Sima Wali, who fled the Soviet-backed coup in Afghanistan in 1978 to wage what she called a “jihad for peace and equality” by women against “gender apartheid” imposed by the Communists and then by the Taliban, died on Sept. 22 at her home in Falls Church, Va. She was 66.
The cause was multiple system atrophy, a rare neurological disease, her nephew Suleiman Wali said.
Ms. Wali had worked for the American Embassy and the Peace Corps in Afghanistan in her 20s before the 1978 coup. She then settled in Washington, where she became a United States citizen and organized Refugee Women in Development, an advocacy group, now dissolved, that sought to empower victims of war and genocide.
She further championed the rights of Afghan women after the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to rout the Taliban, Islamic fundamentalists whom Washington accused of providing a haven for the terrorists who had masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks.
With the formation of a new Afghan government under United Nations auspices, Ms. Wali successfully lobbied to establish a Ministry of Women’s Affairs in Kabul, the country’s capital.
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The Taliban had stripped women of basic human rights and of previous gains by strictly enforcing Shariah, or Islamic religious law. In the introduction to “Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story” (2009), by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, Ms. Wali wrote of Afghan women:
“Traumatized and desperate, they constantly spoke of severe poverty, suicide and the growing hopelessness that saw their dreams for a free Afghanistan swallowed by an army of Islamist mercenaries from all over the world armed and supplied by Pakistan.”
She added: “I still hear their cries. During this entire time I carried with me their pleading voices and ultimately their screams, while the world looked away.”
She concluded, “Afghan women were the canaries in the mine shaft, bearing witness to the inhumanity of a regime against its own citizens.”
When she visited Afghanistan in 2005 under a program financed by the National Endowment for Democracy, a Washington foundation, Ms. Wali barely escaped being taken hostage near the Pakistani border by what she described as a mob of armed Taliban insurgents and other fundamentalists.
Still, she insisted that the problem in Afghanistan was not Islam but the Taliban.
“The Taliban is using culture and religion to keep women down,” she said in 1998 at a seminar for Afghan refugees in Pakistan, “but there is nothing in my religion that teaches keeping women at home, not educating them, starving them and withholding medical treatment from them so they die.”
She added, “Islam teaches us to care for and protect women.”
Earlier in the 20th century, the royal family of Afghanistan guaranteed universal suffrage and civil rights to women during one of several experiments with democracy.
The 1978 Communist coup was followed by a Soviet invasion and a 10-year struggle to resist it, then by a civil insurgency that culminated in the withdrawal of Soviet forces and a Taliban victory in 1996. The Taliban regime was overthrown during the American-led assault in 2001, but the war against the guerrillas goes on.
Ms. Wali often criticized the United States for supporting the guerrillas who had fought against the Soviet takeover and then morphed into the Taliban.
Sima Wali was born on April 7, 1951, in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Her father, Mohammad Wali, was manager of the Afghan National Bank and a cousin of King Amanullah Khan, who championed women’s rights in the 1920s. Her mother, the former Shafiqa Sharifi, supervised a clothing factory.
Sima spent her early childhood in India, where her father was posted and where she was educated in English. After the family returned to Afghanistan, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Kabul University.
She earned a master’s in international relations from the School of International Service at American University in Washington. Her parents joined her in Washington after escaping from a Communist jail, where they had been held for a month.
She is survived by two sisters, Sohaila and Soraya Wali, and four brothers, Ahmad, Jahed, Zia and Abdul Wali. Ms. Wali was married at one time, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1987, her family said.
She received the Amnesty International Ginetta Sagan Fund Award in 1999 and the Gloria Steinem Women of Vision Award from the Ms. Foundation for Women in 1989.
In 2001, Ms. Wali was one of three female delegates to a meeting in Germany, sponsored by the United Nations, that led to the Bonn Agreement, which formed a new Afghan government after the American-led invasion and, as she had called for, created a Ministry of Women’s Affairs.
In 2002, she spoke at the United Nations’ celebration of International Women’s Day in New York. She was also a founder of the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, a feminist think tank, based in Montreal.
Ms. Wali was profiled in a 2004 documentary film by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, “The Woman in Exile Returns: The Sima Wali Story.”
“I no longer fear that Afghanistan will again be abandoned,” she wrote in 2009. “My fear today is that despite all the initial good intentions, America’s overreliance on military methods, targeted missile strikes, chemical spraying, and imprisoning and torturing suspected militants has turned popular opinion in the wrong direction.
“Combined with an inability to improve the lives of the average Afghan by even a small measure,” she added, “America is now viewed as an occupier, instead of the friend and ally we want her to be.”
A peripatetic self-described “voice for the politically voiceless,” Ms. Wali learned of her degenerative neurological disorder in 2005. The disease gradually reduced her mobility and even her ability to speak.
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