[BRIEF NOTE] Some News Items

[rfmcdonald]

From The Australian:

Recently caught with her hair uncovered and her arms bare, Sonya was lectured and publicly humiliated and forced to sign a statement that she would always wear demure Islamic clothing in the future. If she is caught again, she will be taken to the headquarters of the Wilayatul Hisbah, or the sharia (Islamic law) police, for further "education". If she is caught for a third time, her case will be referred to the planned sharia court, where the punishment for inappropriate dress will be a whipping with a rattan cane.

A 19-year-old accountancy student at Syiah Kuala University in Banda Aceh [a province of Indonesia], Sonya says she was monstrously embarrassed when she was treated like a criminal. "I felt so afraid and ashamed," she says, her hair mostly covered by a loose jilbab or headscarf. "They asked for my identification card and the sharia officer took a note of my identity. They also instructed me in the way of muslimah, Muslim women's clothes."

From the New York Times:

Parents are so rattled by reports of rapes and kidnappings [in Iraq] that they keep their girls under closer watch than ever. Girls accustomed to pool outings and piano lessons during the crushingly hot summer vacation months are instead locked up at home. They quarrel with their mothers; they sleep too much; they grow cranky and dejected from mind-numbing boredom.

During the school year, young men claiming to represent new religious groups arrived at some schools, demanding that girls' heads be covered or long-sleeved shirts be required. Not surprisingly, an increasing number of the girls seem to be covering their heads — as much out of fear as out of newfound conviction. Some have stopped going to school altogether, as much because of the threat of violence as because of the economic hardships facing their families. In Yosor's school, for example, 700 girls registered for classes this past year, compared with 850 the previous year.

From the Sunday Herald:

The BBC news website has a public access section called Have Your Say. Last week’s question was on “honour” killings, pondering whether the police are doing enough. Given that Scotland Yard has decided to examine files going back some 10 years, containing more than 100 cases in England and Wales that they believe have the sniff of the honour killing about their gills – just to “learn more about the scale and nature of the phenomenon”, but not to re-open the cases – then the answer would seem to be a resounding “no”.

Perhaps the police have decided that it would be culturally insensitive to go poking around in the past and – in some cases – find out if these missing women were in fact murdered. This, despite the fact it’s been suggested that re-examining the cases might show that some of the missing had families who gave the police highly implausible reasons why their daughters or wives simply disappeared off the face of the earth, and were keen to reassure them that it had nothing whatsoever to do with the missing woman in question having recently acted outwith various strict cultural or religious restraints.

From the Feminist Majority Foundation:

Two Afghan women were killed and 13 more were wounded by a bomb that exploded on a bus filled with female election workers. According to the New York Times, a Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the attacks and warned Afghans to stop working on the election process. The women on the bus were registration officials who were traveling to Rodat, Afghanistan to register women to vote, reports the New York Times. As a result of the attack, the United Nations has reported that all female registration teams in the eastern, southeastern, and southern regions of Afghanistan were suspended.

From the Asia Times:

Several times over the past 15 years, Islamic militants [in Kashmir] have imposed the burqa (an all-enveloping cloak that covers a woman from head to toe) on women, threatening them with acid and paint if they dared to defy the diktat (order). Women admit that they succumbed to the terror only because of the extreme brutality and gruesomeness of the punishment. In 2000, 16-year-old Mewaiz was shot through the knees for wearing trousers and leaving her head uncovered. There have been several instances of girls becoming targets of acid attacks by militants simply because they had left their heads uncovered or were going to school.

[. . .]

There have been cases of children being beheaded on the suspicion that their fathers were informers and of women being injected with poison as punishment for their fathers, brothers and husbands working with the local police. In 2002, three teenage girls were killed in Hasiyot in Rajouri district. Two of them were beheaded, the third shot dead. Militants accused them of being informers but the girls' families believe that the girls were killed because they were going to school. In March this year, five-year-old Zahida and her four-year-old brother were executed by the Lashkar-e-Toiba in Jammu's Doda district because her parents refused to provide sanctuary to militants.

Yet again, I repeat my suggestion of 9 May 2004. Any takers?