Sima Samar

Senior Fellow, The Fletcher School, Tufts University
As a girl and a member of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority, Sima Samar was not born to power.

Even so, she rose to an unprecedented level of influence. A Nobel Peace Prize nominee, she sat on advisory panels to the United Nations secretary-general and became Afghanistan’s first minister of women’s affairs and deputy prime minister of the Afghanistan Interim Administration in December 2001. She chaired the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission from 2002 to 2019.

That couldn’t happen since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, she believes. “Growing up in Afghanistan, as a girl, I have to say that it was much better than it is today,” said Samar, a visiting fellow at The Fletcher School and a Tufts Scholar at Risk.

Today the Taliban, which retook control of Afghanistan in August 2021 as U.S. and other international forces withdrew, has outlawed girls from attending school beyond sixth grade. The women employees of Shuhada, a network of hospitals and schools Samar founded, also face restrictions. Instructors have been asked to teach from home. Many women in medicine are allowed to keep practicing, due to the sensitivities of treating female patients, but “they are very, very careful,” said Samar, who started her career as a medical doctor.

“They dress the way they’re supposed to. They used to work long after dark, but now that’s not the case,” she said. “They’re not doing anything to give anyone a reason to cause a problem.”

For Samar, who once in addition to chairing the Afghanistan Human Rights Commission also headed the Commission on the Prevention of Torture, current conditions represent a painful break from more promising times.

She was in the U.S. in August 2021, when the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan for the first time in nearly 20 years. She had arrived in America that June with a coast-to-coast itinerary of visits to family she hadn’t seen during the height of COVID.