All of us girls made it clear that we wanted to see the Taliban brought to justice, but we weren’t very convinced this would happen.
Afterwards General Abbas gave some of us his visiting card and told us to contact him if we ever needed anything.
On the last day we all had to give a speech at the Islamabad Club about our experiences in the valley under Taliban rule. When Moniba spoke she couldn’t control her tears. Soon everyone was weeping. We had enjoyed a glimpse of a different life in Islamabad. In my speech I told the audience that until I had watched the English play I had no idea there were so many talented people in Pakistan. ‘Now we realise we don’t need to watch Indian movies,’ I joked. We’d had a wonderful time, and when we got back to Swat I felt so hopeful about the future I planted a mango seed in the garden during Ramadan as they are a favourite fruit to eat after breaking the fast.
But my father had a big problem. While we had been IDPs and for all the months the school had been closed he had collected no fees, but the teachers still expected to be paid. Altogether that would be over one million rupees. All the private schools were in the same boat. One school gave its teachers salaries for a month, but most didn’t know what to do as they couldn’t afford to pay. The teachers at the Khushal School demanded something. They had their own expenses, and one of them, Miss Hera, was about to get married and had been relying on her salary to help pay for the ceremony.
My father was in a fix. Then we remembered General Abbas and his visiting card. It was because of the army operation to expel the Taliban that we had all had to leave and found ourselves in this situation now. So Madam Maryam and I wrote an email to General Abbas explaining the situation. He was very kind and sent us 1,100,000 rupees so my father could pay everyone three months’ back pay. The teachers were so happy. Most had never received so much money at once. Miss Hera called my father in tears, grateful that her wedding could go ahead as planned.
This didn’t mean we went easy on the army. We were very unhappy about the army’s failure to capture the Taliban leadership, and my father and I continued to give lots of interviews. We were often joined by my father’s friend Zahid Khan, a fellow member of the Swat Qaumi Jirga. He was also the president of the All Swat Hotels Association, so he was particularly eager for life to go back to normal so that tourists could return. Like my father he was very outspoken and had been threatened too. One night in November 2009 he had had a very narrow escape. Zahid Khan was returning to his home from a meeting with army officials at Circuit House late at night when he was ambushed. Fortunately, many of his family live in the same area and they exchanged fire with the attackers, forcing them to flee.
Then on 1 December 2009 there was a suicide attack on a well-known local ANP politician and member of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assembly, Dr Shamsher Ali Khan. He had been greeting friends and constituents for Eid at his hujra, just a mile from Imam Deri where Fazlullah’s headquarters had been, when the bomb went off. Dr Shamsher had been an outspoken critic of the Taliban. He died on the spot and nine other people were injured. People said the bomber was about eighteen years old. The police found his legs and other parts of his body.
A couple of weeks after that our school was asked to take part in the District Child Assembly Swat, which had been set up by the charity UNICEF and by the Khpal Kor (My Home) Foundation for orphans. Sixty students from all over Swat had been chosen as members. They were mostly boys although eleven girls from my school went along. The first meeting was in a hall with lots of politicians and activists. We held an election for speaker and I won! It was strange to stand up there on the stage and have people address me as Madam Speaker, but it felt good to have our voices heard. The assembly was elected for a year and we met almost every month. We passed nine resolutions calling for an end to child labour and asking for help to send the disabled and street children to school, as well as for the reconstruction of all the schools destroyed by the Taliban. Once the resolutions were agreed, they were sent to officials and a handful were even acted on.