Sima Samar: safeguarding human rights in Afghanistan.

Sima Samar had just graduated from the Kabul University School of Medicine, in 1982, when the Soviet invasion forced her to flee to central Afghanistan. "I began seeing patients immediately, but I often had to run to my book to identify symptoms and treatments, and then I had to find out whether the necessary medicine was even available. I saw women die every day because of incomplete abortion or shoulder presentation of the fetus at delivery: we did not have the proper equipment to deal with these sorts of problems ", she wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2004. This experience started Samar on a journey to help women obtain equal rights, including health care, that would take her to Pakistan, around the world, and eventually back to Afghanistan. Sitting in a cosy office at Boston University, where she is the 2006 Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Global Health, Samar is about as far from a war -torn country as one could imagine. The setting doesn't matter. "I believe that there is no full justice anywhere ", she says. "One of the reasons the war became so violent, and lasted so long, was the lack of education, as well as poverty and joblessness. To overcome these things, I insist on education. I don't believe in any kind of development without the involvement of women." Samar fled central Afghanistan in 1984 when her husband was arrested -he was never heard from again. She remained in exile for 17 years while the former Soviet Union, and then the Taliban, ravaged her country. Samar plunged into work in Quetta, Pakistan, and eventually established a hospital for Afghan refugee women. This facility was desperately needed: fundamentalists dominated the refugee camps and were opposed to the provision of health care for women by male physicians. In 1989, she founded the Shuhada Organization, a nongovernmental organisation that is "committed to the reconstruction and development of Afghanistan with special emphasis on the empowerment of women and children ". Despite hostility from the Taliban, and with the support of the Norwegian Government and Novib (Oxfam Netherlands), the Shuhada Organization's 20 physicians and 1000 other staff now run four hospitals, 12 clinics, and 60 schools in Afghanistan. Samar returned to Afghanistan in 2001 and was named Deputy Prime Minister of Hamid Karzai's new Government and Minister for Women's Affairs. She now serves as Chair of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, which monitors and investigates many human rights violations, including extrajudicial killings, forced marriage, rape, torture, and illegal imprisonment. In today's Afghanistan, says Samar, human rights for women means promoting reproductive health and providing family planning, which isn't happening