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TweetAnother sickening display of how islam treats women, and regards human rights.
The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has pardoned three men who had been found guilty of gang raping a woman in the northern province of Samangan.
The woman, Sara, and her family found out about the pardon only when they saw the rapists back in their village.
“Everyone was shocked,” said Sara’s husband, Dilawar, who like many Afghans uses only one name. “These were men who had been sentenced and found guilty by the Supreme Court, walking around freely.”
Sara’s case highlights concerns about the close relationship between the Afghan president and men accused of war crimes and human rights abuses.
The men were freed discreetly but the rape itself was public and brutal. It took place in September 2005, in the run up to Afghanistan’s first democratic parliamentary elections.
The most powerful local commander, Mawlawi Islam, was running for office despite being accused of scores of murders committed while he had been a mujahedeen commander in the 1980s and a Taliban governor in the 1990s, and since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Sara said one of his sub-commanders and body guards had been looking for young men to help in the election campaign.
“It was evening, around the time for the last prayer, when armed men came and took my son, Islamuddin, by force. I have eye-witness statements from nine people that he was there. From that night until now, my son has never been seen.”
Dilawar said his wife publicly harangued the commander twice about their missing son. After the second time, he said, they came for her. “The commander and three of his fighters came and took my wife out of our home and took her to their house about 200 metres away and, in front of these witnesses, raped her.”
Dilawar has a sheaf of legal papers, including a doctors’ report, which said she had a 17mm wound in her private parts cut with a bayonet. Sara was left to stumble home, bleeding and without her trousers.
When I met the couple in May 2006, they were in hiding and struggling to pursue the four men through the courts, petitioning the parliament, the president, human rights organisations and the United Nations. Sara and Dilawar say that one of the men involved in the attack used money and connections to repeatedly evade justice, particularly after his boss, Mawlawi Islam, became an MP and, they allege, was fully able to protect him.
This is from Afghanistan, a “moderate” islamic country, and an “ally” in the war on radical islam. They look pretty much the same to me.
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