In 1977, Meena began a resistance movement to fight for women’s rights and defy imperial occupation in Afghanistan.
When she gave her speech in Valence, she represented the Afghan resistance movement at a party congress. Her speech made Soviet delegation very angry as she spoke openly about USSR invading Afghanistan.
Meena was also extremely fixated on the inferior status of women back then. She was concerned of the way men saw women and women saw themselves. In order to change that she knew the women had to step up & renegotiate their own roles.
She is the one to start what is called the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) an organisation that seeks to liberate the Afghani women.
Many women started joining RAWA because they knew that Meena cared.
“Some of the older women would tell her, you’ve got to rest, you’ve got to protect yourself more. They told me how she’d periodically collapse: from dehydration, exhaustion, malnourishment, sometimes pregnancy & grief’’
Meena was soon murdered. She had been strangled to death, betrayed by a male RAWA supporter.
Meena is still considered to be ‘a living legend.’ RAWA members were interviewed and those who had never even met Meena had high regards for her. “but they had heard the stories and they felt that the only reason they were where they were — educated, safe, and with a deep purpose in life and a community of love and caring to support their struggle — was the efforts of this woman”. Meena was the face of RAWA. There were approximately 2,000 members in the mid-2000s. Meena’s legacy extends beyond RAWA, too. Malala
was asked in 2014, about her childhood memories of reading, to which she responded: “One of the first books I read is called Meena, about a girl who stood up for women’s rights in Afghanistan.”
