janetyu
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Joined: 14 Jan 2010
Posts: 60
Location: Norway
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 Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2011 7:21 am Post subject: The Christian woman facing death over a work squabble |
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copied from:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8164979/The-Christian-woman-facing-death-over-a-work-squabble.html
The Christian woman facing death over a work squabble
The death sentence on Asia Bibi, a Christian woman in Pakistan, for blasphemy has set off a storm of debate about her fate.
Rob Crilly in Lahore 11:59AM GMT 27 Nov 2010
It started as nothing more than a petty squabble: a group of Muslim women refused to sup from a bucket of water fetched by a Christian co-worker as they picked berries on a farm.
But within days the spat had escalated into a deadly storm, as imams whipped up an angry crowd accusing Aasia Bibi of badmouthing the Prophet Muhammad.
Today the mother-of-five is on death row, the first woman in Pakistan to be sentenced to hang for blasphemy.
Her tiny, stinking cell is now the centre of a political storm as liberals face off with conservative clerics over the country's barbaric blasphemy laws, which cuts to the heart of Pakistan's uneasy relationship between religion and democracy.
Hard-line Muslims have taken to the streets, warning the government not to cave in to foreign pressure to pardon her, and issuing death threats to her supporters, alarming the country's embattled Christian minority.
Meanwhile, from the prison where she is being held, Mrs Bibi, 45, has made one brief statement to proclaim her innocence. "The allegation against me is baseless," she insisted, speaking from behind a veil worn not as a concession to Islamic sensibilities, but simply to hide her identity. "We had some differences and this was their way of taking revenge."
For Pakistan's Christians, who make up some 3 million of the country's 165 million population, such words will have a depressingly familiar ring: the blasphemy laws, it is widely acknowledged, have long been used as against them - not as a system of organised persecution, but simply as a way of settling petty personal disputes. However, in a land where a weak government is battling against an ever-stronger current of Islamic militancy, reforming them so that they are not abused is far from easy.
The Bibi case, which has brought the issue into sharp relief, began in June last year, when she was asked to fetch water by the wife of the landowner on whose land, in rural Punjab, she was working. A row broke out when her Muslim colleagues refused it, saying it had been made unclean by contact with a Christian.
The incident seemed to have been forgotten, until five days later when she was approached by an angry mob accusing her of blasphemy. They said she had told them that Jesus had been resurrected while the Prophet Muhammad had died – claims her supporters emphatically deny – and demanded she recant and convert to Islam.
When police officers arrived on the scene, they initially protected her, escorting her to safety. Then, apparently under pressure from imams, they arrested her.
Earlier this month she was sentenced to death at Sheikhupura court, convicted on the basis of evidence from two witnesses who were not even present in the fields where the exchange is supposed to have taken place.
Her husband, Ashiq Masih, could not even bear to tell his children what had happened when he returned from court that day. They found out from neighbours and did not eat for two days. Then they were forced to flee from their home in the village of Ittamwala.
"I am frightened that they will come and beat us and kill us," he told The Sunday Telegraph. "I keep getting phone calls from people with hidden numbers asking where I am and whether they can meet me, but I know what they want. They want us dead."
He has moved his children – aged from nine to 20 – through a succession of safe houses in Christian enclaves. Ever few weeks they pack their clothes into trunks and switch to a new home in the towns and villages outside Lahore.
Home for now is a single room, down a back alley of stinking open drains. A cheery sign hangs on the wall as a reminder of the family's faith - "God Bless Our Home" - but the patchy whitewash, dirty beds and incessant buzz of mosquitoes reek of quiet desperation.
Mr Masih said his wife was struggling to cope with her death sentence.
"She had been very strong in prison," he said in Punjabi. "She is different now. She is mentally stressed. She is very scared for her life and for the life of her family."
He had just returned from Islamabad where he had presented government ministers with a petition asking for his wife's freedom and for protection for his family.
It is understood that Pakistan's president, Ali Asif Zardari, has promised that she will be released, but is waiting to see whether an appeal lodged at Lahore High Court will succeed. However, he fears that overhauling the blasphemy law would risk angering Islamists, who would use it as an opportunity to destabilise the government.
That fear is very real in a country battling al-Qaeda terrorists along the border with Afghanistan, and where the Pakistani Taliban and jihadi groups have used suicide bombers to attack religious minorities.
"No-one wants to be accused of being soft on blasphemy or of being a 'bad Muslim'," said one human rights official.
The British government has recognised the absence of an alternative view of Pakistan. In the past year more than £8m of British taxpayers money has been spent on counter-terrorism programmes, much of it on schemes offering platforms to mainstream Muslim leaders or encouraging grass roots groups and media organisations which take a stand against extremism.
Moderate voices say the blasphemy laws are in desperate need of reform, and would like to see cases tried in the higher courts to ensure that evidence is scrutinised more thoroughly.
Shahzad Kamran, of the Sharing Life Ministry Pakistan, which monitors Christians' treatment in Pakistan, said: "Asia's case has been high profile, but there are many more."
His organisation is following five similar cases where Christians have been accused of blasphemy. In each, he added, the victims had been accused on trumped-up charges.
Pakistan has a complex relationship with religion. It was founded in 1947 as a homeland for India's Muslims, according to the secular ideals of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, but successive political leaders followed a programme of Islamisation during the 1970s and 1908s, making Islam the state religion, declaring Friday to be a day of rest and banning alcohol in order to win the support of hard-line religious parties. The blasphemy laws were toughened under the military ruler General Zia ul-Haq, who wrote Sharia law into the rule book, introducing the death penalty for defaming the Prophet Muhammad.
Although no-one has ever been executed under the law – most are freed on appeal – as many as 20 people are thought to have been murdered in revenge attacks while awaiting trial.
In July, two Christians charged with blasphemy were shot dead outside a court in Faisalabad. Last week, a 22-year-old man acquitted of blasphemy was shot dead, two days after being freed from jail.
A report by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom last year concluded: "Although there have been occasional acquittals on blasphemy charges, in virtually all cases those acquitted have been forced into hiding or even exile, out of fear of attacks by religiously-motivated extremists."
Attempts to reform the law, most recently under President Pervez Musharraf, have foundered in the face of strong opposition from religious conservatives – a constituency that few politicians want to confront.
A new attempt is under way with a private members bill that would remove the death penalty and the government promising consultation on the issue.
But once again the hardliners are mobilising their support. Hundreds of protesters gathered in Lahore and Multan this week to demand that Mrs Bibi be hanged.
There will be more unrest if Mr Zardari agrees to pardon her, according to Qari Hanif Jallundari, who heads the Wafaqul Madaris al Arabia, an umbrella grouping of some 12,000 madrassas which represent the hardline Deobandi strain of Islam.
"I advise him not to take a hasty decision under foreign pressure," he said, adding darkly: "Such a decision will lead to untoward repercussions." |
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