by Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 28 (IPS) - The United Nations is admitting its ''collective failure'' to curb the spiralling violence against women and young girls in conflict and post-conflict situations worldwide.
[Evils of Islamic Law]
By Safa Haeri
Posted Saturday, October 16, 2004
PARIS, 16 Oct. (IPS) Almost two months after having hanged a 16 year old girl, the ruling Iranian ayatollahs are to commit another human crime by condemning another young girl to stoning.
PROUT Editor's note: Indians are the biggest murderers of women. Every day, one can read in the newspapers in every town of women being set on fire by her husband or mother-in-law. This is part and parcel of Indian culture. The numbers are increasing every year. Those are only reported cases. Thousands more cases are never reported or are registered by the police as accidents/ kitchen fires. It is a crime done by Hindus and Hindus should focus on the problem, condemn it and solve it before moving on to the crimes committed by people in other religions. There are far more Hindu women killed by Hindu men in India than are Muslim women killed by Muslim men in countries like Afghanistan or Pakistan. So let the Hindus take care of their own crimes first before moving on to the crimes of Muslims! Those hysterical hate-mongers who rant and rave about how Muslims oppress women, let them walk to the neighbor's house and liberate the women there. And for the good Hindu women, if their husbands start to pour kerosene on their bodies, let them grab the kerosene and pour it onto those evil husbands, and light the match also. It is about time that Hindu women stop dying as mute victims. Rather, let them turn their husbands into ashes! At least the ashes will have some practical use as fertilizer for a bumper brinjal crop!
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Tribune News Service
Ludhiana
The crime branch of the Punjab today began an inquiry into the Manju dowry burning case, in which the city police is on the backfoot for allegedly not taking timely action on her complaint.
By Garda Ghista
Our sister Amina was freed from death by stoning on the last day of September, 2003. Many of us did not know Amina Lawal was a divorced woman from Katsina State in Nigeria, sentenced to death by stoning for adultery on the grounds of becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Many of us did not even know that our sister was in danger – we did not even know that we had a sister. We live in an age that is called post-human - an age wherein humanity is posthumous. For many of us, Amina was a flickering figure that appeared on a news sound byte. This is what post-human means. People are reduced to disposable, ephemeral images manipulated by a remote. These images describe her in the traditional modernistic labels of “Nigerian,” “Muslim,” and “woman.” What these labels do is to create a feeling that she is “alien,” and hence we have no responsibility to even care. Essentially the nationalism of the modern era of humanism is, as former UN General Romeo Dallaire said, just another kind of racism.
[A National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) report on prevention of atrocities against the Scheduled Castes found that the tradition of divine prostitution, popularly known as the Devdasi system, was still alive in many parts of the country.
National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Law and Justice has moved a bill in the house which seeks to amend the Pakistan Penal Code 1860 by equating ‘honour killing’ with ‘intentional murder’ and enhancing punishment for it. The bill also stipulates that in cases of murder related to honour the family members (legal heirs) will not have the authority to pardon the offender. Another aspect of the bill relates to treating as cognisable offence any agreement under which someone gives a woman (or girl) in marriage to another person or party to settle a dispute. Further, in the cases relating to honour killing, the provincial governments will not have the power to remit or suspend the sentence.
Are we finally entering the civilised world? Yes and no.
By Garda Ghista
“However much people might indulge in tall talk, in no country or age were women given full freedom in religious and social matters, nor are they given their rights even to this day!”
- Prabhat R. Sarkar
A Sad Scenario
Every religion existing today discriminates in some way against women. The scriptures of all religions degrade and denigrate women, put them down and designate women as being inferior to men. This may or may not be the fault of the original prophet who created that particular scripture. But, it is for sure the fault of the men who later on over the years, after the departure of the original prophet, revised the text of those scriptures.
Two women sentenced to death by a court in northern Nigeria are seeking to appeal the sentences, a human rights group said Friday.
by Garda Ghista
Introduction
The ‘paradox’ of Bengal, or Bangladesh, is that on the one hand it has immense geographical, geological, agricultural resources and hence potentiality for development into a (so-called) first world nation. However, despite these abundant resources, it has remained in abject poverty, or to use the term of Paul Farmer, ‘dire affliction.’ Bangladesh has a population of 133 million people, but the plight of the majority is heart-rending. Ten percent of the people own more than 60 percent of the land. Sixty percent of the people own less than ten percent of the land. Illiteracy is nearly 40 percent. Infant mortality is 80/1000. More than 50 percent of the people are landless. These landless people survive as sharecroppers or worse, as daily wage laborers, with men earning 33 cents daily and women 20 cents. Hence for the majority, at least one of the five necessities of life (food, clothing, shelter, health care and education) are missing. In macro-economics, this is defined as absolute poverty.
PROUT Editor's note: The Sangh Parivar, alias the BJP, RSS and VHP, are shameless in attacking Christian sisters/nuns whose only crime was to bring food to the neglected and downtrodden Dalits. Why could not the Sangh Parivar likewise bring rice and other foods to the Dalits and thereby win their love and loyalty? Why are the Hindutva members such cowardly wimps that they primarily attack the helpless, defenseless women? Shame on them!! It is their venemous hatred, their cruelty, their vicious nature that in fact drives the Dalits of India into the arms of Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. For this very reason thousands or millions of lower-caste Hindus over centuries have converted - to escape the torture and oppression of the upper castes - represented at present by the Sangh Parivar. The fact that the cowardly state government 'obeyed' the RSS demands and deported Brother Leonard back to Kenya (a complete misuse of the POTA) is a blight on the otherwise beautiful and progressive state of Kerala. It is the duty of each one of us to expose and condemn this genocidal, hatred-filled, venemous serpent that calls itself BJP, VHP, and RSS. Let their leaders be imprisoned until they learn to function and feel like universal human beings.
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By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
September 29, 2004
EERWALA, Pakistan — I'm still trying to help out President Bush by tracking down Osama bin Laden. After poking through remote parts of Pakistan, asking for a tall Arab with a beard, I can't say I've earned that $25 million reward.
But I did come across someone even more extraordinary than Osama.
Usually we journalists write about rogues, but Mukhtaran Bibi could not be more altruistic or brave, as the men who gang-raped her discovered. I firmly believe that the central moral challenge of this century, equivalent to the struggles against slavery in the 19th century or against totalitarianism in the 20th, will be to address sex inequality in the third world - and it's the stories of women like Ms. Mukhtaran that convince me this is so.
By Ammu Joseph / The Hindu
Bride-burning. Widow-burning. Female infanticide. Pre-natal sex selection. And now acid attacks: the latest addition to India's — and South Asia's — hall of infamy.
Nearly 280 women were killed and 750 injured through acid attacks in Pakistan in 2002, according to Human Rights Watch. The Acid Survivors Foundation (ASF) in Bangladesh recorded 485 such attacks in 2002 alone; it is estimated that at least 864 women, 412 men and 14 children had acid thrown on them there in the four years up to 2003. In both countries, cases appear to be increasing at a rate of 40 to 50 per cent every year.
