Open Letter to Women for Afghan Women from co-founders Sunita Viswanath and Masuda Sultan
April 25, 2022
We are cofounders and former board members of Women for Afghan Women (WAW). While we have both left the organization in protest, we are writing this open letter in response to WAW’s false public allegations about us, our meetings in Afghanistan, and our focus and activities related to Afghanistan. There is a pattern of refusal of the board to address these three major concerns which we have been consistently bringing up:
- Concern for staff and vulnerable women clients and children abandoned by WAW
- Concern about WAW’s inability or unwillingness to send over $10 million we raised together to support women and children in Afghanistan
- Concern over the WAW Executive Director’s mismanagement, including allegations of abuse and neglect, nepotism and corruption
We have raised all these concerns privately with WAW over the course of the 8 months since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, and in fact some of them for years prior to August 15th, warning of potentially dire consequences should they not be addressed. Three board members have left the organization because the women WAW exists to serve are no longer centered in the decisions being made, whether about evacuations or about programs, and our efforts to rectify this have been obstructed.
We traveled to Afghanistan three weeks ago as part of a Women’s Delegation for Peace and Education. On our trip, we met many former staff and beneficiaries of WAW and heard heart-wrenching testimony from former WAW clients who said they were dumped on the street from the organization’s shelters on August 15 just as the Taliban were taking power. We heard from WAW staff that the Executive Director of the organization instructed them to “get rid of” these women and children, was unresponsive to their requests for help, and as we know later, left the country. It was excruciatingly difficult to hear these harrowing testimonies of trauma and neglect and we apologized as cofounders of WAW and pledged to help in any way we can. We gave the former staff and clients some nominal funds on behalf of our delegation as part of our humanitarian aid effort. This was money we had raised on our own in the days before our trip, despite requesting to WAW to support these former staff and clients using the substantial funds we raised together, or to send financial support to other women’s NGOs on the ground that we knew were operating and could help them and others, or join us on the trip in order to learn the facts on the ground. WAW has refused all of these requests. Clients have had to beg on the streets while the organization was sitting on more than $10 million dollars collected in their names in the US since August 15. We are appalled that the organization we co-founded sat on this much money during near-famine conditions in Afghanistan in a bitter winter. We know other organizations were able to transfer funds and keep their work going, and their clients safe. It is a tragedy that after 21 years of building the largest Afghan women’s rights organization in the world, WAW failed to protect Afghan women in their greatest hour of need.
We also heard stories about the Executive Director’s abusive treatment of staff, corruption and nepotism (hiring of family members, and prioritization of family and friends on evacuation lists at the expense of defense lawyers and vulnerable clients). While we had raised some of these concerns in the past, the trip confirmed the depth and pervasiveness of this corruption. We were provided evidence of serious threats and retaliation to those who raised any of these issues.
We met with representatives of the interim government in various ministries and these meetings were not secret. We have spoken openly about this engagement which was one of the key goals of our delegation. Ours was the first American civil society delegation to Afghanistan since Aug 15th, and our meetings were an attempt at diplomacy: we advocated in every meeting for women’s rights, rights already granted by Islam.
WAW need not treat us as enemies of the organization, making false public accusations about us (see March 30th statement on the WAW website).
We assure you the last thing we would do is misrepresent ourselves as current WAW board members when we have left the organization on principle. WAW is still not addressing the issues related to the organization, the funds, the corruption, and vulnerable people who were under your care. We hope WAW will be transparent with donors about the disposition of funds, and address the other very serious issues raised by the 150 staff and clients who recently took great personal risk to conduct a protest in Kabul.
There are mountains of evidence to back up every claim we make in this letter, including video recordings of the staff and clients testimonies we heard in Kabul. We will continue to track down and personally assist the women WAW left behind, even without the support and partnership of the organization we built over 20 years and generously donated our time and resources to, because we see it as our duty and a commitment we made to them.
We are through with asking WAW to do anything at all. This letter is just to set the record straight about why we cofounders have stepped down and the seriousness of our disappointment in WAW.
— — Sunita Viswanath and Masuda Sultan
Masuda Sultan is a co-founder of Unfreeze Afghanistan. She is an Afghan-American women’s rights activist and entrepreneur who has been working for over 20 years in support of women and girls in education, vocational training and protection from violence. In 2008 Ms. Sultan was appointed as an advisor to the Ministry of Finance in Afghanistan. She is a co-founder of All in Peace, a coalition of organizations dedicated to bringing the longest war in American history to a peaceful end. She is a co-founder and former board member of Women for Afghan Women. Ms. Sultan currently serves on the Council on Foreign Relations Women and Foreign Policy Advisory Committee. Her memoir, My War at Home, was published in early 2006 by Simon & Schuster. She has an MPA from Harvard University.
Sunita Viswanath is a cofounder and former board member of the 21 year old women’s organization Women for Afghan Women. She is a progressive Hindu faith leader, and cofounder and Executive Director of Hindus for Human Rights. She is an advisory member of the advocacy organization Unfreeze Afghanistan. Sunita wrote this oped about the recent trip to Afghanistan.
