Pakistani dissident and feminist Gulalai Ismail speaking during an interview with AFP in Washington, DC on Thursday — AFP WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (AFP): Gulalai Ismail's campaigns to empower Pakistani girls have won her international awards and recognition as one of her country's foremost activists.
But when she spoke out against sexual violence and disappearances allegedly carried out by the army in northwestern Pakistan, her fortunes quickly changed.
The 32-year-old said she feared for her life. After four months on the run, she succeeded in eluding a vast hunt and has turned up in the United States, where she is seeking asylum.
Ismail said she never sought to become an overseas dissident but sees a closing of the political space in Pakistan, where the army has remained the dominant power-broker for most of the country's history.
"I never wanted to leave Pakistan," she told AFP in an interview in Washington. "I believe that I can better work towards democracy and civil supremacy and peace in Pakistan."
But she concluded she would be more effective abroad, saying: "If I had ended up in prison and tortured for many years, my voice would have been silenced."
Ismail, who speaks with poise and passion though she remains afraid, believed she posed a special threat as a vocal woman.
"When a man stands up, he is mostly against the state oppression," she said. "But when a woman stands up, she is fighting oppression on many levels-fighting cultural norms, fighting the patriarchy and the state oppression."
Ismail was still a teenager when she co-founded Aware Girls in 2002, which promotes gender equality in the deeply conservative northwestern district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
In 2017, she won the prestigious Anna Politkovskaya Award for human rights advocacy. The year before, she was honored for conflict prevention by France's Chirac Foundation and has been welcomed by former first lady Michelle Obama.
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