Advertisement
“A dream you dream alone is only a dream; a dream you dream together is reality.” — Yoko Ono
Oct
30
Woman Stoned For Adultery in Somalia
Filed Under Africa, International, feminism, human rights, misogyny, patriarchy, rape and sexual assault, religious fanaticism, violence against women and girls | Posted by Cara |
Trigger Warning
In Somalia, insurgents have stoned a woman to death. The woman, who relatives named as Asha Ibrahim Dhuhulow, was buried in the ground up to her neck and pelted with rocks until she was dead. The “crime” of which she was accused was adultery.
The 23-year-old woman was placed in a hole up to her neck for the execution late on Monday in front of hundreds of people in a square of the southern port of Kismayu, which the Islamist insurgents captured in August.
Stones were hurled at her head and she was pulled out three times to see if she was dead, witnesses said. When a relative and others surged forward, guards opened fire, killing a child.
“A woman in green veil and black mask was brought in a car as we waited to watch the merciless act of stoning,” one local resident, Abdullahi Aden, told Reuters.
“We were told she submitted herself to be punished, yet we could see her screaming as she was forcefully bound, legs and hands. A relative of hers ran toward her, but the Islamists opened fire and killed a child.”
The European Union’s presidency condemned the stoning.
“The EU … condemns a particularly vile execution, which the Islamist insurgents who took control of the city deliberately publicized,” it said in a statement.
The Islamists last carried out public executions when they ruled Mogadishu and most of south Somalia for half of 2006. Allied Ethiopian and Somali government forces toppled them at the end of that year, but they have waged an Iraq-style guerrilla campaign since then, gradually taking territory back.
According to this NY Times blurb, Somali human rights officials say that the woman did not in fact commit adultery, but was raped.
Originally, I felt like this factor mattered. It’s an instinctual response, to think that this murder was even more unjust if the reasoning regarded a violent act committed against her. Of course, it does matter and we should care if she was raped in the sense that it would be another tragedy and human rights violation stacked on top of this one. And if Asha said that she was raped, I believe her.
But in the end, whether she was killed because of a rape, because of consensual sex, or because of sexual contact neither consensual or non-consensual because it was entirely imagined, it’s not the point. To emphasize that Asha was murdered because she was raped, and that’s why her death is a tragedy is to suggest that it would be less tragic if she actually had committed consensual adultery.
Asha’s life was taken from her, quite simply, because she was a woman. And a child was killed, it seems, because someone dared to even suggest with their body language that the murder was unjust. It’s a human rights violation, regardless of the details, and we should be saddened and outraged.
As I came up pretty empty-handed: if you have information on any feminist or human rights groups, particularly those from the region, working on crimes like this one, please leave that information in the comments or email me and I will add it to the post.
Comments
12 Comments so far
Subscribe to The Curvature
“Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.” — Susan B. Anthony
Sick. Horrible. Disgusting. Unconscionable. Vile. Rage-inducing. Horrific. Outrageous. Just… fucking evil.
Horrible.
This is more a political/military question but how much territory do the Islamists now control – is it like the situation of South Vietnam where the Viet Cong controlled one third of the country by day and the other two thirds by night?
I am beyond words.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/02/somalia-gender
She was thirteen years old.
It’s hard to imagine something more unjust than this although to say she was killed because she was a woman is quite inaccurate since men can and have been executed for adultery under Sharia law.
So a man could have been gang-raped by three women, and, on reporting it, be killed for ‘acting like a tart’?
Um. No.
What Anna said.
http://drx.typepad.com/psychotherapyblog/2007/12/rape-qatif-saud.html
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=3932740&page=1
Male rape victims at the hands of other males can actually be punished for homosexuality.
It does not devalue the atrocity but it is incorrect to say she was killed because she was a woman.
Yes, Elmo, she was. If she wasn’t, her rapists would also be dead for having “adulterous sex.” Those men were punished similarly because they were rape victims and because they were “gay” (of course there’s no evidence that they were actually gay, but the excuse being used is that they engaged in a “homosexual act” in being raped. I bet you anything that if their attackers had been women, this would not have been done to them).
Now please stop linking to xenophobic and anti-feminist blogs in my space. This is atrocious. The system(s) which allow it are atrocious, abhorrent and inhumane. That does not make Islam “brutal” or “primitive” any more than it makes Christianity brutal and primitive for engaging in the crusades. It reflects only on the people committing these acts, not on all of the followers of the religion being used as an excuse.
The second link s/he pasted was pretty interesting. Isn’t that how pretty much every female rape victim is treated?
‘But Alex says the police doctor who examined him that night seemed intent on proving there was no rape, just a consensual sexual act between three men and a 15 year-old gay boy.’
In no way detracting from the horror of what Alex faced, isn’t that what almost every woman who is in the same situation has to deal with?
Even signs of violence are met with sneers of ‘you just liked it rough’.
sigh. I hate the world. I really do.
If she committed adultery, was it a lone act? If she was raped, did she rape herself? A thirteen year old’s life cut off just because she was born a female…where is the face of the man who raped her or committted adultery with her…why is it so bad for women across the world? These things make me weep.
Hi Cara,
I agree that this woman was likely killed unmercifully, by a Male, ritualistic stoning act; # 1 because of being a female as whether deaf or not, any female… still living is persecuteable till death, by any Man’s Army of SOB Rapist Predator supporters or adultering finger pointings…at only this poor young girl’s “transgression” (genitals) and pelting out punishment in the name of their Man-God, “Allah”.