Malala's father says Taliban lost fight
2013-01-09 19:57
Paris - The Taliban are fighting a lost cause and must
accept peace talks, the father of Malala Yousafzai said on Wednesday, accepting
a key French award for the Pakistani schoolgirl shot for campaigning for girls'
education.
In an impassioned speech after accepting the Simone de
Beauvoir Prize for Womens' Freedom on behalf of the 15-year-old, Ziauddin
Yousafzai said his daughter was supported by the world and by God.
"She fell but Pakistan stood up. And the whole world
- north, south, east and west - supported her," he said.
"God protected her and protected the cause of
humanity and education."
In an attack that shocked the world, Malala was shot in
the head by a Taliban hitman as her school bus made its way through the town of
Mingora in Pakistan's northwestern Swat Valley in October.
The bullet grazed her brain, coming within centimetres of
killing her, travelling through her head and neck before lodging in her left
shoulder.
She was then treated in a British hospital.
Yousafzai said the Taliban should now see the writing on
the wall and "learn from this incident.
"They should come to talks and to peace and to
humanity," he said, referring to Pakistan's population and saying that if
they wanted to impose their will "they will have to kill 180 million
people and that's impossible”.
Despite coming from a male-dominated society, he quoted a
woman Pakistani poet Rabia Basri who wrote: "There has been no lady prophet
in history and no woman has been stupid enough to claim to be God."
Yousafzai added: "In my part of the world, fathers
are known by their sons. Daughters are very much neglected. I am one of the few
fortunate fathers who is known by their daughter."
Blogging
Excerpts from Malala's blog, which earned her the wrath
of the Taliban and made her a global icon of courage and hope, were read out to
sustained applause.
An entry said: "On my way from school to home I
heard a man saying 'I will kill you'. I hastened my pace and after a while I
looked back to see if the man was still coming behind me. But to my utter
relief he was talking on his mobile and must have been threatening someone else
over the phone."
Malala's father also evoked the plight of an Indian
medical student who was brutally gang-raped in New Delhi and died in a
Singapore hospital as well as "girls who are shot, who burn themselves
because of child marriage and those who are raped."
Yousafzai's daughter first rose to prominence aged just
11 with a blog for the BBC's Urdu-language service charting her life in Swat
under the Taliban, whose two-year reign of terror supposedly came to an end
there with an army operation in 2009.
Her attempted murder has sparked calls for her to be
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Yousafzai also called for a change in global politics,
saying his country has suffered enormously in an era when "our children
were orphaned, our women were widowed and our schools were lost."
"Let's have politics for the people. People should
not be sacrificed at the altar of the state," he said, reminding the
audience that were about 160 million children out of school worldwide.
Last month Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari announced
a $10m donation for a global war chest to educate all girls by 2015 set up in
Malala's name.
The "Malala Fund for Girls' Right to Education"
aims at raising billions of dollars to ensure that all girls go to school by
2015 in line with United Nations Millennium goals.
