TORONTO –– Dr. Sima Samar is going home, finally, to a country left destitute and suffering by decades of instability, where people lack food, identity papers and the semblance of an economy.

Her task back in Afghanistan, as deputy premier and minister of women's affairs, is to restore the rights of women trying to recover from the oppression of Taliban rule, under which they had to cover themselves head-to-foot and were forbidden from working or attending school.

Whatever the obstacles, Samar said in a telephone interview Thursday with The Associated Press, "I think that the situation will not be harder than it was in the past years" under the Taliban.

Samar, 44, was named one of two women in the six-month transitional Cabinet agreed to Wednesday by Afghan negotiators at U.N.-sponsored talks in Germany. She didn't expect it, and was in Canada to receive a human rights award when her son telephoned to deliver the news.

She said returning to Kabul after living in exile in Pakistan would be "a dream come true," but made clear she knows the task is formidable.

"It's a short time," she said of the six-month mandate of the interim government. "For the six months, the big challenge will be to feed the people, to help them survive."

Speaking from Calgary, Alberta, Samar said her hope was that the interim leadership can install a working system with police and other services to provide stability.

"If they are able to implement security in the country, then the women will feel confident to go out and go to school and work," she said. "You need stability and security first."

The U.N.-brokered deal reached in Germany gave most posts in the interim Cabinet to the northern alliance, which has captured most of the country backed by U.S. forces. The Cabinet is due to take power on Dec. 22.

The deal reflected international pressure to include women after years of suppression by the Taliban and to strike a balance among Afghanistan's ethnic groups. Delegates said a ministry of women's affairs was only created in a late compromise at the insistence of Sima Wali, a U.S.-based activist for Afghan women's rights.

Samar, from the minority Hazari, got the post and one of five deputy premier designations, while another woman, Suhaila Seddiqi, will be health minister under Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun tribal leader named prime minister.

Samar fled Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion of 1979, in which her first husband was killed. She worked as a doctor in a refugee camp in Pakistan and opened a hospital there in 1987.

She also ran schools in rural Afghanistan as well as a school for refugee girls in Quetta, Pakistan. Literacy programs established by her organization were accompanied by distribution of food aid and information on hygiene and family planning.

She talked about the challenges of restoring women's right to vote, for example, because it would means providing identity papers, which are almost nonexistent.

She expects support from women at home and abroad because of her reputation, including her efforts to publicize the Taliban treatment of women.

Samar revealed that she was the unidentified Afghan woman who appeared in a burqa with her face covered at a February 1998 news conference in Brussels with European Union Human Rights Commissioner Emma Bonino.

At the news conference, Samar identified herself as an Afghan doctor but refused to give her name. She told how the under the Taliban, Afghan women were forbidden from walking alone on the street, going to school or working.

"I was there, speaking but under the burqa," Samar recalled Thursday. "I didn't mention my identity because I didn't want to risk it."

Now she is going back as the top woman in government.

"It was really a dream to go back, even without this position," she said. "I'd be really happy to do my previous work, just as a simple citizen."