of people whose lives have been destroyed by war. We hope that the brave girl and many other countless war victims find a global voice and we as a world wake up to the war that does not happen on the battlefields but in countless homes too.
Image Courtesy: BCCL
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