Global Conflict, Misogyny, and Resistance
Patriarchy and misogyny fuel global conflicts that further increase the oppression of women and girls. But the resistance of women and girls remains steadfast. Sally Armstrong, award-winning war correspondent, author, and human rights activist, joins us to share their stories. Highlights include:
How Sally broke the story about mass rape in the Balkan War in the 1990s that was ignored by male-dominated mainstream media;
How patriarchy became established and why women’s role in human history has been unrecorded and ignored;
Why cultural relativism can be an enemy of greater justice for girls and women;
How misinterpretations of religious doctrine are used as justification for continued oppression of girls and women;
How women and girls from Bosnia to Kenya to Afghanistan to Senegal continue to resist the injustice of patriarchy and misogyny in their daily lives.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Sally Armstrong (00:00):
I've been covering war for 35 years, and every single war I have covered has been started by a very small collection of greedy men. Every single one. Men who want power, land, riches. And they use God to get their way. They use any matter of misogyny and misinformation to get their way, but it's invariably it's a small group of greedy men.
Alan Ware (00:31):
That was Sally Armstrong, award-winning author, journalist, and human rights activist, who has spent decades reporting on the incredible hardship that girls and women experience in conflict zones around the world and the resilience and courage they show in the face of it. In this episode of OVERSHOOT, we explore with Sally her experiences and the insights she's gained about justice, human rights, and the fight for equal status for women and girls.
Nandita Bajaj (01:09):
Welcome to OVERSHOOT where we tackle today's interlocking social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. On this podcast, we explore needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on earth. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware (01:35):
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot - the patriarchal pronatalism that fuels overpopulation, the growth-obsessed economic systems that drive consumerism and social injustice, and the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all of life.
(02:15):
And now on to today's guest. Human rights activist, journalist, and award-winning author Sally Armstrong has covered stories about women and girls in zones of conflict all over the world - from Bosnia and Somalia to the Middle East, Rwanda, Congo, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Iraq and Guatemala. Her eyewitness reports have earned her awards, including the Gold Award from the National Magazine Awards Foundation and the Author's Award from the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters. She received the Amnesty International Canada Media Award in 2000 2002, 2011, and again in 2017. She received the Mahatma Gandhi Peace Award in 2024. She was named the Massey lecturer for 2019. She's the recipient of 11 honorary doctorate degrees and one honorary diploma and is an officer of the Order of Canada. She is the co-author with Sima Samar of Outspoken, My Fight for Freedom and Human Rights in Afghanistan, which was published in March, 2024. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj (03:23):
Hello Sally, and welcome to our podcast. It's a real honor to speak with you today.
Sally Armstrong (03:28):
Thank you for having me
Nandita Bajaj (03:30):
And Sally, as an organization committed to standing up to patriarchy, pronatalism, and the oppression of girls and women, we deeply appreciate your journalism, exposing the injustices faced by women and girls around the world and their resilience and courage in the face of it. We are seeing growing authoritarianism over the last several years, and that includes a backsliding in reproductive rights and women's rights in general in many countries, especially in the wake of the Trump election and the greater pronatalist push coming from the Republican party in the US and in the face of all of this, your work seems ever more important, so we couldn't be happier to be having this conversation with you today.
Sally Armstrong (04:17):
Thank you.
Nandita Bajaj (04:18):
So, Sally, throughout your career you've reported on some of the most serious injustices faced by women and girls, injustices that are often overlooked by mainstream media. Could you share specific moments or stories that led you to focus on exposing these injustices and advocating for the rights of women and girls?
Sally Armstrong (04:40):
Well, actually, I can tell you a story that's pretty precise about how this happened. I was in Sarajevo, it was 1993, and I was there to report on the effect of war on children. As you will recall, there was a civil war going on in the Balkans, and I had my story. In fact, I was leaving the next day when I began to hear rumors about rape camps. And as a journalist, you have to understand that one of the first casualties of war is usually the truth. So you have to be very careful with the rumors and comments people make. I listened to this, that they were rounding up the wives, the daughters, the sisters, the mothers of the so-called enemy and putting them in camps and gang raping them. I could hardly believe my ears. And this was before Rwanda. This was before Darfur.
(05:31):
We hadn't heard of this kind of thing in this timeframe. So frankly, at first I thought it must be an exaggeration. But as the day went on, I received more and more credible evidence from people all throughout Sarajevo. I heard from doctors, I heard from military people, I heard from humanitarians. I heard from the women themselves, and I knew there was a story, but I worked for a magazine, and magazines have a three to four month lead time. I knew it would take me three to four months to get this story to press. So I gathered up everything I could. I gathered up names and mobile numbers and anecdotes, everything I could. I came back to Canada the next day and I went to a very large news agency and I handed them my data. I gave them everything I had, and I said, give this to one of your reporters. This is an international headline. And the guy thanked me.
(06:24):
I went back to my office where I was the editor-in-chief of the magazine. I waited and waited and waited. I didn't see anything in the paper. Seven weeks later, there was a four line blurb in Newsweek magazine that said, they're gang raping women in the Balkans. So I called the guy I gave the data to, very large news agency, and I said, what happened? He said, oh, Sally, it was a good story. I was going to assign it, but I was busy and I was on a deadline and I forgot. I said 20,000 women were gang raped, some of them eight years old, some of them 80 years old and you forgot? He said, oh, Sally, you're always going on and on about of women. So I called my editorial staff together, this was at Homemaker's magazine, and told them what happened.
(07:12):
I was so enraged, but my staff said, don't you get it. Nobody wants the story. Everybody was in Sarajevo. CNN was there. CBC was there. The New York Times was there. BBC was there. The London Times, everybody was there. They didn't want the story cause it's only about women. And I was outraged. And one of my very young journalists, one of my young editors said, why don't we do it? And I said, well, as I told you, we have a three month lead time. We can't get this to our readers for three months. And that young woman said, you still don't get it. No one else is going to do it. Two days later, I was back on a plane, went back, got the story. Honest to God, I received so many awards for that story on the backs of those brave women who were willing to tell. And those brave women ultimately went to the Hague. And in 1998, they made rape a war crime. But as it happened, as the story came out, I thought to myself, if no one else is going to tell these stories, I'm going to tell them. And that's how I began, really.
Nandita Bajaj (08:19):
That is an incredible story.
Alan Ware (08:22):
And we know that historically mass rape was done throughout history, Nanking China with the Japanese soldiers and the Soviet army estimated to have raped 2 million German women at that time, partition of India, Rwanda. And yeah, looking back at those histories you don't often hear that doesn't come to the fore, does it, the stories of mass rape in those historical accounts. Is it the same bias in the forties and the fifties for newspapers not reporting on that?
Sally Armstrong (08:56):
Of course it is. It's always that story. To make it worse, we give people excuses. We talk about how militaries rape and pillage. We say it all as if it's a piece of decor in a story. We look at boys and we say, oh, well, boys will be boys. And it's only in the recent past that we have demanded that these issues be taken seriously.
Nandita Bajaj (09:20):
Right. And to make matters worse, there's so much social stigmatization of rape victims where they are blamed and made to feel shame, so they're afraid to come forward with their accusations.
Sally Armstrong (09:36):
When I went back to do that story, I took a psychiatrist with me to go and interview the women. And I had the psychiatrist talk to the woman who was the star of my story, a woman called Emma Panovich, an incredible woman. I said to him, it has to be okay with her. She has to be comfortable with this. We can change anything she likes. We can change your name. We can change the location because that stigma is incredible. I'm just back from Kenya doing a story that is one of the most incredible stories of my career. It's about young girls, 160 girls between the ages of three and 17, who sued the government of Kenya for failing to protect them from being raped. But that's a different story to come back to Sarajevo. And this woman, the psychiatrist, spoke to her. And you know what she said to him?
(10:20):
She said, you tell that reporter to come to where I am. I want my face and my name shown because until someone sees my name and my face, they will not take this seriously. It doesn't mean every girl can. I mean the trauma. And at that time, people could see there were photos of the camps. They were raping these women to death, but people chose not to use that as news. It always comes back to us. It's what we decide is acceptable and not acceptable. And over the years, our views of what is acceptable are altering, thank goodness. But we're certainly not at the finish line.
Alan Ware (10:58):
Are there areas today where you feel like mass rape is going on that's being under reported?
Sally Armstrong (11:04):
Absolutely. But finding it, knowing it, proving it. As I said to you, one of the first casualties of war is usually the truth. Lots of people alter the facts. And I've always thought, I don't think people lie to you to trick you. I think they're so afraid you won't believe how bad things are that they up the ante. They exaggerate to make sure you're paying attention. And when you see the conditions people live in with these terrible atrocities, with the oppression, with the lack of human rights, you can understand why they might want to up the ante a little bit.
Alan Ware (11:39):
To get attention to the story, yeah. Now, you've talked about in your Massey lectures in 2019, that became the Power Shift book, you've studied and spoken about the role of women in early societies and how some of the more recent archeological discoveries and their interpretations are challenging the older interpretations that suggested more traditional gender roles. How are you seeing that change in interpretation over time?
Sally Armstrong (12:07):
This is enormous. So here's the truth of it. Those eras - the Pleistocene, the Paleolithic, the Stone Age - they've been very well studied by men. And there's nothing wrong with men studying them. The trouble is that men only looked at what the men were doing. It's typical to this day. The men, archeologists and anthropologists, did the studies, but they only did on men. But now women have entered the field and they've reopened these studies. And again, it's not to say that men shouldn't be doing it, of course they should, but you have to look at the whole population. And now both the men and the women, anthropologists and archeologists, are looking at all of it. And guess what? You know that expression, 'man the hunter', is bogus. There is no information she was not hunting right beside him. And what these anthropologists are now saying is that what women have done historically has been unrecorded, neglected, or ignored in the interpretation.
(13:08):
And if that's not the way to second class citizenship, I don't know what is. Gerda Lerner, she's a highly respected anthropologist in this field, she said this, 'historical scholarship up to the most recent past has seen women as marginal to the making of civilization and as unessential to those pursuits defined as having historic significance'. It's true. But how powerful is that? I mean, you talk about being left out. This is pretty serious leaving out. Margaret Conkey is another anthropologist, and this is what she says: 'The research is permeated with assumptions, assertions and statements of fact that are neither objective nor inclusive'. There's things like 'man' and 'mankind'. People just presumed, well, that's okay. It's not okay. It doesn't include all of it. Those are exclusive comments. So I think the conclusion of these women, anthropologists and archeologists who were reopening those files, was that the status of women today is a direct result of yesterday's inaccurate interpretations.
(14:13):
And as I delved into all of this, I just found one example after another. Amanda Foreman, she's with the BBC, but she's an historian, and this is what she says, 'The hard truth is that in almost every civilization, women have been deemed the secondary sex. It's an idea that is so ingrained, it's been written into history as a biological truth'. So here's how it happened. This is what I found out. I was so excited by this. It was the end of the stone age, the beginning of what they call the agriculture era. Until then, you would kill, eat, survive today, tomorrow kill again, eat again, survive. But at the end of the stone age, the beginning of this agriculture era, the people living on Earth began to realize you could store food. Small things began to become evident. For example, when birds droppings were found, there were seeds in it.
(15:08):
And as they realized those seeds given the right condition would sprout and grow, they started growing them in rows. But then they began to know they could store food. And once you can store food, you can think ahead. You can think ahead to tomorrow, the day after, the next week. And that's when they realized what they needed most were more laborers, and where were you going to get more laborers? From the pregnant women. So men literally began acquiring the pregnant women, gathering them up, saying, I'll take care of you and I'll make sure you're getting your portions. They acquired the pregnant women, and that indeed was the birth of patriarchy. And what they didn't do, the religious codes finished. And by the time the laws were codified, women were second class. That's what happened. It's pretty amazing, isn't it?
Alan Ware (16:03):
Yeah, yeah. You mentioned in the book the Assyrian, which is one of the early agricultural empires that you said, they had 112 laws and half dealt with marriage and sex, and women were divided into five groups - the upper class concubines, temple, prostitutes, harlots, and slave girls. And men were completely allowed to abuse wives and slaves. And as you mentioned also that was handed down to Greece and Rome, which then we in the West took on a lot of that.
Sally Armstrong (16:33):
We haven't exactly come as much of a distance as we should have by now considering the amount of time that's gone by. And I can give you loads of examples of progress, but we're not at the finish line.
Nandita Bajaj (16:44):
That's right, yes. And your point about men acquiring pregnant women in order to grow the number of laborers. Another journalist that we interviewed recently, the author of The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, Angela Saini, makes a very similar point that population growth has always been used as a way to grow the strength of empires and states and religious institutions.
Sally Armstrong (17:11):
Well, look what happened in China, hardly a religious event. They wanted more people. And then they had so many people, they decided, as governments do, that now you could only have one child. And the one-child policy in China taught us such an enormous amount. I had to do a story on that once. And they even had a platform that had a name that they went to the top of the platform to throw the girl baby off because you only wanted a boy baby. So it taught us a lot about misogyny, about misinformation, about rules that don't work. As for other countries, and I'm thinking about Afghanistan, where women are just expected to be pregnant all the time, the women know very well, literate or illiterate, this is not healthy for them, is not healthy for the child, and it's not healthy for the whole family or for the country. But they are unable to say no. They're moving in the direction, but certainly not at the moment. And I often think, what does it take for the world to look at the facts and say, these are the consequences of making stupid decisions, of denying women human rights, of not allowing the health of a woman to be seen as the health of the family. Although when you think of what happened in the United States two days ago, you really wonder what the heck are people thinking?
Nandita Bajaj (18:34):
Exactly. That really is at the heart of it, isn't it? The insanity of using misogyny as a way to control women's reproduction, but also the rights of the child are hardly ever taken into account in these circumstances. Sally, the incredible thing about your writing that we love is that you don't just expose the injustices towards women and girls globally, but you also share their stories of courage and resilience in standing up to the oppression. In your reporting from regions where girls and women face extreme discrimination, what do you consider the most pervasive injustices?
Sally Armstrong (19:14):
Well, you know, I can't answer that question, because if I am an 8-year-old girl being denied food because there's only enough for the boys in a village in Africa, I would say I was the biggest victim. If I were an 18-year-old girl being forced to marry my father's brother in Afghanistan, a man who terrified me and who I know would rape me every single night, I would think I had the biggest problem. The problems people have to me are so incredible. I mean, it stuns me how people even survive some of the ghastly things they go through. Look what's happening today in Afghanistan. When I first started covering Afghanistan, it was 1990...well, the Taliban took over in late 96. I didn't get in until March 97, but that's when I started. I've been covering it ever since. But even then, I remember that movie, the Titanic was popular, and the boys in Afghanistan wanted haircuts like Leonardo DiCaprio and the Taliban went berserk.
(20:20):
They absolutely couldn't do it. I thought, what the heck? But then the women were told they were not allowed to wear white socks because white socks were the color of the Taliban flag. So I thought, well, it's a bit ridiculous, but whatever. But six months later when I was back, that rule had changed. And now you couldn't wear white socks because they were considered sexually promiscuous, white socks. It astonished me the ridiculous things they were saying. But if you see where they're going with this, as soon as you hook the crime to sexuality, the punishment becomes much more severe. And women who broke the Taliban laws could be taken to the soccer stadium where they were stoned to death. And I mean, even today, this is so incredibly ghastly.
(21:07):
You have to look at who are these people? They throw the woman to the ground, they make a circle around her. In some countries, they bury her up to her neck and they throw rocks at her head till she's dead. But the rule the Taliban had is you must not throw a rock so big is to kill her quickly. That's not in the Quran. Nothing they're saying is in the Quran. These guys were making it up as they went along and they were getting away with it. The Taliban today saying, women are not allowed to speak. So think about that. Why are you not allowed to speak? Well, said their leader, because it creates vice in men. In other words, if I hear your voice, it will make me rape you. So you can't speak. What kind of sexual depravity is this? And is it not time, and I wrote this in the Globe and Mail not very long ago, that this is the sound and action of sexually depraved people.
(22:01):
A man who says, I can't control myself sexually, and it's your fault, he needs help. He needs to go to the doctor, but instead, she's not even allowed to say her prayers. What makes it worse now is for 20 years, people in Afghanistan, the women particularly saw such change, and we look at that 20 year period as though it was a failure. But let me tell you this, life expectancy in Afghanistan went from 47 years to 63 years during that 20 year period. That's not a failure. That's a miracle. Maternal mortality dropped by 50%. The kids went back to school. Even at the beginning, 39% of them were girls, but they began nation building and they started putting things together that could make this country run efficiently. So this is not a failure. The failure is why we left, how we left and how we put things in place that the Afghans simply couldn't manage. A presidential political system simply doesn't work in a tribal country.
(23:05):
They need a parliamentary system. But the Americans tend to come into these conflicts and they bring the most money and they bring the most people, and they bring the most guns. So they get the biggest say. And they said, we're having a presidency. So even though many, including me, wrote against that, that's what they ended up with. So that's getting a sidebar to the question you asked, but if you are being mistreated, for you that's the worst. So to say someone's mistreatment is worse than yours, I don't go along with that. But the women in Afghanistan today, imagine you're not allowed to speak and to make it worse, you're not allowed to speak because your voice will cause a man to commit rape and it's not his fault. Oh my God.
Nandita Bajaj (23:45):
Unbelievable. And Sally, you've also, along with so many examples that you've shared, even including now, you've talked about child marriage and FGM and foot binding, and like you said, for every victim, their experience is their own and it's the worst to them. You've also noted some incredible examples of communities and individuals who have courageously fought back against these injustices. Can you speak to some examples?
Sally Armstrong (24:15):
Well, one of the best is the first village to end female genital mutilation. And these were the women of Malicounda Bambara in Senegal. I went there many, many times to do their story. It was so amazing because some of them were midwives and they would go and deliver babies in other tribes. And they found out that not all of the women had been cut, and they wanted to know why. And they all knew the consequences of being cut because it was taking their money. Their hard-earned money from working in the fields was now going to a doctor to treat the many, many, many problems women have when they've been cut. So they went to the Imam, you have to go to leaders, you have to go to the people who hold the power. They went to the Imam and said, why do we do this?
(24:59):
He said, oh, because it's in the Holy Book. So they said, well, let's look at the Holy Book and find out where it says that. And of course, they found out it's not in the Holy Book. And so then the Imam said, well, it's our tradition and our traditions are important, that for 2000 years they've been doing this. And the women said, why would we hold the tradition, dear, that is so harmful to us? And that was the beginning. So there's a guy called Gerry Mackie who did all the studies of foot binding in China, and he said, everyone tried to end it. The diplomats tried, the politicians tried. Everybody tried to end it, nobody could. But towards the end of the 1800s, a small group of women got together and they formed what they called the Healthy Foot Society. And they took an oath, and the oath said, I will never bind my daughter's feet, and I will never allow my son to marry a girl whose feet are bound.
(25:54):
And that dipped. So when Gerry Mackie heard about the women of Malicounda Bambara, he said, they're taking on the same anti- foot binding style when you say in public, this is my oath, you will make change. So the women of Malicounda Bambara stood together and they said, never again, not my daughter. I think it was three weeks later, 70 more villages had taken on the same. Never again, not my daughter. That's how that started. Now, were people against it? Of course they were, for all the reasons you've already suggested, misogyny being one of them, absolute control being another, ignorance being a big one. And it still goes on. It even goes on in Canada, but it is against the law, and it's against the law in most of those countries. And again, we're not at the finish line, but we're moving in that direction.
Nandita Bajaj (26:45):
Right. Yeah. These are incredible examples. And as you say, it takes really people taking individual ownership of their dignity and their rights, standing up to some of these forces.
Sally Armstrong (26:58):
You have to remember though, it's very hard to argue with a Kalashnikov pointed at your head, and you are talking about people who would rather kill you than go along with change. So you have to manage the change. You have to go to the Imam, you have to get certain people on board and get your crowd together. And still you will lose some of them along the way. It's very tough, very, very tough to demand change.
Nandita Bajaj (27:21):
Definitely. And it would also explain why in so many communities still it's mothers and aunts that are the ones that promote their daughters in getting FGM because of the fear of consequences for their daughter if she wasn't undergoing FGM. There is such deep internalized patriarchy among so many communities.
Sally Armstrong (27:44):
Well, that's what they do. They say, if you're not cut, you can't eat with us. You can't go to school with us. You can't marry, not our people.
Alan Ware (27:53):
And you spoke a little bit in the book about honor killing where a woman is murdered often by her family for something they perceive as shameful that she did, that dishonors the family. And one thing I hadn't thought about is how many of those honor killings probably are not being reported to the doctor, like accidental fall down a well or something or down the steps. So there could be a lot more honor killing going on than we know about, right?
Sally Armstrong (28:20):
I would say 99% of them, more than 99% are not reported. What are you going to do? Murder your daughter for looking at a boy and then go to the police and say, I just cut my daughter's head off because she looked at a boy. You don't tell. I interviewed a coroner in Jerusalem. He was the main coroner. And he said to me, using your words, she fell down a well, a piece of concrete fell from the roof and landed on her head. He said, I know these are honor killings, but I write on the death certificate, fell down a well, and I sign it. So I said, well, do you feel you're as guilty as the person who killed her? He said, it's our way. But then I said to him, how many kids do you have? And he had three. Two of them were girls. And I said, if your girl was caught having sex with a boy or flirting with a boy, what would you do about it? And he was absolutely apoplectic that I would ask such a question. Obviously he would've killed her. I shouldn't say obviously. He didn't say he would, but he wouldn't answer the question.
Alan Ware (29:20):
There is good news, and I can't remember if it was in your book or somewhere else that female general mutilation has declined quite a bit in the Middle East and Asia and Africa. I'm not sure if those are some of the same trends as Senegal where people are just saying no more.
Sally Armstrong (29:36):
It is declining, not in Somalia. Somalia's still high, but it is declining. And I think hopefully someday it will be seen as something people did when they didn't know any better. But we're learning about, look at war. Remember we used to shoot soldiers for cowardice when in fact they were suffering from the mental strain of being in the middle of a war. We used to kill them for that. We don't do that anymore.
Alan Ware (30:03):
Yeah. Throughout your career, you've advocated for a universal approach to human rights, and you have noted where you've worked people often use the 'culture card' to justify discriminatory practices, violating rights, framing them as cultural traditions that deserve our respect. How do you address that tension between respecting tradition and upholding universal human rights?
Sally Armstrong (30:28):
Cultural relativism enrages me, absolutely enrages me because it comes from people who have the intellect to know better. I'm going to tell you an example. In 2009, a young woman graduated with a master's degree from the University of British Columbia. Her thesis was based on the notion that Canadian women, and her example was me and the Canadian women for women in Afghanistan were going around the world trying to stop culture. And they said, I was accompanied by the military, I think they even said the police at some point, to go school to school to convince girls to give up their culture and give up their education. It was such nonsense. And I looked at that and I thought, how could a young girl doing a master's degree come up with this sort of retributive nonsense? And I looked at who was advising her, and I realized it was a woman who had been against, certainly the work I was doing and many others to stop FGM to stop honor killing, to stop the ill treatment of women, because they're women. And she was a classic cultural relativist, and she advised that girl.
Alan Ware (31:47):
Yeah. When you mentioned that in the book, it did remind me of a vague memory in the 1980s, people calling female genital mutilation, honoring of ancient custom, and that you had to tread lightly around any of those kind of discussions.
Sally Armstrong (32:01):
I do not tread lightly around any of them.
Nandita Bajaj (32:06):
We find it extremely refreshing your rejection of cultural relativism because the 'culture card' is so often used as a cover to continue to uphold practices, to oppress women and girls and just people living on the margins. It's always been used as a justification to carry on certain traditions, but you call this type of power, old power. So in your book, Power Shift, you discuss how gender dynamics have evolved from old power of centralized top-down authority to new power, which is more decentralized and participatory. Could you briefly explain these concepts?
Sally Armstrong (32:50):
Sure, I can, but it's not my theory. This belongs to Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, they're the authors of a book called The New Power. And I was very taken by their research, and I'll give you a definition. They call it old power this way. It works like a currency. It's held by few. Once gained, its jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It's closed, inaccessible and leader-driven. It downloads and it captures. Does that sound at all like Donald Trump to you? But they talk about the new power. It operates like a current, it's made by many. It's open, participatory, peer-driven. It uploads and it distributes. Like water or electricity it's most powerful when it surges. And the goal of new power is not to hoard it, but to channel it. And their conclusion was that Me Too, the movement, was a very good example of the new power.
(33:50):
Having said that, and I think we all believe it and understand it, and we've all worked for people who use old power, and we've all admired people who've come in with this new style. But look what just happened in the US, the worst possible example of old power. But you see, this is the story of vigilance. When you gain, when you make a difference, when you make change, you have to be constantly guarding that change because it's so much easier to flip back and to use old ways that are harmful. You have to constantly be vigilant.
Alan Ware (34:25):
Yeah, it is encouraging to see in places like India, Iran, a lot of women using this new power laterally, social media organizing protests against usually sexual abuse in the case of India or in Iran with the mandatory dress codes in the green wave protest throughout Latin America. All of that sounds and seems pretty new power to me in the way it's been carried out.
Sally Armstrong (34:53):
Well, it does. And you were mentioning India and Iran. You have to look at the leadership and decide why is this happening? It's happening because it's being directed by the leadership. And how do you change that leadership? It's becoming increasingly difficult to change leaders who are rejecting democracy, but it still can be changed. I believe, and I've written a lot about the Iranian women, I believe at the end of the day, they will win. And you look at that country, look at the situation in the Middle East right now. The Iranian people don't have a quarrel with the Israelis, and the Israeli people I don't think they spare a thought for the Iranians. This is a quarrel between the Ayatollahs and Netanyahu. These are people who are warmongering. And the Iranian people, they're highly educated. It has a history of progress. I believe very strongly in what the Iranian women are doing. And I believe if they can overthrow the Ayatollahs, and God knows they tried, you will reshape the entire Middle East. I've been covering war for 35 years, and every single war I have covered has been started by a very small collection of greedy men, every single one - men who want power, land, riches. And they use God to get their way. They use any matter of misogyny and misinformation to get their way. But it's invariably it's a small group of greedy men.
Alan Ware (36:27):
And we're seeing while these authoritarian regimes of Putin and Xi and Erdogan and Orban and...
Sally Armstrong (36:34):
Trump.
Alan Ware (36:34):
Yeah, and Trump. So while we have the tools for new power, Extinction Rebellion, Greta, I think you've mentioned Tarir Square, we've had many recent examples of participatory kind of lateral. We're also seeing a rise in these authoritarians. So this tension between old and new power is ongoing. And you've also discussed how personal will or the courage of individuals is so important in driving social change where we often rely on political or public forces alone. And what are some of your favorite examples of the personal will?
Sally Armstrong (37:11):
I started noticing some years ago on assignment that we always depended on public will and political will to make change. We push the politician to sign the paper that will give us a new stop sign or a new shelter or a new law. And then to push that politician, we march and we sign petitions and we raise the roof. We make demands, and for a very long time that's worked. The public will pushes the politician to bring political will to the problem. But lately what I'm seeing is personal will. An example would be Malala Yousafzai. Remember, she was 15 years old when she said she wanted to go to school. She could learn to read and write and think for herself. And the Taliban in the Swat Valley in Pakistan said, you go to school we'll kill you. And she defied them. And she went to school and she was sitting on the school bus, and two men got on at the front of the bus, and the last word she heard was, which one is Malala?
(38:08):
And they shot a 15-year-old girl in the head because she wanted to learn to read and write. And they said they did it in the name of God. Now I rest my case. How stupid is that? But the thing is, Malala recovered and she started a movement, and Greta Thunberg has done the same sort of thing. Sima Samar, the woman I just wrote a book with, the warrior of the women of Afghanistan. She's the same thing. These are people who use personal will and they're standing up and saying, what you are doing is not okay with me. And that is a spectacular take on current affairs. And they're being successful. They're gathering especially young people around them. And it comes down to that. What you are doing is not okay with me. And it's very powerful.
Alan Ware (38:55):
Right, yeah. The courage that takes is impressive. It reminded me of Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil, that the Nazis just were following orders. Some people did stand up and they harbored Jews and they had to do it quietly. The apparatus of the state was so massive and unforgiving. As you mentioned in Afghanistan with the Taliban, if you have a Kalashnikov pointed at your head, it's harder to take advantage of that courage that people might have. But we do have a lot of societies where you don't get shot and where you really can stand up and make a position.
Nandita Bajaj (39:32):
And you started sharing the example earlier about these hundreds of girls in Kenya who sued the government. I wonder if you could share that, because that's a brilliant example of this girl, 11-year-old girl, Millie that you wrote about in terms of personal will.
Sally Armstrong (39:49):
That's how it started. Millie, who comes from a village called Meru, which is about four hours north of Nairobi. She stood up at a village meeting and she said, I want to go to school. She's 12, 12 years old. But she said, I can't go to school because I'm pregnant and I'm pregnant because that man sitting right there raped me. I mean, this is personal will to the max. And the nerve of that kid, the center where these girls, 160 girls between the ages three and 17 were staying there because they had been raped. And the stigma with their families meant they had to go away. So they stayed in this shelter in Meru. And to make a long story short, they sued the government. The 160 girls sued the government in Kenya for failing to protect them from being raped, and they won. But you know what?
(40:33):
If you win that case, which they did, and you do nothing about it, you might as well not bothered ever going to court. What they needed to do was reform the judiciary of Kenya. Now, who in the heck is going to do that? You have to be very well experienced. You see the problem there, that rape is called defilement, but the police didn't know how to make an arrest. They didn't know how to collect evidence. They didn't know how to take it to court. The judges didn't know what to do with it. And there was all that backlash. If you're going to reform the judiciary, you have to have terrific experience and you have to be very sensitive to who is going to do it. Well, who steps up to the plate? The sexual assault squad of the Vancouver police force. Can you imagine? They send two people over, a man and a woman officer to train the trainer over there back.
(41:21):
I go to do that story, and that goes on for three years. In the meantime, the little girls. now they've grown a little bit, they want legacy. They said, we want a course for all the schools of Kenya that will tell all the kids why we did this. And we want that course to include singing and dancing and talking to the community and talking to the police. And who is going to put together a course like that in a country that's just coming out of a case that accused the government of allowing little girls to be raped. So the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto takes it on, hands it to their MBA class, puts them in touch remotely with the girls and says figure it out. And they came up with something they called justice clubs. And the justice clubs were to be at the schools for boys and girls to talk about the consequences of sexual assault.
(42:09):
I can't imagine a smarter idea. It should be in every darn school in the whole world. And they started that, and they were just getting going. And the pandemic hit. All the schools were shut down. Everybody went home. And again, two tech wizards in Toronto stood up and said, this isn't a problem. We can make an app. And they create an app. So now it's called Virtual Justice Clubs, and they increase their audience by a bazillion. And now so many of the kids are in on it. These kids are strutting around. I know my rights. It is infectious, it is contagious, it is spectacular. But here at such a long story, but to make it short, I was there in March doing another story on them. They've now been invited into 11 other countries as well as indigenous communities in Canada. It is such a great idea. They do incredible work. It's called the equality effect. And you know what I love about them? And I've seen this in other places where women are so bold, they're so nervy to stand up and say, what you are doing is not okay with me.
Nandita Bajaj (43:17):
Right? Yeah. These are incredible examples. And Sally, you co-authored a newly published book with Sima Samar about her life titled, Outspoken, my Fight for Freedom and Human Rights in Afghanistan. And Sima was resisting the Taliban from 1996 to 2001 when they were first in power. And now that the Taliban have regained control in Afghanistan since 2021, we talked about this a bit earlier. We're seeing restrictions on education, employment, and public life being reinstituted among the new laws just announced in August. And one of which you spoke about preventing them from singing in public and speaking and making it mandatory for women to veil their entire bodies, including their faces at all times in public. There's definitely backsliding happening here. What insights are your contacts in Afghanistan sharing about how these changes are impacting daily life? And are there signs of quiet resistance or resilience among those affected?
Sally Armstrong (44:22):
Well, I will be careful with what I share with you. Yes, there is resistance, but I'll tell you this. In all the years I've covered war, especially civil war, invariably a chance for change comes when the bad guys start fighting with each other. And presently, what I'm seeing is a split. It's not a strong split, but it's a split between the Kandahari Taliban where the leader is and the Kabul Taliban. And by the way, those leaders, their daughters are in school in Pakistan. They're in university in Pakistan. I mean, the duplicity is to the max in this place. But when you see that split happening, that's when I think there's a space for others to move in. And you would need, in my opinion, much respected non-aligned Afghans. And we all have the same list of who could do this, to go in, not to overthrow the Taliban, but to say, we're here to help you.
(45:23):
Your people are starving. They hate you because they're starving. They will die in the winter because of starvation, because of lack of medical help. We can help you with that. We can bring in money that will get food to the people, that will get medical help to the people. We're not overthrowing you. We're just here to help you. And as you come in and you help, hopefully, you change the way people operate and you save a nation and hopefully you either convince the leaders to come along with this plan or you have enough power then to get rid of them. That is my Pollyanna view of what's likely. Something will happen. Something always happens when you throw the beans in the air. They land in a different place.
Nandita Bajaj (46:06):
Does it seem like the people that you have in mind to be the ones to go in, they seem willing to take that on?
Sally Armstrong (46:13):
The people that we all have in mind are willing to go in. You have to be very careful because I want to go in, but I can't go in. I'm on a Taliban list. So imagine what they're on. You have to be very cautious because the Taliban would kill people. But you have to put it out there in such a way that the Taliban think they're gaining something by this. They're not educated people. They don't even know their own religion. What they do is, and they'd go berserk if they heard you say that, but indeed, their behavior is anti-Islam. And it's about power. It's a small group of men who want power.
Nandita Bajaj (46:49):
Yeah. And are there any signs of local resistance or efforts to maintain freedoms, particularly regarding access to schooling or gathering spaces?
Sally Armstrong (47:01):
No. There are signs of resistance. I won't name them. Afghan people don't want to fight anymore. They don't want to fight. They've been fighting for 40 years, so it would be hard to have an uprising.
Nandita Bajaj (47:13):
Yeah, fair enough.
Alan Ware (47:15):
So throughout your career, as you mentioned, 35 years of reporting on war and conflict, you've seen some of the worst of what people do to each other. And we're wondering, witnessing that, how difficult that is, how disturbing, how you maintain balance in the face of what you've seen.
Sally Armstrong (47:35):
I feel really lucky. I love my job and I feel lucky because first of all, I have to get people to trust me to tell me their story. But when I tell it to them, and it's published here, Canadians take action. So for my stories, I see change happening. People read them and they raise hell about them. They are hard stories and they're scarring. I mean, these women, their faces play in the back of my eyelids when I come home. But to see the human spirit and action in the worst possible situation, it really feeds your soul. I'm thinking of a time I was in Kandahar. It was January, 2001, so it was only about nine months before 9/11 happened. I remember the world didn't pay any attention to Afghanistan until 9/11 happened, and I was in, it was called the orthopedic hospital. In this hospital, these women who used to be pharmacists, lawyers, teachers, they were working, making prosthetics for kids who'd stepped on landmines or people who'd had a limb cut off by the Taliban. Everything about the place was so dreadful.
(48:43):
And not only that, they had to paint the windows of the place black so no one could see them. They had to paint the windows in their own homes black so no one could see them because they were women. They had been stripped of everything. They told me they buried radios in their backyards because news had become more important than food. Their lives were so dreadful, and even in this place, they couldn't be seen or spoken to by a man. So the guy doing the surgery upstairs is sending a note through a pipe. Their lives were so awful. And I was recording the interview, and when I closed my notebook and I turned off my recorder, because now I have my story, we started to talk. And what did we talk about? We talked about recipes. We talked about kids. We talked about in-laws. We started kibitzing.
(49:31):
And I thought in the depth of despair is humanity. It flourishes still. But here's the real kicker on that one. When I was leaving, those women were stuffing sweet cakes and naan bread into my pockets, because they were worried I might be hungry on the way out of a country that had put them in prison. This is what humanity is, and it has an effect on you, but it makes you know that people are good. People are good at heart. I have another story that absolutely turned my head. This happened in Somalia right at the beginning of my career, and I was there covering the famine, and the center of the famine belt was in a place called Baidoa. And I went to Baidoa. It was exceptionally difficult getting anywhere because the civil war was raging everywhere. I went into what's called the therapeutic feeding center, and this is the end of the line in the famine business.
(50:24):
This is where they have nutritional biscuits and sometimes IV and all manner of means that humanitarian agencies bring in to try to save the life of a person who is dying of starvation. And I saw a little boy, and he was lying on a mat. I thought he was three years old, but the woman in charge said, no. He is six years old. Older people who are starving look older. Young people who are starving look younger. So here's this little boy who's actually six but he looked three, and he was just a bag of bones lying on a mat on the floor and the place was dark, even with the noonday sun in Somalia which would cook you. It was damp inside this place. There was a coldness inside with the broken down building. And I asked the woman, what happened to this boy? And she said, he was one of six children.
(51:13):
His father defied the warlord, and therefore the warlord said, we will not give you food to your family. This was during a famine. And then they shot the father to death, and the mother realized she had to leave, and she knew it was a two day walk to Baidoa, and she set out with these six children. Four of them died along the way. Think about it. What do you do? What do you do? Your child is dead. You're on the road. You got the other kids. She finally got to Baidoa with two children, and one child and the mother died the next day, and this little boy was the last person in a family of six children and two adults to be living. And he was starving. And I said to the woman, I want to take his picture. I want to tell his story, but I hate it when people rush and say, oh, I'm on deadline.
(52:00):
I said, I don't know who to ask for permission. She said, you can ask me. I give you permission. Now, this is before cell phones. So I kneeled down on the edge of the mat and I put the camera up and I put the flash on because it was dark in there. And when I took the picture, that little boy, that little bag of bones started to stir, and he was reaching his little skinny head around to see the source of the light. I thought, honest to God, the child is so sick, but he still has that curiosity we love about children. What was that? What was that? He's looking around. Where was that light? Well, he looked around far enough and he saw me a giant woman with yellow hair at the end of his mat. He probably thought he had died, the poor little guy.
(52:45):
And we made eye contact, and this is hard. What do you do when you make eye contact with a child? You smile, right? I smiled at that little boy thinking, this is wrong. This is the worst behavior. You shouldn't be smiling. This little boy is so sick. But the part that I will never forget in all of my life is he smiled back at me. And I thought to myself, you're almost dead, but you still want to make friends with a absolute stranger, I mean, I know I was not known to him. I looked unlike any person he'd ever seen. And I will never forget that, because that's how we all begin, with that lovely curiosity and to make friends. And how the heck do we end up as the head of the Taliban or as Donald Trump for that matter? So you ask what keeps me, that little boy, he plays in the back of my eyelids. He died the next day, by the way. It's a very, very sad story.
Nandita Bajaj (53:41):
Wow, Sally, that's an incredible story, and we feel lucky to have had the chance to speak with you and to have you share all of the incredible journalistic work that you are doing to expose all the injustices being done across the world - to young children, to young girls and women, and then also to highlight the resilience and courage and the best aspects of human behavior and human capacity. Thank you.
Sally Armstrong (54:14):
Thank you very much. Nice to talk to you.
Alan Ware (54:16):
That's all for this edition of OVERSHOOT. Visit population balance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you'll consider a one-time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj (54:45):
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for helping to advance our vision of shrinking toward abundance.
