However hard it might be for women in senior positions in Australian politics, their rough road pales in significance beside the actual dangers that face women who aspire to the top job in Pakistani p
olitics.
Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s first and so far only woman prime minister was assassinated in December 2007. Now Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot in the head by the Taliban, has declared she is determined to follow in Bhutto into politics.
Malala said recently that she has abandoned her plan to be a doctor. "I want to go into politics so I can help a whole country," she told a 2500-strong audience in London’s Royal Festival Hall on International Women’s Day this year. "A doctor can only help one community."
I was in the audience that morning in London and, like most people who have met or watched this remarkable young women, I was struck by her maturity and her aura of authority. She is only 16, an age when most girls are not talking about changing their countries, but circumstances have determined that Malala’s destiny is different.
After she finishes her own education, she will return to Pakistan and fight against the country’s corruption which, she says, is necessary to provide education to all children. "Pakistan needs true and honest politicians," she told her London audience.
Malala is explicitly treading in the footsteps of Bhutto, describing the former leader as one of her "heroes". Malala wore a white shawl that had once belonged to Bhutto when she made her renowned address to the United Nations last July. It was one of two that had been presented to her by Bhutto's children while she lay in a Birmingham hospital recovering from the Taliban shooting.
When Malala raised her new ambition in an interview late last year with the Financial Times newspaper, the interviewer reminded her that Pakistan is effectively governed by the military, which allows civilian leaders only limited powers. "As a politician I am going to change that rule," she responded.
The military stands accused of Bhutto’s assassination. Pakistan’s former president General Pervez Musharraf has been formally (if improbably) indicted for her murder. So Malala faces peril on two fronts: the Taliban has said they will kill her if she returns; now the military may well also be out to get her.
Listening to Malala that morning in London, I felt a sense of dread. How could she not know the risks? How can her family permit such a foolhardy ambition? Why are her minders – she has a chief of staff and an international public relations company working with her – allowing her to even voice these plans?
And is it prudent for someone who is vowing to fight corruption to identify so strongly with Bhutto, whose family was embroiled in corrupt practices and who herself was charged with corruption? Bhutto was, however, never convicted and indeed most of what were widely seen to be politically motivated charges were withdrawn.
Perhaps Malala takes comfort from that.
Perhaps, also, her advisers and family believe she is protected by the glare of the international spotlight. One can only hope they are right. Although the history of Pakistan suggests otherwise, maybe it is unwise to underestimate the girl who told US President Barack Obama to his face that his use of drones in her country was wrong.
Perhaps Malala’s talismanic attachment to Bhutto’s shawls is as much a mark of her defiance and her courage as the way she has responded to the act of violence that changed her life.
Had Malala not been airlifted to England after she was shot on October 9, 2012 (notably, the same day that then prime minister Julia Gillard made her famous "sexism and misogyny" speech, another act that reverberated around the globe) it is doubtful that she would have survived her shocking injuries. As it was, part of her skull had to be removed and a moulded titanium plate fitted instead, as well as a cochlear implant because her hearing was permanently damaged by the gunshot blast.
She appears perfectly recovered now when she speaks. Even close up, on television and when she addressed the UN, she seems fine but "I will never be exactly the same," she writes in her book I am Malala. "I can’t blink fully and my left eye closes a lot when I speak."
Malala is an extraordinarily articulate young woman, and her ability to command the attention of an audience does not rest entirely on her status as a survivor of a horrifying attack. After just a few moments of listening to her, what happened to her was no longer at the front of my mind.
At times, she sounded like any ordinary teenager. The girl who, behind the closed doors of her home in Birmingham, bosses her brothers: "I become a dictator, they have no freedom of expression or choice".
Or the girl who, while living in purdah in Pakistan’s Swat valley, read the Twilight series of books and dreamed of being a vampire. But the extraordinary assurance with which she articulated her mission to bring formal education to the world’s children made her sound older and authoritative.
"I don't want to be thought of as 'the girl who was shot by the Taliban', but 'the girl who fought for education'", she wrote in her book.
It is clear that history has conferred the mantle of leadership on Malala Yousafzai. Before she was shot, she had won a national prize for championing peace and she wrote a regular diary for the BBC. She won’t stop now. We just have to hope that she does not, like Bhutto, have to pay the ultimate price for doing so.
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