UNITED NATIONS: Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai says she does not want to be known as the girl the Taliban tried to kill but as “the girl who struggled for her rights.”
After making a widely hailed speech at the UN, the 16-year-old said she would devote her life to the education for girls.
The UN appearance was Malala’s first public speaking engagement since a Taliban gunman shot her in the head last October to end her campaign to get girls into schools. “The attack on October 9 was just part of my life,” Malala said at a reception at the Pakistani UN mission in New York.
“I want to work hard, I want to sacrifice my whole life for the education of girls. And to be true, I want to say that I don’t to be the girl who was shot by the Taliban, I want to be the girl who struggled for her rights.”
Malala, considered a strong candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, said she was determined to keep her struggle “for a right to live in peace, for a right to go to school. The Taliban and other extremists do not understand the importance of education”.
The Taliban are among “people who think that when a woman goes to school she will be empowered, and they are afraid of it.
“They are still targeting schools, they are still killing innocent children,” she said, referring to recent attacks in Pakistan and Nigeria.
“If we work together, we will soon see that there will be many schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan and poor countries. And we will see that every woman and every girl will have the same rights as men have.
Malala is expected to return to New York for a summit on education on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly of world leaders in late September.
“Malala’s speech was just the start of a momentous push for change in the run-up to 2015, to deal with the education emergency,” said Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister and now UN special envoy on global education. Getting all children into primary school by 2015 was one of the Millennium Development Goals agreed at a world summit in 2000.
Malala was given several standing ovations for her speech when she said she would not be silenced by the Taliban.
She declared: “Let us pick up our books and pens. They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the world.”
AFP
