Morality: October 2004 Archives

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.

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.

Minister of Foreign Affairs of The Republic of Cuba,
at the 59th Session of the United Nations General Assembly. New York,
24 September 2004.

Mr. President:

Every year at the United Nations we go through the same ritual. We attend the general debate knowing beforehand that the clamour for justice and peace by our underdeveloped countries will be ignored once again. However, we persist. We know that we are right. We know that one day we will accomplish social justice and development. We also know that such assets will not be given away to us. We know that the peoples will have to seize them from those who deny us justice today, because they underpin their wealth and arrogance on the disdain for our grief. But it will not be always like this. We say so today with more conviction than ever before.