Need to be heard

“The women and the girls of Afghanistan have earned the right to be heard, to take their place in society openly, as they have done behind the scenes for decades, if not centuries."    Nada Al-Nashif is Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights and has been serving the United Nations for almost 30 years. Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, her life was turned upside down with the Iraqi invasion of 1990, when her family was forced to flee and leave everything behind to rebuild their lives in Jordan.     Following her uprooting, Nada took her first UN job in Libya during Gaddafi's rule, and then served across other conflict zones, including Lebanon and Iraq. In the late 1990s she travelled to Afghanistan as part of a UNDP team negotiating with the Taliban to open girls’ schools.    Nada also experienced one of the darkest days in the UN’s history. On 19 August 2003, a truck packed with a tonne of explosives blew up the UN’s headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 colleagues, including the UN’s Special Representative for Iraq Sergio Vieira de Mello. “It's hard to accept but you need to because you cannot keep asking ‘Why was I there? Why me? Why not me?’” she says. Nada explains how her own injuries act as a constant reminder of human vulnerability and the blessing of having survived to tell the story.