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In 1972, the former Black Panther was facing the death penalty. Five decades after the campaign for her release went global, she still believes people are the ‘motors of history’by More
After the collapse of the Afghan government last August, the only significant challenge to the Taliban’s primitive totalitarianism was mounted by women in big cities — the capital Kabul, Mazar-e Sharif in the north, and Herat in the west, among others. The Taliban’s approach to women’s rights brought fears of violence that engulfed the country in the 1990s when the Talibs first won power. But Afghan society has undergone considerable changes since then, and many Afghan women refuse to accept the militants’ restricted approach to their right to work and education.
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In response, the Taliban have deployed various oppressive measures. In September, they replaced the Women’s Affairs Ministry with morality police, which enforces the armed group’s strict religious doctrine on the country. At the same time, while trying to confine women to their homes by forbidding them to work or study, the Taliban are using the threat of violence against women as a bargaining chip against the Western powers.
Violent Tactics
In September last year, the Taliban attacked the media to prevent them from covering the women’s protests in Kabul. Two Etilaatroz journalists were tortured. Etilaatroz is one of the leading Afghan newspapers and a critical voice mainly focused on investigative journalism. An attack on the newspaper was a clear signal for everyone covering the protests against the Taliban.
Since the armed group took control of the country, at least 318 media outlets closed in 33 of 34 provinces and, according to the International Federation of Journalists, 72% of those who lost their jobs are women.
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But the Taliban quickly changed their tactics to tackle women’s protests through more intimidating methods, including nighttime house searches to locate those who dared raise their voice. Tamana Zaryabi Paryani, a member of the movement demanding rights to work and education, is just one of the women taken from their homes in Kabul in the middle of the night; her whereabouts remain unknown. Some families report being contacted by detainees from Taliban prisons in undisclosed locations.
The Taliban deny capturing, detaining or killing women and other opponents. This tactic aims to mislead public opinion, the media and policymakers in Western countries. The situation may be even more critical in the provinces, beyond the eyes of the media. In September last year, the Taliban killed a former police officer with the ousted Afghan government in front of her family in Gor province; she was pregnant at the time of her murder.
There is no way to assess the true number of disappeared women across the country. Some of them are known by the media, such Mursal Ayar, Parwana Ibrahimkhel, Tamana Paryani, Zahra Mohammadi and Alia Azizi. Most of them belong to the protest movement against the Taliban’s policies. Azizi worked as a senior female prison official in Herat and went missing when the Taliban took control of the city. Amnesty International urged the Taliban to investigate the case and release her “immediately and unconditionally” if she is in their custody.
Last week, the UN repeated its call and asked the Taliban to release the disappeared women activists and their relatives. The German Embassy, currently operating from Qatar, has called for an investigation into the missing women. It is entirely possible that the Taliban will eventually release some of the captives, claiming that they were rescued from the clutches of the kidnappers, in order to portray themselves as a responsible government.
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Gang rape is another tactic that the Taliban deploy against women in detention. The Independent reports that last September, bodies of eight detainees arrested during a protest in Mazar-e Sharif were discovered. According to reports, the girls were repeatedly gang-raped and tortured by the Taliban. Sexual assault is a many-sided weapon against women in a society based on strict honor codes. Some of those who survived the rapes were killed by their families.
In January, The Times reported that the staff in the government-run Mazar-e Sharif Regional Hospital claim that they receive around 15 bodies from Taliban fighters each month — mostly women with gunshot wounds to the head or chest.
Bargaining Chip
Violence has been the Taliban’s primary tool both in war and during negotiations with Western powers. Over the course of two decades of conflict, the Taliban used violence as a means to win recognition as a political force. During their talks with the US and the Afghan government, the Taliban escalated violence to enhance their position at the negotiating table. Now, they are pursuing the same strategy by trading repression for recognition.
Since the Taliban took control of the country, women’s rights are a constant subject of ongoing diplomatic discussions that have so far brought no result. The international community has failed to press the Taliban to form an inclusive government and respect women’s rights.
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But the armed group wants the international community to recognize their government. In January, a Taliban delegation was invited to Oslo to talk with Western powers and representatives of Afghan women for the first time. At the meeting, Hoda Khamosh, a civil society activist, asked the Taliban delegation: “why are the Taliban imprisoning us in Kabul and now sitting here at the negotiating table with us in Oslo? What is the international community doing in the face of all this torture and repression?”
Since then, nothing has changed. The reality is that the Taliban used the talks in Oslo as an opportunity to make an international appearance to advertise their government. They are deploying precepts like women’s rights to force more international engagement. While Norway was criticized for inviting the Taliban and offering them exposure, Switzerland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that it invited the Taliban to talk about “the protection of humanitarian actors and respect for human rights.”
The Taliban is an ideological, zealot religious movement, and years of experience suggest that they are unlikely to revise their position on women’s rights and other fundamental issues, including human rights and political pluralism. Talking about women’s rights in Western capitals is just an opportunity for them to normalize their regime and travel abroad. Human rights violations, particularly violence against women, not only serve the Taliban’s ideological purposes but have turned into a convenient bargaining chip against the international community.
It is critical that Western powers support fundamental human rights in the country without providing the Taliban with opportunities for blackmail, implementig realistic measures to press the group to release activists and to respect women’s rights. First, it is important to maintain or escalate the current sanctions regime against the Taliban leadership. Second, making sure that there is no rush to recognize the Taliban regime mong foreign governments is another key leverage point.
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Third, there is a need to appoint a special rapporteur to monitor the human rights situation and document violations to hold the Taliban accountable. Fourth, it is important to extend and support the mandate of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan to help monitor the human rights situation in the country.
Finally, the international community can continue its humanitarian support through UN agencies and other organizations without recognizing the Taliban. Recognition of the group will not only increase human rights abuses but will send the wrong signal to other extremists in the region. All these measures will reduce the Taliban’s ability to use violence as a bargaining chip against the international community.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
Invisible and unheard: how female veterans suffering trauma are let down by US healthcareWomen suffer PTSD at twice the rate of men yet their symptoms and stories are often overlooked For Felicia Merkel, the PTSD trigger is any loud sound – an overhead speaker, a slammed car door – transporting her back to the blistering heat of Afghanistan. For Liz Hensel, it is looking into her daughter’s chestnut brown eyes, their color reminding her of those of a young Afghan girl named Medina, who lost her mother and leg at the trauma hospital in Kandahar. For Jen Burch, the intrusive memory is of the man who assaulted her before she deployed.More than a decade has passed since these three women were deployed to Afghanistan. It’s now almost four months since the US military withdrew from Kabul on 30 August. Still, specific memories consume them. Three hundred thousand female veterans served in the 19-year war, and as media coverage dwindles and the nation slowly forgets, Felicia, Liz and Jen continue to remember.Their experiences in Afghanistan differed from those of the male soldiers with whom they served. Now, their stateside lives do too. Being a woman in war comes with its own set of distinct traumas. While congressional legislation that has recently been proposed is welcome, essential bills are still being blocked that would help repair the suffering these women have endured for years.Gender differences exist in trauma exposure. PTSD is twice as common in women than in men, according to a study conducted by Kathryn Magruder at the University of South Carolina.Yet they face additional obstacles when seeking support after their deployment.The Deborah Sampson Act passed in January of this year made gender-specific services available at veteran medical centers across the country.However, on 6 December, House and Senate armed service committee leaders tried to block the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act, which would enable veterans to report sexual assault to a neutral third party.Felicia’s husband says she is a lot jumpier now than she used to be. Talking about Afghanistan makes her sad, but as she has gotten older, sounds, not memories, trigger her PTSD. The anxiety hits. She breathes deeply. Then tries, with difficulty, to get her heart rate down.It was December 2010, the year of her first deployment. She was lying in bed at the base at Kandahar, watching American television, when she heard those crashing bumps. Seconds later, the sirens sounded. A rocket had hit. Felicia fell to the floor with a thud and ran for the nearby bunker.It was cold and dusty in there; a dirt track enveloped in a hollow concrete shell. Just feet away, medics worked on a man wounded in the chest; he had no pulse in his left leg. They called for clothing, anything that might be used to stop the bleeding. As the yells of the medics got louder, Felicia’s mind traveled further away.She couldn’t do anything to help. Eleven years later, she still feels that guilt and hears those sounds.She had arrived in Kandahar energetic and excited. She returned to Minnesota a year later, distant and dejected. The months after coming home were the worst. Gritting her teeth through weekly therapy sessions, she insisted that everything was fine. The therapist believed her, even telling her not to come back.On 4 January 2012, Felicia tried to kill herself. She began with a single antidepressant. Then she took five more. Then the bottle. None of her co-workers, family or friends knew about her clinical depression. She spent her 22nd birthday in intensive care.Post-military support at the time, she maintains, was significantly lacking.“Female service members have much more to deal with in the complexity of trauma,” confirmed Jennifer Pacanowski, founder of the non-profit Women’s Veterans Empowered and Thriving. “They also have less access to services, which are not as specialized to their needs as those available to male veterans.”The Deborah Samson Act, a bipartisan bill passed by the Senate in January 2021, will establish a policy to end gender-based sexual harassment and assault by training employees and providing legal services for veterans at risk. It will also staff Veteran Affairs facilities with a permanent female health provider.Felicia wishes she had access to these sorts of resources when she came home. Instead, during a 10-minute evaluation, it was determined she did not have PTSD, and that her grief stemmed only from her mother’s death.She was furious and felt unheard.Looking back, she believes that better healthcare policies for female veterans would have encouraged her to open up about her experiences and struggles sooner. Instead, she dealt with her feelings alone until she needed life-saving help.After deploying in August 2010, Liz began volunteering at Kandahar’s trauma hospital. She had already witnessed death. Just weeks earlier, an injured soldier died with his head resting on her stomach. She dealt with this like any Marine had to do in any high-intensity combat situation: turn off emotion and focus.She could not, however, turn off the memories of the trauma hospital. As the mother of two young daughters, it tugged at every maternal instinct she had.American male service members were not permitted to work at the hospitals. Only because she was female could she see what she now can’t forget.The waiting room that November day was bustling with uncles, fathers, cousins and brothers.No one waited for Medina. Whoever brought the three-year-old Afghani girl had left. Her infected foot could not be saved, and Liz cradled the child as she came out of the anesthesia after the amputation. Rather than waking in familiar arms, Medina’s first sight was this stranger wearing desert camouflage with a pistol at her side. The anguish Liz felt reminded her that she could feel again after months surrounded by death.Now, Medina revisits Liz’s thoughts back in Virginia. She appears in flashbacks when Liz looks at baby photographs of her youngest daughter. She comes to mind when Veterans Day is celebrated on national television.Was the girl still alive? Could Liz have done more to help her? Was she attending school amid the Taliban’s ever-increasing restrictions on women’s freedom?Liz had flown to Afghanistan fearless and determined in 2010 but returned to the US four months later, injured and traumatized.In the weeks after her deployment, Liz felt as if she were watching someone else’s life in a movie. Physically, she was home, but mentally, she was in Kandahar.She tried going through the motions expected of her as a mother and a wife. Doing menial tasks – cooking dinner, hugging her child – things she had been so capable of doing before she left. But it felt to her like a tug of war, the past pulling her back, her mind fighting to remain present.It didn’t help that she felt her pain was invisible to the world. When attending Veterans Affairs medical appointments, the administration staff would sometimes ask her husband, who came along for support, who he was there to see. He would have to correct them and say the appointment was for his wife.It was only when they took the time to listen to Liz’s story that people validated her trauma. Research shows that post-traumatic stress in veterans varies by gender. If hers had been recognized earlier, she wonders, would she still be struggling with it 11 years later?Jen, like Liz, was working in Afghani hospitals because she was a woman. She, too, was haunted by a girl who had lost a foot. But, more, she was haunted by the long-term impacts of sexism and abuse in the military.Jen was sexually assaulted by her supervisor at a US military base, months before she was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010.She was made to report it through her chain of command, but was quickly stopped in her tracks. Everyone loved the man she was accusing.“We’re so glad to have him back,” said the male officer who handled her complaint.Jen wanted to deploy abroad. She knew no one would believe her. So she stopped, fearing that as a victim, she would be isolated.But trauma builds on trauma. This experience made Jen more vulnerable to the horrors she witnessed during her service in Afghanistan. Statistically, a history of sexual assault puts a veteran at higher risk for developing PTSD.Serving at Buckley Space Force Base in Denver, Colorado, when she returned stateside from August 2011 to 2014, things got worse.Jen started to go through some of the lowest moments of her life.Her co-workers assumed that she was being emotional about things because she was a woman. Someone she served with in Afghanistan observed that the only PTSD she had was from eating the bad food. This went on for a year and a half.Jen was assaulted before she arrived in Afghanistan. She worked overtime in the trauma hospital doing mortuary affairs; developed breathing problems; had glass nodules in her lungs. Yet she was perpetually made fun of. It was a very negative culture surrounding her post-deployment.No one wanted to hear her story.Although women are the fastest-growing veteran demographic, she believes that some men still don’t think of women serving in roles of high stress or exposure.Currently, the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act is being blocked. If the act had been passed when Jen was on active service, she would have reported her sexual assault.This is the same for many other women in the military, she believes. And while there is a mountain of legislation being passed to assist female veterans, this is still not enough.“If it means sharing the darkest details of my story, then I’ll keep doing this,” Jen said, “until the gendered gap in veteran healthcare is finally closed”.TopicsPost-traumatic stress disorderWomenUS militaryMental healthUS politicsHealthfeaturesReuse this content More
Sarah Weddington, attorney who won Roe v Wade abortion case, dies aged 76Texan lawyer and Linda Coffee won landmark 1973 case, safeguarding right now under threat from US supreme court
How dismantling Roe v Wade would threaten other rights
Sarah Weddington, an attorney who argued and won the Roe v Wade supreme court case which established the right to abortion in the US, has died aged 76.Susan Hays, a Democratic candidate for Texas agriculture commissioner, announced the news on Twitter on Sunday and the Dallas Morning News confirmed it.“Sarah Weddington died this morning after a series of health issues,” Hays wrote. “With Linda Coffee, she filed the first case of her legal career, Roe v Wade, fresh out of law school. She was my professor … the best writing instructor I ever had, and a great mentor.“At 27 she argued Roe to [the supreme court] (a fact that always made me feel like a gross underachiever). Ironically, she worked on the case because law firms would not hire women in the early 70s, leaving her with lots of time for good trouble.”The court ruled on Roe v Wade in 1973. Nearly 50 years later the right it established is under threat from a supreme court packed with hardline conservatives, in part thanks to a Texas law that drastically restricts access and offers incentives for reporting women to authorities.In 2017, speaking to the Guardian, Weddington predicted such a turn of events. “If [Neil] Gorsuch’s nomination is approved, will abortion be illegal the next day? No. One new judge won’t necessarily make much difference. But two or three might.”After steering Gorsuch on to the court – and a seat held open by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell when Barack Obama was president – Donald Trump installed Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett replaced the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of women’s rights.Weddington found her way to Roe v Wade soon after graduating from law school at the University of Texas. Represented by Weddington and Coffee, Norma McCorvey became the plaintiff known as “Jane Roe” in Roe v Wade. McCorvey became an evangelical Christian and opponent of abortion. She died in 2017.In her Guardian interview, Weddington discussed arguing the case in federal court. “I was very nervous,” she said. “It was like going down a street with no street lights. But there was no other way to go and I didn’t have any preconceived notions that I would not win.”She won, but the case continued.“Henry Wade, the district attorney, unwittingly helped us,” she said. “At a press conference, he said, ‘I don’t care what any court says; I am going to continue to prosecute doctors who carry out abortion.’ There was a procedural rule that said if local elected officials continue to prosecute after a federal court had declared a law unconstitutional, there would be a right to appeal to the supreme court.”‘Historical accident’: how abortion came to focus white, evangelical angerRead moreBefore the court in Washington, Weddington said: “It was impossible to read the justices’ faces. The attorney on the other side started by saying something inappropriate about arguing a case against a beautiful woman. He thought the judges would snicker. But their faces didn’t change a bit.“I had to argue it twice in the supreme court: in 1971 and again in 1972. On 22 January 1973 I was at the Texas legislature when the phone rang. It was a reporter from the New York Times. ‘Does Miss Weddington have a comment today about Roe v Wade?’ my assistant was asked. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Should she?’“It was beginning to be very exciting. Then we got a telegram from the supreme court saying that I had won 7-2 and that they were going to air-mail a copy of the ruling. Nowadays, of course, you’d just go online.“I was ecstatic, and more than 44 years later we’re still talking about it.”Weddington later revealed that she had an abortion herself, in 1967. “Just before the anaesthesia hit,” she said, “I thought: ‘I hope no one ever knows about this.’ For a lot of years, that was exactly the way I felt. Now there’s a major push to encourage women to tell their stories so people will realise that it is not a shameful thing. One out of every five women will have an abortion.”Weddington predicted: “Whatever else I do in my life, the headline on my obituary is always going to be ‘Roe v Wade attorney dies’.”In fact she achieved much more, as Hays detailed in her tweets on Sunday. “Those career doors shut to her led her to run for office, getting elected as the first woman from Travis county in the [Texas legislature] in 1972 (along with four other women elected to the House: Kay Bailey, Chris Miller, Betty Andujar and Senfronia Thompson).“She was general counsel of the United States Department of Agriculture under [Jimmy] Carter and enjoyed her stint in DC. Federal judicial nominations for Texas were run by her as a high-ranking Texan in the administration.“A Dallas lawyer she knew sought a bench. She had interviewed with him while at UT law. He’d asked her, ‘What will we tell our wives if we hire you?’ She told him he was wasting their time and hers and walked out of the interview. He did not get the judgeship.“Ever the proper preacher’s daughter, she would never tell me who the lawyer was. People don’t know that about Sarah. She was such a proper Methodist minister’s daughter. One of the few people I couldn’t cuss in front of.”Hays also paid tribute to Weddington as a teacher and a member of a “Great Austin Matriarchy” that also included the former Texas governor Ann Richards and the columnist Molly Ivins.In her Guardian interview, Weddington indicated she was at peace with being remembered for Roe v Wade. “I think most women of my generation can recall our feelings about the fight,” she said. “It’s like young love. You may not feel exactly the same, but you remember it.”TopicsRoe v WadeAbortionUS politicsUS healthcareUS supreme courtUS constitution and civil libertiesLaw (US)newsReuse this content More
The supreme court is signalling that it’s ready to end Roe v WadeMoira DoneganPredictions that the court would keep abortion as a constitutional right are starting to look incredibly optimistic It went worse than had been expected, and expectations were already low. As the supreme court prepared to hear oral arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a lawsuit over a 15-week abortion ban in Mississippi that constitutes the most serious challenge to Roe v Wade in a generation, many court watchers predicted a massive rollback of abortion rights. But the line among reasonable pundits was that the court, fearing censure from a largely pro-choice American public, would attempt to have its cake and eat it too – allowing states to impose abortion bans earlier in pregnancy, but keeping abortion as a constitutional right intact.The most convincing version of this argument came from Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, who predicted that the court, like it did in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v Casey, might weaken the abortion right without abandoning it entirely. In Casey, the supreme court lessened the standard of scrutiny applied to state abortion restrictions – from a robust “strict scrutiny” standard to a more malleable “undue burden” standard – and affirmed that states could ban abortions outright after fetal viability, the point of gestation at which a fetus can survive outside the womb, usually at about 24 weeks.Stern, like many others, predicted that the court might impose an even more deferential legal test on abortion restrictions – “rational basis review” – and eliminate the viability standard. The result would be that states could ban and restrict abortions more easily, even before viability, but they would still not be allowed to ban abortions entirely. “The court could move back the point at which states can prohibit abortion outright from 24 weeks to 15 or perhaps 12, the end of the first trimester,” Stern wrote. “A diminished right to abortion would survive, battered but extant.”And yet the end of the viability standard would still have been practically disastrous for abortion access on the ground, as well as for women’s freedom and dignity. This much was elegantly explained by New York’s Irin Carmon, who wrote that attacks from conservatives over the past 30 years have increased the abortion right’s legal reliance on the viability standard, even as developments in pre- and neo-natal care have pushed viability itself earlier in pregnancy. “If a ban on abortion at 15 weeks is allowed for whatever reason, why not draw the line at six?” Carmon asked.Getting rid of the viability standard, but still leaving the right to abortion technically intact, would in practice invite an anarchic scramble, as conservative states rushed to ban abortion as early as possible and push the limit back sooner and sooner in pregnancy. Julie Rickelman, a longtime abortion rights advocate and the lawyer representing Mississippi’s lone abortion clinic in the Dobbs case, put it bluntly: if viability goes, Roe is effectively no longer good law. “If the court upholds this law, it will be discarding the viability line and overruling Roe,” she told Carmon. “That is the key line in the law that has protected people’s access to abortion.”In other words, the best-case scenario was legal chaos, misogynist lawmaking, a diminished right to bodily autonomy for women, and millions more people subject to forced pregnancy.But even these predictions – which pass for “optimism” among legal observers now that the supreme court is held in the chokehold of a conservative supermajority – proved too rosy. At oral arguments in Dobbs on Wednesday, five of the court’s six conservatives showed little interest in maintaining Roe while getting rid of viability. Instead, they were focused on eliminating Roe, and the abortion right, entirely. By the end, it seemed likely that conservatives have a crucial five votes to rule that the constitution does not protect the right to end a pregnancy: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.The lone exception among the conservatives was Chief Justice John Roberts, who seemed almost desperate to direct attention to the viability line. Over the course of arguments, Roberts repeatedly returned to the viability question, emphasizing that it was rejected as a possible standard in the initial 1973 Roe decision and only adopted later, in Casey. But none of the other conservatives took the bait.The two “swing” votes – if such an extremely and committedly conservative court can be said to have such a thing – are Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. In a display of the impotence that has marked his career as chief justice, Roberts was unable to persuade either of them to take up his apparently preferred proposition of maintaining a shell of Roe while gutting the viability standard.Instead, Kavanaugh spent much of his speaking time assuring his colleagues that they need not be bound by Roe’s precedent, listing a long litany of cases in which the supreme court reversed its own prior decisions. Barrett, meanwhile, emphasized the availability of adoption as a supposedly adequate alternative to abortion, at one point asserting that so-called “safe haven” laws, which allow birth mothers to surrender their parental rights and leave their infants in the care of others without punishment immediately after they give birth, offer an adequate remedy for pregnant women who cannot or do not wish to become parents. The idea was that if a woman is pregnant and does not want to be, an acceptable outcome would be for her to gestate and birth a child, and then simply give it away.The hardest-line conservatives, meanwhile, offered even more grim and ominous assessments of abortion as a matter of law, and their sadistic and extremist views give some indication of where the court may be heading in future cases. Both Alito and Thomas referred repeatedly to abortion as “taking a life”, and indicated that they would be open to recognizing fetal personhood. Until now, post-viability abortion bans have rested on the legal idea that the state has an interest in protecting fetal life that overrides a woman’s interest in controlling her own body after that point. But Alito and Thomas suggested that they think that interest belongs not only to the state, but to the fetus itself, and that this interest begins very early. “The fetus has an interest in having a life,” Alito said at one point. “That doesn’t change from the point before viability and after viability.”The suggestion that a fetus might have interests in its own right – interests that can be seen as equal or greater than the interests of the woman carrying it – is a dramatic step in anti-choice jurisprudence, one with dramatic implications for women’s healthcare, freedoms, and access to public life. After Wednesday’s oral arguments, it seems certain that Roe v Wade will soon be overturned. For this court, that’s just the beginning.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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As Hillary Clinton’s most trusted aide, it was her job to stay out of view. Even when her husband Anthony Weiner’s scandalous behaviour dragged her into the spotlight, she mostly stayed silent. In this interview, Huma Abedin explains why she is ready to tell her own story, in a new memoir that sheds remarkable light on what it cost her to become a public figure against her will
How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know
When Huma Abedin joined Hillary Clinton’s team in the White House as an intern in 1996, she could not have imagined she would still be working for the same boss, as her most trusted and intimate aide, a quarter of a century later. But that is far from the most surprising aspect of Abedin’s story. In this episode, she talks to Nosheen Iqbal about the extraordinary upbringing that took her from Kalamazoo in Michigan to Saudi Arabia, and what it meant to be the Muslim daughter of an Indian father and a Pakistani mother working in Washington. She reflects on the privileges and costs of working at the centre of political power at such a young age, always having to choose between family and friends, and the job that turned into a vocation. And she talks frankly about her marriage to Anthony Weiner, whose scandalous and ultimately criminal behaviour made her a household name against her will. “I never wanted to be the story, or be part of the story. I didn’t even want to be in the picture,” she says. “So to be elevated in this way … yes, shame is the word.” Throughout all of the crises that arose from Weiner’s behaviour – up to and including a huge and arguably terminal blow to Clinton’s campaign for the presidency – Abedin either stayed silent or spoke in brief, carefully constructed statements, even as she found herself hounded by the paparazzi or splashed across the front pages. Now she has written a memoir – and, she says, she has found huge strength in telling her story in her own words. “I know I have been judged; I know I will continue to be judged,” she says. “But it feels amazing, I have to say.” • Read an extract from the book “If Hillary Clinton loses this election, it will be because of you and me” here. • Huma Abedin’s memoir, Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, is published by Simon & Schuster at £20. To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Archive: NBC; CBS; Clinton Library; CNN; ABC; AP; VOA News; C-Span More
Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen discuss their dads, their unlikely friendship, and second careers – as podcast hosts Sat 23 Oct 2021 04.00 EDTPresident Barack ObamaGood conversations don’t follow a script. Like a good song, they’re full of surprises, improvisations, detours. They may be grounded in a specific time and place, reflecting your state of mind and the current state of the world. But the best conversations also have a timeless quality, taking you back into the realm of memory, propelling you forward toward your hopes and dreams. Sharing stories reminds you that you’re not alone – and maybe helps you understand yourself a little bit better.When Bruce and I first sat down in the summer of 2020 to record Renegades: Born in the USA, we didn’t know how our conversations would turn out. What I did know was that Bruce was a great storyteller, a bard of the American experience – and that we both had a lot on our minds, including some fundamental questions about the troubling turn our country had taken. A historic pandemic showed no signs of abating. Americans everywhere were out of work. Millions had just taken to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd, and the then occupant of the White House seemed intent not on bringing people together but on tearing down some of the basic values and institutional foundations of our democracy.Almost a year later, the world looks a shade brighter. But for all the change we’ve experienced as a nation and in our own lives since Bruce and I first sat down together, the underlying conditions that animated our conversation haven’t gone away. And in fact, since the podcast was released, both of us have heard from folks from every state and every walk of life who’ve reached out to say that something in what they heard resonated with them, whether it was the imprint our fathers left on us; the awkwardness, sadness, anger and occasional moments of grace that have arisen as we navigate America’s racial divide; or the joy and redemption that our respective families have given us. People told us that listening to us talk made them think about their own childhoods. Their own dads. Their own home towns.Bruce SpringsteenWhen President Obama suggested we do a podcast together, my first thought was: “OK, I’m a high school graduate from Freehold, New Jersey, who plays the guitar … What’s wrong with this picture?” My wife Patti said: “Are you insane?! Do it! People would love to hear your conversations!”The president and I had spent some time together since we met on the campaign trail in 08. That time included some long, telling conversations. These were the kind of talks where you speak from the heart and walk away with a real understanding of the way your friend thinks and feels. You have a picture of the way he sees himself and his world.So I took Patti’s advice and followed the president’s generous lead, and before we knew it we were sitting in my New Jersey studio, riffing off each other like good musicians.There were serious conversations about the fate of the country, the fortunes of its citizens, and the destructive, ugly, corrupt forces at play that would like to take it all down. This is a time of vigilance when who we are is being seriously tested. We found a lot in common. The president is funny and an easy guy to be around. He’ll go out of his way to make you feel comfortable, as he did for me so that I might have the confidence to sit across the table from him. At the end of the day we recognised our similarities in the moral shape of our lives. It was the presence of a promise, a code we strive to live by. Honesty, fidelity, a forthrightness about who we are and what our goals and ideas are, a dedication to the American idea and an abiding love for the country that made us.We are both creatures stamped Born in the USA. Guided by our families, our deep friendships and the moral compass inherent in our nation’s history, we press forward, guarding the best of us while retaining a compassionate eye for the struggles of our still young nation.My father’s houseBruce Springsteen and Barack Obama talk about the impression their fathers made on their lives and their concept of manhoodSpringsteen From when I was a young man, I lived with a man who suffered a loss of status and I saw it every single day. It was all tied to lack of work, and I just watched the low self-esteem. That was a part of my daily life living with my father. It taught me one thing: work is essential. That’s why if we can’t get people working in this country, we’re going to have an awful hard time.Obama It is. It is central to how people define themselves in the sense of self-worth. For all the changes that have happened in America, when it comes to “What does it mean to be a man?”, I still see that same confusion, and the same limited measures of manliness today, as I had back then. And that’s true, whether you’re talking about African American boys or white boys. They don’t have rituals, road maps and initiation rites into a clear sense of a male strength and energy that is positive as opposed to just dominating.I talk to my daughters’ friends about boys growing up, and so much of popular culture tells them that the only clear, defining thing about being a man, about being masculine, is excelling in sports and sexual conquest …Springsteen And violence.Obama And violence. Those are the three things. Violence, if it’s healthy at least, is subsumed into sports. Later, you add to that definition: making money. How much money can you make? And there are some qualities of the traditional American male that are absolutely worthy of praise and worthy of emulating. That sense of responsibility, meaning you’re willing to do hard things and make some sacrifices for your family or for future generations. But there is a bunch of stuff in there that we did not reckon with, which now you’re seeing with #MeToo, with women still seeking equal pay, with what we’re still dealing with in terms of domestic abuse and violence. There was never a full reckoning of who our dads were, what they had in them, how we have to understand that and talk about that. What lessons we should learn from it. All that kind of got buried.Springsteen Yeah, but we sort of ended up being just 60s versions of our dads, carrying all the same sexism.Obama You don’t show emotion, you don’t talk too much about how you’re feeling: your fears, your doubts, your disappointments. You project a general “I’ve got this”.Springsteen Now, I had that tempered by having a father who was pretty seriously mentally ill, and so in high school I began to become very aware of his weaknesses even though, outwardly, he presented as kind of a bullish guy who totally conformed to that standard archetype. Things went pretty wrong in the last years of high school and in the last years that I lived with him at our house. There was something in his illness or in who he was that involved a tremendous denying of his family ties. I always remember him complaining that if he hadn’t had a family he would’ve been able to take a certain job and go on the road. It was a missed opportunity. And he sat there over that six-pack of beers night after night after night after night and that was his answer to it all, you know? So we felt guilt. And that was my entire picture of masculinity until I was way into my 30s, when I began to sort it out myself because I couldn’t establish and hold a relationship; I was embarrassed simply having a woman at my side. I just couldn’t find a life with the information that he’d left me, and I was trying to over and over again.All the early years I was with Patti, if we were in public I was very, very anxious. I could never sort that through, and I realised: “Well, yeah, these are the signals I got when I was very young: that a family doesn’t strengthen you, it weakens you. It takes away your opportunity. It takes away your manhood.” And this is what I carried with me for a long, long time. I lived in fear of that neutering, and so that meant I lived without the love, without the companionship, without a home. And you have your little bag of clothes and you get on that road and you just go from one place to the next.And you don’t notice it when you’re in your 20s. But, right around 30, something didn’t feel quite right. Did you have to deal with that at all?Obama So there’s some stuff that’s in common and then there’s stuff that tracks a little differently. So my father leaves when I’m two. And I don’t see him until I’m 10, when he comes to visit for a month in Hawaii.Springsteen What brought him to visit you eight years after he left?Obama So the story is that my father grows up in a small village in the north-western corner of Kenya. And he goes from herding goats to getting on a jet plane and flying to Hawaii and travelling to Harvard, and suddenly he’s an economist. And in that leap from living in a really rural, agricultural society to suddenly trying to pretend he’s this sophisticated man about town, something was lost. Something slipped. Although he was extraordinarily confident and charismatic and, by all accounts, could sort of run circles around people intellectually, emotionally, he was scarred and damaged in all kinds of ways that I can only retrace from the stories that I heard later, because I didn’t really know him. Anyway, when he’s a student in Hawaii, he meets my mother. I am conceived. I think the marriage comes after the conception.But then he gets a scholarship to go to Harvard and he decides: “Well, that’s where I need to go.” He’s willing to have my mother and me go with him, but I think there are cost issues involved and they separate. But they stay in touch. He goes back to Kenya, gets a government job, and he has another marriage and another set of kids.Springsteen When he comes back to visit you, he has another family …Obama He’s got another family, and I think he and his wife are in a bad spot. And I think he was probably trying to court my mother and to convince her to grab me and move all of us to Kenya, and my mother, who still loved him, was wise enough to realise that was probably a bad idea. But I do see him for a month. And … I don’t know what to make of him. Because he’s very foreign, right? He’s got a British accent and he’s got this booming voice and he takes up a lot of space. And everybody kind of defers to him because he’s just a big personality. And he’s trying to sort of tell me what to do.He’s like, “Anna” – that’s what he’d call my mother; her name was Ann – “Anna, I think that boy … he’s watching too much television. He should be doing his studies.” So I wasn’t that happy that he had showed up. And I was kind of eager for him to go. Because I had no way to connect to the guy. He’s a stranger who’s suddenly in our house.So he leaves. I never see him again. But we write. When I’m in college I decide: “If I’m going to understand myself better, I need to know him better.” So I write to him and I say: “Listen, I’m going to come to Kenya. I’d like to spend some time with you.” He says: “Ah, yes. I think that’s a very wise decision, you come here.” And then I get a phone call, probably about six months before I was planning to go, and he’s been killed in a car accident.But two things that I discovered, or understood, later. The first was just how much influence that one month that he was there had on me, in ways that I didn’t realise.He actually gave me my first basketball. So I’m suddenly obsessed with basketball. How’d that happen, right? But I remember that the other thing we did together was, he decided to take me to a Dave Brubeck concert. Now, this is an example of why I didn’t have much use for the guy, because, you know, you’re a 10-year-old American kid and some guy wants to take you to a jazz concert.Springsteen Take Five, you’re not going to love …Obama Take Five! So I’m sitting there and … I kind of don’t know what I’m doing there. It’s not until later that I look back and say: “Huh.” I become one of the few kids in my school who’s interested in jazz. And when I got older my mother would look at how I crossed my legs or gestures and she’d say: “It’s kind of spooky.”The second thing that I learned was, in watching his other male children – who I met and got to know later when I travelled to Kenya – I realised that, in some ways, it was probably good that I had not lived in his home. Because, much in the same way that your dad was struggling with a bunch of stuff, my dad was struggling, too. It created chaos and destruction and anger and hurt and long-standing wounds that I just did not have to deal with.Springsteen The thing that happens is: when we can’t get the love we want from the parent we want it from, how do you create the intimacy you need? I can’t get to him and I can’t have him. I’ll be him. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll be him … I’m way into my 30s before I even have any idea that that’s my method of operation. I’m on stage. I’m in workmen’s clothes. I’ve never worked a job in my life.My dad was a beefy, bulky guy. I’ve played freaking guitar my whole life, but I’ve got 20 or 30 extra pounds on me from hitting the gym. Where’d that come from? Why do I spend hours lifting up and putting down heavy things for no particular reason? My entire body of work, everything that I’ve cared about, everything that I’ve written about, draws from his life story.Here is where I was lucky. At 32, I go into hardcore analysis. I don’t have my children until I’m 40, so I’m eight years into looking into a lot of these things, because what I found out about that archetype was it was fucking destructive in my life. It drove away people I cared about. It kept me from knowing my true self. And I realised: “Well, if you wanna follow this road, go ahead. But you’re going to end up on your own, my friend. And if you want to invite some people into your life, you better learn how to do that.”And there’s only one way you do that: you’ve got to open the doors. And that archetype doesn’t leave a lot of room for those doors to be open because that archetype is a closed man. Your inner self is forever secretive and unknown: stoic, silent, not revealing of your feelings.Well, you’ve got to get rid of all of that stuff if you want a partnership. If you want a full family, and to be able to give them the kind of sustenance and nurture and room to grow they need in order to be themselves and find their own full lives, you better be ready to let a lot of that go, my friend.My dad never really spoke to me through [to] the day he died. He didn’t know how. He truly did not. He just didn’t have the skills at all. And once I understood how ill he was, it makes up for a lot of it. But when you’re a six-year-old or an eight-year-old or a nine-year-old boy, you’re not going to have an understanding of what your father is suffering with, and …Obama You end up wrestling with ghosts.Springsteen I guess that’s what we all do.Obama And ghosts are tricky because you are measuring yourself against someone who is not there. And, in some cases, I think people whose fathers aren’t there – and whose mothers are feeling really bitter about their fathers’ not being there – what they absorb is how terrible that guy was and you don’t want to be like that guy.In my mother’s case, she took a different tack, which was that she only presented his best qualities and not his worst. And in some ways that was beneficial, because I never felt as if I had some flawed inheritance; something in me that would lead me to become an alcoholic or an abusive husband or any of that. Instead, what happened was I kept on thinking: “Man, I got to live up to this.” Every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or live up to his mistakes.You know, Michelle wonders sometimes: “Why is it that you just feel so compelled to just do all this hard stuff ? I mean, what’s this hole in you that just makes you feel so driven?” And I think part of it was kind of early on feeling as if: “Man, I got to live up to this. I got to prove this. Maybe the reason he left is because he didn’t think it was worth staying for me, and no, I will show him that he made a mistake not hanging around, because I was worth investing in.”Springsteen You’re always trying to prove your worth. You’re on a lifetime journey of trying to prove your worth to …Obama Somebody that’s not there.Springsteen The trick is you have to turn your ghosts into ancestors. Ghosts haunt you. Ancestors walk alongside you and provide you with comfort and a vision of life that’s going to be your own. My father walks alongside me as my ancestor now. It took a long time for that to happen.This is a condensed and edited extract from Renegades: Born in the USA by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen. It is published on Tuesday (Viking, £35).TopicsPodcastsBarack ObamaBruce SpringsteenFamilyMenUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More
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