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Parents selling children shows desperation of Afghanistan
By ELENA BECATOROS
yesterday
SHEDAI CAMP, Afghanistan (AP) — In a sprawling settlement of mud brick huts in western Afghanistan housing people displaced by drought and war, a woman is fighting to save her daughter.
Aziz Gul’s husband sold the 10-year-old girl into marriage without telling his wife, taking a down-payment so he could feed his family of five children. Without that money, he told her, they would all starve. He had to sacrifice one to save the rest.
Many of Afghanistan’s growing number of destitute people are making desperate decisions such as these as their nation spirals into a vortex of poverty.
The aid-dependent country’s economy was already teetering when the Taliban seized power in mid-August amid a chaotic withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops. The international community froze Afghanistan’s assets abroad and halted all funding, unwilling to work with a Taliban government given its reputation for brutality during its previous rule 20 years ago.
The consequences have been devastating for a country battered by four decades of war, a punishing drought and the coronavirus pandemic. Legions of state employees, including doctors, haven’t been paid in months. Malnutrition and poverty stalk the most vulnerable, and aid groups say more than half the population faces acute food shortages.
“Day by day, the situation is deteriorating in this country, and especially children are suffering,” said Asuntha Charles, national director of the World Vision aid organization in Afghanistan, which runs a health clinic for displaced people just outside the western city of Herat.
“Today I have been heartbroken to see that the families are willing to sell their children to feed other family members,” Charles said. “So it’s the right time for the humanitarian community to stand up and stay with the people of Afghanistan.”
Arranging marriages for very young girls is a frequent practice throughout the region. The groom’s family — often distant relatives — pays money to seal the deal, and the child usually stays with her own parents until she is at least around 15 or 16. Yet with many unable to afford even basic food, some say they’d allow prospective grooms to take very young girls or are even trying to sell their sons.
But Gul, unusually in this deeply patriarchal, male-dominated society, is resisting. Married off herself at 15, she says she would kill herself if her daughter, Qandi Gul, is forcibly taken away.
Gul remembers well the moment she found out her husband had sold Qandi. For around two months, the family had been able to eat. Eventually, she asked her husband where the money came from, and he told her.
“My heart stopped beating. I wished I could have died at that time, but maybe God didn’t want me to die,” Gul said. Qandi sat close to her mother, her hazel eyes peering shyly from beneath her sky-blue headscarf. “Each time I remember that night ... I die and come back to life. It was so difficult.”
She asked her husband why he did it.
“He said he wanted to sell one and save the others. ‘You all would have died this way,’ (he said.) I told him, ‘Dying was much better than what you have done.’”
Gul rallied her community, telling her brother and village elders that her husband had sold her child behind her back. They supported her, and with their help she secured a “divorce” for her child, but only on condition she repays the 100,000 afghanis (about $1,000) that her husband received.
It’s money she doesn’t have. Her husband fled, possibly fearing Gul might denounce him to the authorities. The Taliban government recently announced a ban on forcing women into marriage or using women and girls as exchange tokens to settle disputes.
The family of the prospective groom, a man of around 21 or 22, has already tried several times to claim the girl, she says. She is not sure how long she can fend them off.
“I am just so desperate. If I can’t provide money to pay these people and can’t keep my daughter by my side, I have said that I will kill myself,” Gul said. “But then I think about the other children. What will happen to them? Who will feed them?” Her eldest is 12, her youngest — her sixth — just two months.
Now alone, Gul leaves the children with her elderly mother while she goes to work in people’s homes. Her 12-year-old son works picking saffron after school. It’s barely enough to keep them fed, and the saffron season is short, only a few weeks in the fall.
“We don’t have anything,” Gul said.
In another part of the same camp, father-of-four Hamid Abdullah was also selling his young daughters into arranged marriages, desperate for money to treat his chronically ill wife, pregnant with their fifth child.
Abdullah borrowed money to pay for his wife’s treatments and can’t pay it back, he said. So three years ago, he received a down-payment for his eldest daughter Hoshran, now 7, in an arranged marriage to an 18-year-old in their native Badghis province. He’s now looking for someone to buy his second daughter, 6-year-old Nazia.
“We don’t have food to eat,” Abdullah explained, adding he also had to buy medicine for his wife, who soon would need more treatment. “She needs another surgery, I don’t have one afghani to pay for the doctor.”
The family that bought Hoshran is waiting until she is older before the full amount is settled, he explained. But he needs money now for food and treatments, so he is trying to arrange a marriage for Nazia for about 20,000-30,000 afghani ($200-$300).
“What should we do? We have to do it, we have no other option,” said his wife, Bibi Jan. “When we made the decision, it was like someone had taken away a body part from me.”
In the neighboring province of Badghis, another displaced family is considering selling their son, 8-year-old Salahuddin.
His mother, Guldasta, said that after days with nothing to eat, she told her husband to take the boy to the bazaar and sell him to bring food for the others.
“I don’t want to sell my son, but I have to,” the 35-year-old said. “No mother can do this to her child, but when you have no other choice, you have to make a decision against your will.”
Salahuddin blinked and looked on silently. Surrounded by some of his seven brothers and sisters, his lip quivered slightly.
His father, Shakir, who is blind in one eye and has kidney problems, said the children had been crying for days from hunger. Twice, he said, he decided to take the boy to the bazaar and twice he faltered, unable to go through with it. “But now I think I have no other choice than to sell him.”
Buying of boys is believed to be less common than girls, and when it does take place, it appears to be cases of infant boys bought by families who don’t have any sons. In her despair, Guldasta thought perhaps such a family would want an 8-year-old.
The desperation of millions is clear as more and more people face hunger. By the end of the year, some 3.2 million children under 5 years old are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition, according to the U.N.
Nazia is one of them. The 4-year-old lay listlessly in her mother’s arms after visiting the World Vision health clinic.
Two years ago, Nazia was a plump toddler, her mother Fatima said. Now, her emaciated limbs are just skin covering bone. Her little heart beats visibly beneath her ribcage.
“The prices are high. Flour is expensive, cooking oil is expensive, everything is expensive,” Fatima said. “All day she is asking me to give her meat, yogurt and fruit. We don’t have anything, and we don’t have money to buy it for her.”
Charles, World Vision’s national director for Afghanistan, said humanitarian aid funds are desperately needed.
“I’m happy to see the pledges are made,” she said. But the pledges “shouldn’t stay as promises, they have to be seen as reality on the ground.”
Where is Mohammed when you need him?
Married woman is flogged 100 times after confessing to adultery in
Indonesia while the married man she slept with only gets 15 lashes
By KATE DENNETT FOR MAILONLINE and AFP
PUBLISHED: 12:03 EST, 13 January 2022
The woman's flogging in the conservative Aceh province on Thursday was briefly paused because she couldn't bear the pain, according to an AFP reporter.
The Aceh region in Western Indonesia is renowned for being a conservative area and the only part of the country where Sharia Law is used.
Ivan Najjar Alavi, the head of general investigation division at East Aceh prosecutors office, said the court handed down a heftier sentence for the married woman after she confessed to investigators she had sex out of her marriage.
Judges found it difficult to convict the man, who was then the head of East Aceh fishery agency and also married, because he denied all wrongdoings, Alavi added.
So, if you lie to the judges, you'll get off easy. Is that how it works?
The woman's flogging was briefly paused because she couldn't bear the pain, according to an AFP reporter
'During the trial, he admitted nothing, denying all accusations. Thus, [judges] are not able to prove whether he is guilty,' Alavi told reporters after a public flogging for Sharia law offenders in East Aceh on Thursday.
Because maybe the woman committed adultery with herself?
As an alternative punishment, the judges found the married man guilty of 'showing affection to a female partner who is not his wife' after the couple were caught by locals at a palm oil plantation in 2018.
He was initially sentenced to 30 lashes but his successful appeal at the Sharia Supreme Court in Aceh reduced the sentence to 15.
Another man, who was convicted of having sex with a minor, was also whipped 100 times on Thursday and will also serve 75 months in prison for the crime, according to prosecutors.
Dozens watched, recorded and posted Thursday's flogging on social media, a spectacle criticised by rights groups but one which regularly attracted hundreds before the pandemic.
Aceh is the only region in Muslim-majority Indonesia to impose Islamic law, which allows whipping for charges including gambling, adultery, drinking alcohol, and gay sex.
Once one of the most powerful Islamic sultanates in Southeast Asia, the area had long used an informal kind of Islamic law mixed with local laws, known as 'hukum adat'.
But the legislation was enhanced when Aceh's long-running separatist conflict ended in 2005 and it was granted autonomy - an attempt by the government in Jakarta to quell a long-running separatist insurgency. As part of that deal, Aceh won the right to be the only Indonesian province to use Islamic sharia law as its legal code.
The laws have been gradually expanded to more offences, most recently in 2014, when Aceh approved an anti-homosexuality law that can punish anyone caught having gay sex with 100 lashes. Engaging in homosexual acts is not a crime under Indonesia's national criminal code but remains taboo in many conservative parts of the country.
The public beatings have become more prevalent in recent years with a number of reported incidents of those being punished collapsing in pain on stage.
Religious police in Aceh have been known to target Muslim women without head scarves or those wearing tight clothes, and people drinking alcohol or gambling.
Over the past decade, the central government has devolved more power to regional authorities to increase autonomy and speed up development.
In 2018, Aceh officials vowed to end public floggings and carry them out behind prison walls, however, the number of public floggings and canings is understood to have risen instead.
Human rights groups have slammed public caning as cruel, and Indonesia's President Joko Widodo has called for it to end. But it has strong support among Aceh's population.
Afghan suspected of raping & murdering 13yo to be moved
from UK to Austria
The 23-year-old fled to Britain last summer, allegedly under a fake name
© AFP / Ben Stansall/AFP
London’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court has ordered the extradition from the UK of an Afghan migrant who illegally crossed the English Channel and is wanted in Austria in connection with the rape and murder of a teenage girl.
During a hearing on Wednesday, District Judge Michael Snow told Rasuili Zubaidullah he rejected his counsel’s legal challenges and he must return to Austria to stand trial within 17 days. Zubaidullah was given a week to appeal the decision, and, pending his extradition, will remain in Wandsworth Prison in South London.
The Afghan’s defense team had argued that he should not be extradited to Austria at this point, as he had not been formally charged by the authorities there. However, the judge did not see that as reason enough to allow him to stay in Britain.
Zubaidullah and three other Afghan migrants are suspected of having drugged 13-year-old Leonie Walner in Vienna on June 26, 2021, before luring her into one of the suspects’ apartments, where the teenager was given yet more ecstasy, before being gang-raped and strangled to death. It is alleged the suspects then rolled up her body in a carpet and dumped it on the street.
All the suspects except Zubaidullah were detained by police shortly afterwards and have been in pretrial detention ever since. Zubaidullah fled Austria, however, first reportedly reaching the city of Dunkirk, in northern France. The suspect is then said to have paid people smugglers to help him board a boat illegally headed for Britain. On July 18, he claimed asylum, having allegedly provided UK border force officials with a fake name when the boat reached the Kent coast. He was subsequently accommodated in a taxpayer-funded hostel in Whitechapel, East London.
The Austrian authorities were tracking Zubaidullah, however, and contacted their British colleagues to inform them of his arrival in the UK. The Vienna Public Prosecutor’s Office issued an international warrant for his arrest on July 29, and, acting on that warrant, officers from the UK’s National Extradition Unit detained him 11 days after he set foot on British soil.
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