The extraordinary ordinary

Each of the five women awarded on the occasion of European Day of the Righteous, which was held on March 8 this year to coincide with International Women’s Day in Milan, Italy, had a heroic story that needs to be told. Some had died a long time ago, others were alive and struggling, but the common thread that bound them together was the courage of the ordinary woman to defend her beliefs, and the dignity and rights of others.

Azucena Villaflor (1924-1977) fearlessly pursued the path of truth and justice and paid for it with her life. Eight months into Argentina’s military dictatorship, on November 30, 1976, when her son was kidnapped by the military, she started on this dangerous journey. Soon the realisation dawned on her that only a collective struggle could force the government to respond. So she formed the Association of Mothers of Disappeared Children and, on April 30, 1977, she along with 13 other mothers met at the city centre of Buenos Aires, bringing the protest right to the gates of power. It had a huge symbolic and political significance.

On December 10, 1977, International Human Rights Day, the association published the names of their missing children in a newspaper. The same night, Azucena along with other members of the association was abducted and taken to a torture chamber where they were drugged and stripped, and then put on a flight and thrown into the sea. Later these came to be known as “death flights”. Their bodies washed ashore a few months later, but the DNA analyses confirming their identity could only be conducted 28 years later, when democracy returned to Argentina. Her daughter, Cecilia De Vincenti, who received the award on behalf of her mother, shared with the audience this poignant story.

Felicia Bartolotta (1916-2004) was married to a farmer in 1947 and the following year her elder son Peppino was born. During a brief stint in prison, her husband developed links with the local mafia. Her husband’s brother-in-law, the godfather of the village in Sicily, was killed by a rival group in a car bomb. Her husband then developed links with the new godfather and that is when trouble started as Felicia refused to entertain the mafia gang leader.

Peppino, then 15, became a political activist and started protesting against the mafia. He broke up with his father, got involved in Left-wing political activism along with a group of young boys. When she learnt that he had written an article about the mafia in the mouthpiece of the Left group, she went around town collecting copies and destroying them. (Giovanni, her younger son, who received the award on behalf of his mother, told the audience, “You cannot imagine what Sicily was like in the 1960s.”)

When his activism became more intense, she did not have the courage to go and listen to his speeches, but would get a glimpse of what he said from his friends and asked them to convince him not to talk about the mafia. When her husband was killed in a bizarre accident, Felicia knew that her son’s days were numbered. On May 9, 1978, her worst fears came true when the battered body of her son was found. When her only surviving son, Giovanni, started unearthing the murder mystery and demanding justice, Felicia took over. “Since I am old they cannot do to me what they can do to you,” she reasoned with him. The trial, which went on for several years with the inquiry being closed and reopened several times, finally concluded after 22 years. During the trial, Felicia had pointed with a firm voice at the person who had masterminded her son’s murder and his henchman who had carried it out. It was not revenge she was seeking but justice. She always told the young people who came to visit her after a movie on Peppino was made, “Keep standing with a straight spine”.

Halima Bashir, a young doctor in Darfur, Sudan, lives in exile, in hiding. Since her life is still in danger, she could not attend the ceremony and was represented by the Sudanese community in Milan, who stood apart with their flowing printed robes and bright head scarves.

When the war broke out in 2004, Dr Bashir’s patients in the village hospital included girls who had been raped by the government’s militia. Dr Bashir spoke out to explain that the reality on ground was much more complex than what the Sudanese authorities would have the international community believe. She was threatened and sent to a remote hospital miles away from the media glare. However, when a school close to the hospital was attacked and several young girls raped, Dr Bashir, who had attended to them, was asked by the United Nations officials to testify. She did so with devastating consequences — imprisonment, gangrape and torture. On her release, Dr Bashir escaped to the United Kingdom and sought asylum as a refugee. In an interview to a newspaper, she said that she had no regrets about reporting the horrendous abuse committed by the Sudanese authorities on the children of Darfur. Her book, Tears of the Desert, was published recently.

Vian Dakhil (1971) is also young and holds an important post — she’s the only Yazidi woman member of the Iraqi Parliament. She too could not be present as her car met with an accident when she was on her way to the airport. She sent a message from the hospital bed. On August 5, 2014, when she gave a passionate call in Parliament on behalf of Yazidis trapped in the mountains of Sinjar, where the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria was committing genocide, she made international news headlines. She had warned then that without immediate intervention of the international community there would be large-scale massacre.

The youngest awardee was Sonita Alizadeh (1996), the 20-year-old Afghan rapper who survived several attempts by her parents to marry her off to the highest bidder. In an Iranian refugee camp she learnt to write and secretly composed a rap song, Dokhtar Foroshi (Children on sale), to denounce forced child marriages. Her song was a hit and, in October 2015, it was shared at the Women in the World Summit in London. She now lives in the United States and is continuing her studies. Due to her exam schedule she too could not come.

That leaves yours truly, the only one who was present in person to receive the honour. I was dwarfed by the towering presence of the absent women. As the Mayor of Milan, dedicated a tree to each of us in the “garden of the righteous” at an impressive ceremony, the message was loud and clear — International Women’s Day is an ode to the extraordinary courage of ordinary women.

The writer is a women’s rights lawyer