AS THE mullah in a village in Afghanistan’s northern Kunduz province prepared to read the death sentence, the young couple defiantly told the Taliban-convened religious court: “We love each other no matter what happens”. The crime of 25-year-old Khayyam and 19-year-old Siddiqa was to elope after failing to persuade family not to impose an arranged marriage on the latter.
The sentence, death by stoning, was carried out there and then on Sunday in the Mullah Quli bazaar by hundreds of the victims' own neighbours. Surrounding the couple, the exclusively male crowd first killed the burqa-clad Siddiqa, then her lover. A local witness told the New York Timesthat even family members got involved both in the stoning, initiated by Taliban militants, and earlier in tricking the couple into returning after they had fled to take refuge in a neighbouring province.
Last week 35-year-old Bibi Sanubar, a pregnant widow, was lashed 200 times in front of a crowd before a Taliban commander shot her in the head. Her crime, adultery. Her male partner was not punished and continues to live in the area. Bibi Aisha, a 19-year-old bride, recently had her nose and ears cut off by her husband, a Taliban fighter, after she fled his abusive family.
Nine years after the Taliban were driven from power, sharia law is again casting its grim shadow over parts of Afghanistan beyond the reach of Kabul’s and allied forces. There are worrying signs also that the more brutal excesses of the Taliban courts and their closure of girls’ schools have some support, and not only among conservative local villages. Last week the country’s national Ulema Council, a gathering of 350 mainstream religious scholars and religious officials attached to government, called for more punishment under Sharia law, apparently referring to stoning, amputations and lashings.
And the truth is that although the plight of Afghanistan’s women under the Taliban has often been cited as one of the continuing justifications for international intervention, their condition and rights to education, to work and to personal autonomy remain very much circumscribed in practice under the government of Hamid Karzai. There is certainly little evidence that the international community has made the issue a priority in its dealings with the government. Women legislators, teachers and public servants have been threatened, attacked and killed for daring to challenge warlords and the religious authorities. Rural women, in particular, have seen little change in their status.
Some commentators have suggested, to paraphrase de Valera, “women must wait”, or urged greater sensitivity to “cultural norms”. But to accede would be a disgraceful abandonment of women and basic rights. Human rights groups have also rightly warned that the idea of peace talks with the Taliban must not be allowed to jeopardise even the limited rights women have today. As Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, warns: “If you try to settle the conflict in a way that sacrifices human rights in the name of peace, you will end up with neither.”