This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/03/afghan-woman-stoned-to-death-for-alleged-adultery

The article has changed 2 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 0 Version 1
Afghan woman stoned to death for alleged adultery Afghan woman stoned to death for alleged adultery
(35 minutes later)
A young Afghan woman has been stoned to death after being accused of adultery. A video has emerged of what appears to be a young Afghan woman, married against her will, stoned to death for trying to elope with another man.
A 30-second video clip run in Afghan media shows a woman in a hole in the ground as turbaned men gather around and hurl stones at her. The woman, named by officials as Rokhsahana and aged between 19 and 21, is heard repeating the shahada, or Muslim profession of faith, her voice growing increasingly high-pitched as stones strike her. In a graphic, 30-second video, which has not been verified, a group of men are hurling stones at what seems to be a woman reciting the Islamic creed of faith from a neck-deep pit.
The killing took place about a week ago in a Taliban-controlled area just outside Firozkoh, the capital of central Ghor province, officials said. The video was sourced and released by the international broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. A group of people are watching the stoning as the men throw rocks with increasing speed, without betraying any visible emotion. The video cuts before the woman is killed.
A spokesman for Ghor’s governor, Seema Joyenda said: “Yes, the footage shown in the media is related to Rokhsahana, who was stoned to death.” The incident occurred in Ghalmeen, a village outside the capital of the central Afghan province of Ghor, which is under the control of armed opposition groups, according to the provincial governor, Seema Joyenda.
Joyenda said Rokhsahana had been stoned by a gathering of “Taliban, local religious leaders and armed warlords”. She said Rokhsahana’s family had married her off against her will, and she had been caught while eloping with another man her age, seen as tantamount to adultery. The man was let off with a lashing, Joyenda’s spokesman said. The woman, previously identified as Rokhshana, 19, was stoned last week, accused of adultery with a man much younger than the person she was forcibly married to.
Joyenda condemned the stoning and called on Kabul to launch a military operation to rid the area of insurgents and other armed groups. “This is the first incident in this area [this year] but will not be the last,” she said. “Women in general have problems all over the country, but in Ghor even more conservative attitudes prevail.” According to Joyenda, who has staff members from the village, Rokhshana first ran away several years ago to Iran after her family tried to marry her off to an old man. After they brought her back, they forcibly married her off to another old man. When she ran away this time, she did so as a married woman, and was punished with stoning, Joyenda said.
Local officials, including the police chief and the head of Ghor’s department for women’s affairs, Masooma Anwari, have blamed the Taliban for the killing, claiming that the sentence was decided in a Taliban court.
However, activists in Kabul warned against jumping to conclusions. Wazhma Frogh, co-founder of the Research Institute for Women, Peace and Security, said her contacts in Ghor had told her the perpetrators were not Taliban but rather local tribal leaders.
Related: We are all Farkhunda: how one woman’s murder could change Afghanistan | Kristin CordellRelated: We are all Farkhunda: how one woman’s murder could change Afghanistan | Kristin Cordell
In March a woman named Farkhunda was savagely beaten and set ablaze in central Kabul after being falsely accused of burning a Qur’an. The mob killing triggered nationwide protests and drew attention to the treatment of Afghan women. She said that while she did not mean to exonerate the Taliban of their atrocities, local officials were known to blame the insurgents when they could. “Usually, they are putting it on the Taliban to cover up their own kind. Of course the Taliban do these things, but we can’t deny that tribal leaders also do the same things,” she said.
In September a video from Ghor appeared to show a woman receiving lashes from a turbaned elder in front of a crowd of male spectators after a local court found her guilty of having sex outside marriage with a man, who was similarly punished. Joyenda condemned the stoning but was ambiguous in assigning blame. The culprits, she said, were armed groups, without specifying who they were.
Sharia law decrees stoning as the punishment for men and women convicted of having sex outside marriage, but the penalty is very rarely applied in Muslim countries. Meanwhile, though Joyenda is one of only two female governors in Afghanistan, she has herself been criticised for allowing local authorities to trample on women’s rights. In September, she defended a sentence sanctioned by government judges to deliver 100 lashes to a couple for adultery. “Their punishment is based on sharia law and will teach others a lesson,” a spokesman for the governor told Reuters.
Public lashings and executions were common under the Taliban’s 1996-2001 rule, when a strict interpretation of sharia law was enforced, but such incidents have been less common in recent years. The ambiguity about who stoned Rokhshana perhaps reflects the fact that the Taliban is not a homogenous group. The name is used to label everything from armed fighters to sympathetic clerics and elders.
To many Afghans, public lashings and stonings are an appalling echo of the times during Taliban rule when the fundamentalist movement would routinely mete out corporal punishment for so-called moral crimes. It is also sign of the government lack of clout in many rural communities in which clerics and tribal leaders uphold fundamentalist values.
Activists and western organisations have long criticised the Afghan government for not doing enough to improve the legal protection of women.
While stoning is officially banned, as late as in 2013, under the previous president, Hamid Karzai, the government had to back down from a proposal to reintroduce the punishment, after the suggestion was leaked and triggered an international outcry.
Last year’s election of Ashraf Ghani as president has brought little hope of improvement. Earlier this year, a state court overturned many of the initial hard sentences given to those behind the mob murder of Farkhunda, a female religious teacher, in Kabul.
Over the summer, women’s rights activists have also been subjected to increased pressure from the armed opposition. Following the Taliban’s three-week siege of the northern city of Kunduz, the rebels went door-to-door hunting for female activists, who swiftly fled, including proprietors of women’s shelters, and female radio reporters and officials.