The Rosa Parks for the 21st Century
By Nicholas D. Kristof
She may be the bravest woman in the world, but Mukhtaran Bibi was finally looking intimidated.
Mukhtaran is the Pakistani peasant woman who was gang-raped on the order of a local council, and then forced to walk home nearly naked before a jeering crowd. Instead of killing herself, as rape victims routinely do in such places, she prosecuted her attackers and became a women's rights leader in Pakistan.
But last week, she was confronted by something she found pretty scary: Midtown Manhattan.
Glamour magazine is honoring Mukhtaran as a "woman of the year." It flew her from Pakistan - first-class - to the U.S., where she met senior officials in the White House, the State Department and Congress.
While Mukhtaran is being feted here, it's easy to think that her problems are over. But they aren't. President Pervez Musharraf allowed her to make this visit, after blocking a trip by her in June and then kidnapping her when she protested, but Pakistani intelligence agents still follow her everywhere. Agents open or confiscate her mail and spread lies about her in the Pakistani press, and she is reported to be on a death list. At some point, her luck may run out - and her fame won't stop a knife or a bullet.
When I first met Mukhtaran, in her village, she was running out of money to keep the schools operating, her enemies were biding their time to murder her, and she was lonely and frightened - and unwavering.
Times readers responded with a torrent of contributions, more than $130,000, and Mukhtaran has used the money to improve the schools and "endow" them by buying cows, which will generate income to pay expenses. She has also bought an ambulance for the area and built a police station that provides security, and now she's preparing to build the first high school in the area, along with a clinic and a women's shelter. (If you want to help, please don't send money to me; contributions can be sent to either of these Web sites: www.4anaa.org and www.mercycorps.org.)
Not surprisingly, filmmakers are jostling to make a movie of her story. Mukhtaran turned a tale of gang rape into something that is actually inspiring.
The world lost Rosa Parks last month, but Mukhtaran is a Rosa Parks for the new century: a woman simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, who transcended her role and started a broad movement for justice. The most pressing moral challenge today is to overcome the brutality and inequality faced by women and girls in the developing world, and Mukhtaran has become a leader of that struggle. I hope that we'll follow her, and that the U.S. will align itself with real Pakistani leaders like her.
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Nicholas Kristof Mukhtaran Bibi
