Entrenched patriarchy and illegal use of Sharia law in Bangladesh led to raped girl being lashed to death for adultery

CNN - March 29, 2011

Only 14, Bangladeshi girl charged with adultery was lashed to death

By Farid Ahmed and Moni Basu, CNN

Shariatpur, Bangladesh (CNN) -- Hena Akhter's last words to her mother proclaimed her innocence. But it was too late to save the 14-year-old girl.

Her fellow villagers in Bangladesh's Shariatpur district had already passed harsh judgment on her. Guilty, they said, of having an affair with a married man. The imam from the local mosque ordered the fatwa, or religious ruling, and the punishment: 101 lashes delivered swiftly, deliberately in public.

Hena dropped after 70.

Bloodied and bruised, she was taken to hospital, where she died a week later.

Amazingly, an initial autopsy report cited no injuries and deemed her death a suicide. Hena's family insisted her body be exhumed. They wanted the world to know what really happened to their daughter.

Sharia: illegal but still practiced

Hena's family hailed from rural Shariatpur, crisscrossed by murky rivers that lend waters to rice paddies and lush vegetable fields.

Hena was the youngest of five children born to Darbesh Khan, a day laborer, and his wife, Aklima Begum. They shared a hut made from corrugated tin and decaying wood and led a simple life that was suddenly marred a year ago with the return of Hena's cousin Mahbub Khan.

Mahbub Khan came back to Shariatpur from a stint working in Malaysia. His son was Hena's age and the two were in seventh grade together.

Khan eyed Hena and began harassing her on her way to school and back, said Hena's father. He complained to the elders who run the village about his nephew, three times Hena's age.

The elders admonished Mahbub Khan and ordered him to pay $1,000 in fines to Hena's family. But Mahbub was Darbesh's older brother's son and Darbesh was asked to let the matter fade.

Many months later on a winter night, as Hena's sister Alya told it, Hena was walking from her room to an outdoor toilet when Mahbub Khan gagged her with cloth, forced her behind nearby shrubbery and beat and raped her.

Hena struggled to escape, Alya told CNN. Mahbub Khan's wife heard Hena's muffled screams and when she found Hena with her husband, she dragged the teenage girl back to her hut, beat her and trampled her on the floor.

The next day, the village elders met to discuss the case at Mahbub Khan's house, Alya said. The imam pronounced his fatwa. Khan and Hena were found guilty of an illicit relationship. Her punishment under sharia or Islamic law was 101 lashes; his 201.

Mahbub Khan managed to escape after the first few lashes.

Darbesh Khan and Aklima Begum had no choice but to mind the imam's order. They watched as the whip broke the skin of their youngest child and she fell unconscious to the ground.

"What happened to Hena is unfortunate and we all have to be ashamed that we couldn't save her life," said Sultana Kamal, who heads the rights organization Ain o Shalish Kendro.

Bangladesh is considered a democratic and moderate Muslim country, and national law forbids the practice of sharia. But activist and journalist Shoaib Choudhury, who documents such cases, said sharia is still very much in use in villages and towns aided by the lack of education and strong judicial systems.

The Supreme Court also outlawed fatwas a decade ago, but human rights monitors have documented more than 500 cases of women in those 10 years who were punished through a religious ruling. And few who have issued such rulings have been charged.

Last month, the court asked the government to explain what it had done to stop extrajudicial penalty based on fatwa. It ordered the dissemination of information to all mosques and madrassas, or religious schools, that sharia is illegal in Bangladesh.

"The government needs to enact a specific law to deal with such perpetrators responsible for extrajudicial penalty in the name of Islam," Kamal told CNN.

The United Nations estimates that almost half of Bangladeshi women suffer from domestic violence and many also commonly endure rape, beatings, acid attacks and even death because of the country's entrenched patriarchal system.

Hena might have quietly become another one of those statistics had it not been for the outcry and media attention that followed her death on January 31.

'Not even old enough to be married'

Monday, the doctors responsible for Hena's first autopsy faced prosecution for what a court called a "false post-mortem report to hide the real cause of Hena's death."

Public outrage sparked by that autopsy report prompted the high court to order the exhumation of Hena's body in February. A second autopsy performed at Dhaka Medical College Hospital revealed Hena had died of internal bleeding and her body bore the marks of severe injuries.

Police are now conducting an investigation and have arrested several people, including Mahbub Khan, in connection with Hena's death.

"I've nothing to demand but justice," said Darbesh Khan, leading a reporter to the place where his daughter was abducted the night she was raped.

He stood in silence and took a deep breath. She wasn't even old enough to be married, he said, testament to Hena's tenderness in a part of the world where many girls are married before adulthood. "She was so small."

Hena's mother, Aklima, stared vacantly as she spoke of her daughter's last hours. She could barely get out her words. "She was innocent," Aklima said, recalling Hena's last words.

Police were guarding Hena's family earlier this month. Darbesh and Aklima feared reprisal for having spoken out against the imam and the village elders.

They had meted out the most severe punishment for their youngest daughter. They could put nothing past them.

Journalist Farid Ahmed reported from Shariatpur, Bangladesh, and CNN's Moni Basu reported from Atlanta.

This article was found at:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/29/bangladesh.lashing.death/index.html

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Calgary Herald - Canada February 20, 2011

Canada's Oprah shines light on 'honour' killings

BY MARK MILKE | CALGARY HERALD Columnist


Back in the mid-1990s, a reporter asked Oprah Winfrey why she rarely interviewed victims of domestic abuse any longer. She replied that when her show started, many were reluctant to discuss such topics publicly. That silence ensured too many people would not seek help. But years later, public intolerance of abuse was widespread and she thought such interviews were largely unnecessary.

Oprah's comments came to mind again after a recent conversation with Aruna Papp. Unlike Oprah, Papp is not a household name. But most readers might recall an issue she helped pitch into Canada's public consciousness last summer: "honour" killings.

That subject was not new. That a father, son or other male relative murdered a daughter, sister or wife for "dishonour" had already made headlines in Canada over the past decade. But Papp's study, Culturally-Driven Violence Against Women, garnered significant media, policy and political attention because it put such violence in its proper context.

Papp's work was notable for its bold assertion that these killings were culturespecific, i.e., that while domestic violence occurs everywhere, such murders resulted from specific cultural norms (including some anti-women religious assumptions) prevalent in southeast Asian communities. To combat such violence on an educational and social work level at least, it thus needed to be addressed in that framework.

A social worker who has laboured extensively in Toronto's newer ethnic communities, Papp knows of what she speaks. Growing up in India, her father was abusive; so too was her first husband (15 years her senior, a union that resulted from an arranged marriage when she was just 17).

In her first marriage, Papp long feared for her life even after her divorce, as her ex-husband, her parents and even her grandmother "could kill me and she would get away with it," said Papp in our recent exchange. It wasn't until she had been in Canada for many years (she arrived in 1972) that Papp began to carve out an independent life.

Papp has her critics. Some come from the enclaves where such murders take place and where too many are silent, perhaps out of fear, or in some cases, out of a cultural bias that should be challenged. But just as often, the most predictable critics are young, urban, university educated white women who think culture can never be blamed for anything.

Such reticence is found among those who elevate open-mindedness above observation and thus make tolerance the mortal enemy of moral clarity. Such myopic, morally relativistic tolerance-first types can see faults in their own culture, but they are blind to the warts that exist in other cultures.

The same critics also have a weird guilt complex about pointing out the obvious: One's belief system will affect one's actions. So to get to the root of a problem -"honour" killings in this case -one must first acknowledge religious and cultural assumptions that can be deadly.

Had undesirable aspects of western culture and its traditional religion been off limits over the past half millennium, the freeing of slaves, women's suffrage and independence, and a thousand other desirable outcomes would have been stifled. In the West, certain cultural presuppositions based upon Christian scriptures were properly challenged. That included selected biblical admonitions that treated women as chattel and approved of slavery.

As applied to other cultures and religions today, a critique of certain beliefs -an over-emphasis on honour or tribalism -should not be read as damning the entire culture, religion or those who participate in the same. When Papp's study was released (which I commissioned at the think-tank that then employed me), one fellow e-mailed me and was insulted because he thought his community was broadbrushed. Wrong. That's the point about individuality: Others may define you by culture, gender or orientation; you may define yourself according to an entirely different set of characteristics (maybe nationalism, political beliefs, your attitude to nature or religion).

The present difference between the domestic abuse in the communities identified by Papp and in mainstream Canadian society is in the motivation and in the subsequent response of such communities. When Mel Gibson was angry and accused of violence by his ex-girlfriend last year, no one excused his behaviour on the grounds that his girlfriend offended the family or community honour. That's not yet the case in all communities where murders for reasons of "honour" have taken place, though I suspect many women in such communities silently cheer on Papp's frank analysis.

Papp's observational honesty and toughness will bring positive change on this file for years, and not just in Canada. Her work on culturally-driven violence (which includes a book later this year) parallels the early efforts of Oprah: to shine a light on attitudes that must first be exposed if they are ever to be disinfected.


This article was found at:

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Canada+Oprah+shines+light+honour+killings/4316558/story.html

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BBC News  -  UK    February 10, 2011


Murdered by her father for becoming a Western woman

By Duncan Kennedy  |  BBC News, Rome


Hina Saleem paid the ultimate price.

A 20-year old Pakistani woman who lived in northern Italy, she was murdered by her father who claimed he was "saving the family's honour".

Mohammed Saleem said he didn't like the way Hina was living her life and told the authorities she brought shame on his family.

So he slit her throat. Twenty-eight times.

"I didn't want to kill her," he pleads, "I wanted her to come back home".

Hina's family helped her father bury her in his back garden

Mohammed Saleem has spoken from his prison cell, where he's serving 30 years for the murder.

The BBC has been given access to that interview which gives a rare insight into the mind of a perpetrator of "honour killing".Treason

"I'm a good father," insists Saleem. "My daughter was good before. She was very, very good. Then, all of a sudden, she changed."

Hina's father felt his daughter's lifestyle had changed "all of a sudden"

For Mohammed Saleem, the thing that changed, "all of a sudden", was Hina's lifestyle. She had come to Italy as an Asian girl, but had grown into a Western woman.

She refused an arranged marriage, she smoked and she lived with an Italian boyfriend. For Hina, this was normal. For her father, this was treason.

To him, she represented a threat to his pride, dignity and standing in the Pakistani community.

To have a "wayward" daughter like Hina was, in his view of the world, an unacceptable challenge to his position.

For "wayward", read Western. Hina, he was saying, was effectively betraying her roots, traditions, culture and religion by embracing the more liberal life of a European teenager.

"I didn't want my daughter to be too free," Saleem says from prison.

This was murder, but it was a calculated, slow-burn murder.

Saleem said he did not want his daughter to be free

'Double conflict'

Hina's transition from the apple of her father's eye, to the victim of his murderous rage, is now the subject of a new book called Hina: This is my life.

One of the authors, Marco Ventura, says father and daughter were on a complicated collision course from the moment they arrived in Italy.

"In this story there is a double conflict," says Marco. "There is a conflict between cultures and a conflict between generations, between father and daughter."

Although the murder itself was Saleem's sole enterprise, the project was not. He garnered support from other members of the extended family to bury her in his own back garden.

He rationalises the act of burial like this: "When she died, the only thing I wanted, was to bring her back home."

The co-author of the new book, Giommaria Monti, has given this much thought.

"The parents no longer spoke the same language as their daughter," he says. "Burying her in the garden of the family home brought her back to where she belonged. Hina was their possession."

Global problem

Hina Saleem's murder, of course, is not unique.

The United Nations Population Fund believes that, globally, as many as 5,000 women and girls are killed each year by members of their own family in the name of "honour".

Men, too, are targeted if, for example, they marry outside their caste or religion. But these cases are much rarer than those involving women.

The physical task of "restoring honour", of exacting a price, mostly falls to men.

The legal task of bringing the killers to justice falls to the authorities, but many countries have, what might be called, an accommodating attitude toward such honour-motivated killings.

In the penal codes of countries like Argentina, Ecuador and Syria, there is even a partial, or complete defence, for such killings.

In other words, some societies take an almost tolerant view towards "honour killings", regarding them as a kind of sub-species on the murder spectrum, especially if their purpose is to uphold widely supported virtues and standards.

In Italy itself, there was a legal defence to this form of murder until 1981. That has now been repealed.

Activists working to draw attention to the problem say Western societies must share the blame for their collective inaction.

Souad Sbai, an Italian member of Parliament, founded the Association of Moroccan Women in Italy, a group that speaks out about such cases.

"Cases of 'honour killings' represent a failure of the system of multiculturalism," she says. "We continue to underestimate the problem, because these ethnic groups live their own lives with little integration, especially for women."

"They have very little control in communities where men try to perpetuate the lives and customs they lived in their home country," says Souad.

Mohammed Saleem still feels Hina shamed him, but he now claims he regrets killing her. Not because he lost his daughter, but because of the effect of his murder on the rest of his family.

"It's not only Hina who died," he says "My whole family died. Without my son, without my wife, this is not a life," he says, with a hefty measure of self-pity.

The purpose of talking to a convicted murderer was not to evoke sympathy, but to try to understand.

Did her violent death restore his family's "honour"?

Well, as the family has now been split apart, it's a tainted, diluted kind of restoration, if it did.

Hina's appalling, avoidable, fate shows a very expensive price has been paid.


This article was found at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12416394

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The Guardian  -  UK    February 3, 2011

Bangladeshi girl, 14, dies after receiving 100 lashes

Four arrested and another 14 hunted by police, accused of taking part in lashing ordered by village court

by Fariha Karim in Dhaka


Four people have been arrested in Bangladesh after the death of a 14-year-old girl who was given 100 lashes on the orders of a village cleric. [see related article below]

Mosammet Hena died in hospital on Sunday after being beaten with a bamboo cane for allegedly having an illicit relationship with a married cousin. A complaint had been made against her by the man's wife, Shilpi Begum, at a makeshift village court, or shalish, presided over by senior community members.

Shilpi has now been arrested on suspicion of murder alongside three villagers including imam Mofiz Uddin, who allegedly issued the edict. Another 14 villagers who are accused of taking part in the public lashing, or of being complicit in the girl's murder by failing to prevent her from being whipped, are still being hunted by police.

"What sort of justice is this? My daughter has been beaten to death in the name of justice," Mosammet's father, Dorbesh Khan, 60, told the BBC.

Mosammet was buried yesterday in her family graveyard in Naria, Shariatpur, about 40 miles south of the capital, Dhaka.

Police said Shilpi told the shalish she had seen Mosammet speaking to her husband, Mahbub, 40, near their home. The shalish ruled that Mosammet and Mahbub should each be flogged 100 times, according to Assistant Superintendent Talebur Rahman. Mosammet was dragged inside a house by about 20 to 25 people, including four women. She collapsed unconscious halfway through and was taken to hospital, where she died a week later. Mahbub, who was beaten by his father, is said by police to be on the run.

The case has sent shockwaves around Bangladesh, where punishments in the name of fatwa – a religious edict – have been outlawed since last year. Authorities were ordered by the high court to act to stop punishments, and told that a failure to do so breached their constitutional duties.

Since Mosammet's death lawyers have filed a case against the government at the court, and a team of investigators from a human rights organisation has travelled to the village. Its director of investigations, Nur Khan Liton, said: "This is an absolutely horrific crime. It shows that despite court judgments banning punishments in the name of fatwa, an aggressively religious group who are capable of committing such barbaric crimes of torture against women are still present in our society."

Local media have reported that Mosammet was raped by Mahbub and Shilpi heard her cries, then came out and began beating her. Police do not accept this.

• This article was amended on 4 February 2011. The original gave the name of one of the arrested as Shilpi Begum, and Begum thereafter. In Bangladesh, Begum is a title that is roughly equivalent to Mrs and so should not have been mistaken as the woman's surname. This has been corrected.

This article was found at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/03/bangladeshi-girl-100-lashes

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The Guardian  -  UK   February 10, 2011

Bangladesh whipping case: three doctors investigated for claiming teenage girl had no signs of injury

Second autopsy on body of Hena Akhter, 14, found multiple wounds 'of a homicidal nature'

by Fariha Karim in Dhaka


Three doctors are being investigated by authorities in Bangladesh after they claimed to have found no signs of injury in the postmortem examination of a teenage girl who was whipped to death under a fatwa.

Hena Akhter, 14, died in hospital 11 days ago after she was sentenced to 101 lashes by village elders and clerics who alleged she had been having an affair with her married cousin.

After a postmortem at her district hospital, doctors in Shariatpur, around 60km south of the capital, Dhaka, said they could find no signs of injury.

But Hena's body was exhumed on Tuesday night on orders from the High Court, and a second autopsy concluded that she had died from internal bleeding and septicaemia caused by wounds "of a homicidal nature" on her scalp, abdomen, back, chest, arms and legs.

At the High Court, Justice AHM Shamsuddin Chowdhury ordered the ministry of health to investigate the three doctors who carried out the first postmortem on suspicion of medical negligence, raising the possibility that they had been pressed into suppressing signs of injuries. "There is a world of difference between these two reports," he told Shariatpur civil surgeon, Mohammad Sarwar. "Your postmortem report showed no injuries. The second one is full of injuries. If this is shown to the court, will anyone be punished? No. You are playing with the law and with people's lives."

Asked to explain how a girl who had been widely known to have been whipped to death was found with no injuries, Sarwar claimed it was because staff were "less experienced" than in Dhaka.

The court also heard how the hospital's residential medical officer, Dr Nirmal Chandra Das, had claimed Hena was suffering from convulsions due to hysteria.

Hena's death has provoked widespread outrage in Bangladesh, where punishments in the name of fatwa – a religious edict – were outlawed last July.

Police are treating the case as murder and have arrested six villagers, including a Muslim cleric. Mahbub Alam, 35, with whom Hena was alleged to have been having the affair, has also been arrested after nine days on the run. A court in Shariatpur has given police five days to question him.

Hena's family say that Mahbub attacked her the night before she was punished. They allege that his wife Shilpi then raised a complaint with the shalish – a makeshift village council – claiming that the two cousins had been having an affair.

The schoolgirl was given 40 to 50 lashes with a wet cloth twisted into a rope before she collapsed unconscious, her family said. Mahbub, who was sentenced to 201 lashes, managed to escape after four or five, according to Hena's sister.

Police officers who first responded to the case are now facing investigation by the inspector general of police after Hena's father, Darbesh Khan, told the court that they had failed to record claims Mahbub had raped Hena before attacking her. "My daughter was tied up, grabbed and raped," he said. "I told the policeman that."

Justice Chowdhury ordered the religious affairs ministry to end funding for madrasas and mosques that issue fatwas, so that "no fatwa can ever take place in this republic again", along with fresh demands for the information ministry to circulate guidelines stating that punishments in the name of fatwa are illegal.

Although punishments under fatwa were outlawed in July, Hena's case is the second known to have taken place since then. Last December, a woman died after being whipped 40 times after she was accused by a village court of having an affair with her stepson.

The latest to be detained in connection with the incident is Idris Ali, who was arrested as he left the courtroom following orders to attend the hearing. He is said to have been a member of the panel that issued the punishment.



This article was found at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/10/bangladesh-whipping-three-doctors-investigated 

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The National Post - Canada January 16, 2011

Ottawa seeks ways to stop 'honour killings'

by Linda Nguyen, Postmedia News


TORONTO— They are disturbing stories of fathers trying to kill their daughters, of brothers murdering their sisters.

Long prevalent in certain Muslim, Hindu and Sikh cultures in South Asia and the Middle East, “honour killings” have increasingly been making headlines in Canada in recent years.

Now, the federal government is urging more community groups to come forward to help fight the rise of such crimes.

Status of Women Minister Rona Ambrose first called for a pitch from organizations for projects targeting this type of violence in July.

Since then, the department has received a couple of dozen formal applications but says it still has more funding that can be put toward helping eradicate these “intolerable”acts.

Since 2002, experts say, there have been 13 honour killings in Canada.

“We continue to encourage women’s groups and other community-based organizations to apply . . . for support for projects that explore, expose and (contribute) to ending violence against women, including honour-motivated violence,” said the minister’s spokeswoman, Rebecca Thompson, in a recent email.

Just over $2-million was set aside to fund initiatives curbing violence against women. So far, about $800,000 has been allocated to three projects in the Greater Toronto Area aimed at empowering women, particularly immigrants, to learn about their rights and to speak out against abuse.

Honour-based crimes or killings are usually committed by a man against a woman who is seen as having brought “shame” on their family. This perception has been triggered by such things as the woman not dressing in traditional clothing, embracing too much of “Western” culture or even just looking at a man of whom her family does not approve.

Since 2002, experts say, there have been 13 honour killings in Canada.

In July, Ms. Ambrose hinted that the Conservatives wanted to draw more attention to the growing issue and were looking at making honour killings a separate indictable offence under the Criminal Code. A Justice Department official quickly refuted the claim, though.

Ms. Thompson said the minister is not now pursuing that option, and one expert agreed that is the right choice.

“Honour killings should be treated as first-degree murder,” said Amin Muhammad, a psychiatrist at Memorial University in Newfoundland who studies honour killings. “The public should be aware of the sensitivity and we should recognize it as an honour-based crime, but there should be no separate law.”

Mr. Muhammad said the issue is not necessarily cultural, but another example of domestic violence. If it were made a separate offence, it would make it easier for defendants to argue that they themselves are victims of a “cultural trend,” wrongly paving the way for more lenient sentences., he said. It may also perpetuate stereotypes that honour killings only occur in certain cultures or religions.

“We should not be focusing on any particular group or culture,” he said. “Honour killings can happen to anybody in Canada.”

Mr. Muhammad said the government should establish a committee to closely monitor the issue.

Last year, a Toronto man was sentenced to five years in prison for trying to run over his daughter, her boyfriend and his son-in-law with a speeding minivan. The Sri Lankan man apparently disapproved of his daughter’s boyfriend, who came from a family of a lower caste.

In October, the pre-trial motions began in the case against a Montreal couple and their son accused of killing three teenage sisters and the husband’s first wife in a submerged car in the Rideau Canal in Kingston, Ont.

Mohammad Shafia; his wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya; and their son, Hamed, face four counts each of first-degree murder in the deaths of their 19-, 17- and 13-year-old daughters, and the death of Shafia’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad.

Authorities have alleged that perceived “immoral behaviour” was behind the killings.

In June, Muhammad Parvez and his son, Waqas Parvez both pleaded guilty to murdering 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez on Dec. 20, 2007. The girl from Mississauga, Ont., was killed by her father and brother for apparently refusing to wear a hijab head covering.

This article was found at:

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/Ottawa+seeks+ways+stop+honour+killings/4116903/story.html


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The Guardian - UK December 9, 2010

Afghan women still suffer horrendous abuse, says United Nations report

Report shows that forced marriages, 'honour' killings and women resorting to self-immolation still prevalent

by Jon Boone in Kabul


Bibi Aisha, the Afghan girl whose nose and ears were cut off by her husband, was a "lucky victim" because she survived her attack and got help, a top human rights official in the country said yesterday.

While Aisha escaped her abusive family, the deputy chairman of the country's Independent Human Rights Commission said that many women in similar circumstances were less lucky. "For sure, we have hundreds of Bibi Aishas in Afghanistan," said Ahmad Fahim Hakim.

His remarks came after the news that one of the men responsible for attacking Aisha had been arrested, a development hailed by human rights workers as a sign the Afghan authorities are starting to take deep-rooted abuse of women seriously. [SEE ARTICLE BELOW]

Hakim was speaking during the publication of a major UN report that showed that, despite improvements in women's rights – long touted as a major goal of the US-led intervention in Afghanistan – the country is still blighted by forced marriages, the giving away of infant girls to future husbands to settle disputes, 'honour' killings and desperate women resorting to death by self-immolation.

The report by the UN's Afghanistan mission said that such practices are problem in all communities and cause "suffering, humiliation and marginalisation for millions of Afghan women and girls".

Despite recent efforts to toughen laws designed to protect women, the government does little to combat abuses. For example, the law on elimination of violence against women, which was regarded by rights activists as a major step forward when it came into effect in August last year, is not being enforced in many rural areas, where officials have not even heard of it, the report said.

One long-observed tradition covered by the report is the concept of baad, where a young girl will be given in marriage to settle disputes between families.

"Many of the women told us that, instead of the murderer being punished, an innocent girl is punished and has to spend her life in slavery and subject to cruel violence," said Georgette Gagnon, the UN's director of human rights in Kabul.

The head of Afghanistan's only specialist burns unit is quoted saying that forced marriages are the main cause of women who try to kill themselves by setting themselves on fire.

According to figures quoted in the report, in 57% of Afghan marriages one of the partners is younger than 16.

THE REPORT PRESS RELEASE:

HARMFUL TRADITIONAL PRACTICES THAT VIOLATE WOMEN’S RIGHTS
WIDESPREAD IN AFGHANISTAN: SPEEDY IMPLEMENTATION OF THE LAW ON
ELIMINATION OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN NEEDED

http://unama.unmissions.org/Portals/UNAMA/Press%20Releases/HUMAN%20RIGHTS%20REPORT%20PRESS%20RELEASE%209%20DEC%202010%20%5BENG%5D.pdf


This article was found at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/09/afghan-women-abuse-united-nations

************************************************************************************

The Guardian - UK December 8, 2010

Father of mutilated Afghan girl fears attackers will escape law

Captured father-in-law could evade justice despite allegedly helping relatives to cut off girl's nose and ears

by Jon Boone in Kabul


The father of an Afghan girl whose nose and ears were sliced off by her relatives, says he fears the culprits will never be brought to justice despite the arrest of the main accomplice.

Mohammadzai, the father of Bibi Aisha, whose mutilated face shocked the world when she was featured on the front cover of Time magazine, said he welcomed the fact that his daughter's father-in-law had been captured, but worried that the man could be released illegally.

"I want the hardest punishment that the law of Afghanistan has, but he is from a big family and he has money," he said. "It is just a matter of knowing the right person in Uruzgan and you can get out of prison."

Afghanistan's courts and police force are notoriously corrupt and open to bribes. Even when convictions are successful the government has pardoned well-connected drug traffickers and, in one case, a group of three gang rapists.

Local officials have also expressed doubt about the chances of the family of Aisha, who is now 20, winning such a case, which in the conservative southern province of Uruzgan, where the crime happened, has not attracted the same outrage as it has around the world.

Today, neither the police nor the provincial attorney general were able to say if, or when, the case would go to trial.

Mohammadzai was speaking after it emerged that one of the prime suspects was arrested almost two weeks ago after he emerged from the Taliban controlled village, where he had been hiding, to go to a nearby market.

The father-in-law of Aisha, Haji Mullah Sulaiman, is said to have helped restrain her while family members, including her husband, Qudratullah, cut off her nose and ears, as a punishment for her running away. Two other relatives, in addition to Sulaiman and his son, are also suspects in the case.

When confronted by police, Sulaiman attempted to flee but was successfully arrested after shots were fired in the air near a house he had bolted into.

Mohammadzai said Sulaiman had been in hiding in Pakistan immediately after the attack on Aisha but that he had returned to his home district in the southern province of Uruzgan sometime in the last month.

Qudratullah, Aisha's teenage husband, is believed to be still hiding in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

Uruzgan's police chief, Juma Gul Hemat, confirmed the arrest and claimed that Sulaiman had accepted responsibility for the crime. Hemat said Sulaiman had told him that his family had become angry with Aisha after she criticised her new marital home and spent too much time in her father's house.

Controversy has surrounded the use of the harrowing photograph of Aisha by Time to illustrate the brutality of the Taliban who, Aisha says, convened a special "court" to authorise the punishment of her after she fled, at the age of 18, from her abusive in-laws.

The Taliban have denied the claim and condemned the incident as "barbaric". Although the Taliban try to protect themselves from bad publicity, some observers see the case as a purely domestic dispute mixed up with a particularly ugly version of justice that has been meted out in rural Afghanistan for centuries.

Mohammadzai insisted that the maiming of his daughter was a heinous crime "condemned by everyone in Afghanistan", but he has reportedly had to go into hiding because the local community has refused to support him.

To add further confusion, Sulaiman told the BBC yesterday that it was Aisha's own family who proposed the punishment. "I am innocent," he said. "Aisha's father is accusing me. He had proposed to me to kill her because she had brought shame on him after she fled her house."

After a local BBC reporter interviewed him in his prison cell, authorities refused all other requests to speak to him.

Aisha went to California for reconstructive surgery and to be fitted with a prosthetic nose. She is expected to remain there for months to come.

This article was found at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/08/afghan-father-aisha-justice-escape


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New York Times - November 7, 2010

For Afghan Wives, a Desperate, Fiery Way Out

By ALISSA J. RUBIN


HERAT, Afghanistan — Even the poorest families in Afghanistan have matches and cooking fuel. The combination usually sustains life. But it also can be the makings of a horrifying escape: from poverty, from forced marriages, from the abuse and despondency that can be the fate of Afghan women.

Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Farzana, left, at the Herat burn hospital with her mother. She set herself on fire when her father-in-law belittled her.

The night before she burned herself, Gul Zada took her children to her sister’s for a family party. All seemed well. Later it emerged that she had not brought a present, and a relative had chided her for it, said her son Juma Gul.

This small thing apparently broke her. Ms. Zada, who was 45, the mother of six children and who earned pitiably little cleaning houses, ended up with burns on nearly 60 percent of her body at the Herat burn hospital. Survival is difficult even at 40 percent.

“She was burned from head to toe,” her son remembers.

The hospital here is the only medical center in Afghanistan that specifically treats victims of burning, a common form of suicide in this region, partly because the tools to do it are so readily available. Through early October, 75 women arrived with burns — most self-inflicted, others only made to look that way. That is up nearly 30 percent from last year.

But the numbers say less than the stories of the patients.

It is shameful here to admit to troubles at home, and mental illness often goes undiagnosed or untreated. Ms. Zada, the hospital staff said, probably suffered from depression. The choices for Afghan women are extraordinarily restricted: Their family is their fate. There is little chance for education, little choice about whom a woman marries, no choice at all about her role in her own house. Her primary job is to serve her husband’s family. Outside that world, she is an outcast.

“If you run away from home, you may be raped or put in jail and then sent home and then what will happen to you?” asked Rachel Reid, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who tracks violence against women.

Returned runaways are often shot or stabbed in honor killings because the families fear they have spent time unchaperoned with a man. Women and girls are still stoned to death. Those who burn themselves but survive are often relegated to grinding Cinderella existences while their husbands marry other, untainted women.

“Violence in the lives of Afghanistan’s women comes from everywhere: from her father or brother, from her husband, from her father-in-law, from her mother-in-law and sister-in-law,” said Dr. Shafiqa Eanin, a plastic surgeon at the burn hospital, which usually has at least 10 female self-immolation cases at any one time.

The most sinister burn cases are actually homicides masquerading as suicides, said doctors, nurses and human rights workers.

“We have two women here right now who were burned by their mothers-in-law and husbands,” said Dr. Arif Jalali, the hospital’s senior surgeon.

Doctors cited two recent cases where women were beaten by their husbands or in-laws, lost consciousness and awoke in the hospital to find themselves burned because they had been shoved in an oven or set on fire.

For a very few of the women who survive burnings, whether self-inflicted or done by relatives, the experience is a kind of Rubicon that helps them change their lives. Some work with lawyers who are recommended by the hospital and request a divorce. Most do not.

Defiant and Depressed

Engaged at 8 and married at 12, Farzana resorted to setting herself on fire when her father-in-law belittled her, saying she was not brave enough to do so. She was 17 and had endured years of beatings and abuse from her husband and his family.

Defiant and depressed, she went into the yard. She handed her husband their 9-month-old daughter so the baby would not see her mother burning. Then she poured cooking fuel on herself.

“I felt so sad and such pain in my heart and I felt very angry at my husband and my father- and mother-in-law, and then I took the matches and lit myself,” she said.

Farzana’s story is about desperation and the extremes that in-laws often inflict on their son’s wives. United Nations statistics indicate that at least 45 percent of Afghan women marry before they are 18; a large percentage before they are 16. Many girls are still given as payment for debts, which sentences them to a life of servitude and, almost always, abuse.

A bright child whose favorite subjects were Dari language and poetry, Farzana dreamed of becoming a teacher. But she had been promised in marriage to the son of the family that was providing a wife for her brother, and when she turned 12, her in-laws insisted it was time to marry. Her future husband had just turned 14.

“On the marriage day, he beat me when I woke up and shouted at me,” she said. “He was always favoring his mother and using bad words about me.”

The beatings went on for four years. Then Farzana’s brother took a second wife, an insult to Farzana’s in-laws. Her mistreatment worsened. They refused to allow her to see her mother, and her husband beat her more often.

“I thought of running away from that house, but then I thought: what will happen to the name of my family?” she said. “No one in our family has asked for divorce. So how can I be the first?”

Doctors and nurses say that especially in cases involving younger women, fury at their situation, a sense of being trapped and a desire to shame their husbands into caring for them all come together.

This was true of Farzana.

“The thing that forced me to set myself on fire was when my father-in-law said: ‘You are not able to set yourself on fire,’ ” she recalled.

But she did, and when the flames were out, 58 percent of her body was burnt. As a relative bundled her raw body into a car for the hospital, her husband whispered: “If anybody asks you, don’t tell them my name; don’t say I had anything to do with it.’ ”

After 57 days in the hospital and multiple skin grafts, she is home with her mother and torn between family traditions and an inchoate sense that a new way of thinking is needed.

Farzana’s daughter is being brought up by her husband’s family, and mother and daughter are not allowed to see each other. Despite that, she says that she cannot go back to her husband’s house.

“Five years I spent in his house with those people,” she said. “My marriage was for other people. They should never have given me in a child marriage.”

A Common Option

Why do women burn themselves rather than choose another form of suicide?

Poverty is one reason, said Dr. Jalali. Many women mistakenly think death will be instant. Halima, 20, a patient in the hospital in August, said she considered jumping from a roof but worried she would only break her leg. If she set herself on fire, she said, “It would all be over.”

Self-immolation is more common in Herat and western Afghanistan than other parts of the country. The area’s closeness to Iran may partly explain why; Iran shares in the culture of suicide by burning.

Unlike many women admitted to the burn hospital, Ms. Zada showed no outward signs of distress before she set herself on fire. Her life, though, was hard. Her husband is a sharecropper. She cleaned houses and at night stayed up to clean her own home — a nearly impossible task in the family’s squalid earthen and brick two-room house buffeted by the Herati winds that sweep in a layer of dust each time the door opens.

To her family, she was a constant provider. “Before I thought of wanting something, she provided me with it,” said Juma Gul, 32, her eldest son, a laborer who earns about $140 a month. “She would embroider our clothes so that we wouldn’t feel we had less than other people.”

As he spoke, his 10-year-old twin sisters sat near him holding hands and a picture of their mother.

In the hospital, Ms. Zada rallied at first, and Juma Gul was encouraged, unaware of how hard it is to survive such extensive burns. That is especially true in the developing world, said Dr. Robert Sheridan, chief of surgery at the Shriners Burn Hospital in Boston and a trauma surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital.

The greatest risk is sepsis, a deadly infection that generally starts in the second week after a burn and is hard to stop, Dr. Sheridan said. Even badly burned and infected patients can speak almost up to the hour of their death, often giving families false hopes.

“She was getting better,” her son insisted.

But infection had, in fact, set in, and the family did not have the money for powerful antibiotics that could give her whatever small chance there was to survive. Juma Gul eventually managed to beg and borrow the money, but not before the infection spread.

Two weeks after his mother set herself on fire, he stood by her bed as she stopped breathing.


This article was found at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/world/asia/08burn.html


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