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Soraya Sobhrang

Commissioner for Women’s Rights,

Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission

If somebody kills you for your ideas and you work for human rights or for your country, it is common. But women’s rights activists are dying in bed of natural causes. It’s better if they die fighting. And so we must be hopeful and work and not be afraid.

Just before I left Afghanistan in 2010, I was invited to accompany my friend Elizabeth Roberts and her husband Elias to this interview. Soraya’s office overflowed with stacks of books and papers. She was inundated with work but was calm, soft spoken, and gracious, seemingly unaffected by the chaos around her.

Soraya was born in the western desert province of Herat and graduated from the medical university there as a gynecologist. When the Soviets came, educated people who didn’t support them were considered enemies, so she and most of her colleagues fled to Iran. There, she practiced gynecology in a huge government hospital and worked with botched self-immolation cases. When she heard about the need for doctors in a hospital for refugees in Pakistan, she went there. But that, too, became dangerous as fighting spread, so she moved to Germany where she stayed until the fall of the Taliban.

Soraya was one of the first to repatriate when Karzai became president and invited Afghans to return. She served as Deputy Minister of Women’s Affairs for three years and then was appointed to the Independent Human Rights Commission.