Thank you very much.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here today. I'm going to try to get in a couple of different questions.
First of all, I would just say parenthetically that I appreciated hearing Ms. Valji's comments about the value of a Security Council bid, and I think all of us here would hope to see Canada play that role. Our hope in particular though is that Canada, in the process of trying to achieve that seat, does not sacrifice our values in the pursuit of that role, that we don't end up, let's say, doing too much to cozy up to regimes that don't respect our values and don't respect human rights.
I want to ask Ms. Valji one question that interests me.
We hear often in the west narratives of helplessness and rescue when it comes to women in conflict zones, and sometimes we mistakenly buy into this idea that women in some of these situations are totally helpless and that we in the west need to jump in and fix the situation for them. But there's a lot of evidence in many conflict zones, of course, that there are networks of strong women that are resisting oppression on their own, sometimes with clandestine networks, and it's just the importance of identifying and working with those networks.
I was reading something recently by Elaheh Rostami-Povey about the situation in Afghanistan. I just want to read this quote because I think it's interesting:
As we have seen, a great many women school and university teachers were engaged in teaching girls, young women, and some boys in their neighbourhoods.
This is describing the situation under the Taliban.
The homes of these women and others with specific skills became community homes, financed and managed entirely by women, mainly for girls and women, but also for boys. It was by word of mouth that women and girls spread the news about the secret schools to other women and girls. They hid their books, notebooks, pens and pencils under their borga, risked their lives and went to the secret schools everyday.
I found that interesting as a description of what was happening under the Taliban. I would be curious to hear your comments about how we in the west avoid this narrative of helplessness and instead can identify and work with and empower these networks of women working in potentially very oppressive situations to make sure that we're using all the resources that are available.