Parla Safiya!!! - articolo da The New Scotsman

[Paola Lucchesi <paola.lucchesi@mail.inet.it> (by way of Carlo Gubitosa <c.gubitosa@peacelink.it>)]

Ricchissimo di informazioni. Non solo su Safiya, ma sulla Nigeria.

E per la prima volta si sente qualche commento direttamente di lei. E si
scopre che il figlio della colpa... e' una figlia.

"Il vero' crimine", dice Safiya, "e' essere una donna.

Il pezzo e' lungo, e' in inglese, adesso non ce la faccio a tradurlo, ma
siccome ne vale veramente la pena, che intanto almeno chi riesce a leggerlo
in originale abbia la possibilita' di farlo.

Nota importante: si parla anche della situazione del paese e del presidente
Obasanjo, e da come sono descritte le cose pare proprio possa esser utile
continuare la campagna di lettere proprio a lui.

paola



  http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/index.cfm?id=90222002
Fri 25 Jan 2002


'The real crime is being a woman'


'One thing I cannot accept is to die alone when I know - and the
alkali [Sharia law judge] knows - I could not have made this baby
alone. I mean I am not the Virgin Mary!

"Brilliant, aren't they, these men? They stick to a law inherited
from the seventh century for people having sex in the open Arabian
desert or makeshift tents, but in the 21st century they can
impregnate us in Hilton Hotel rooms with air conditioning and then
deny us."

So spoke Safiya Hussaini Tungar Tudu following her sentence to
death by stoning after being convicted of adultery by an Islamic
Sharia court in a predominantly Muslim area in northern Nigeria.
The judge who convicted her decreed that 35-year-old Safiya will
be buried up to her neck in a pit and then men - only men - will
begin hurling rocks at her head until she is dead.

The attorney general of Sokoto state, Aliyu Abubakar Sanyinna,
says of Safiya's sentence: "It is the law of Allah. We are just
complying with the laws of Allah, so we don't have anything to
worry about."

How big will the executioners' stones be? "It could be something
like this," replies the attorney general, holding up his fist.

If Safiya becomes the first Nigerian executed for adultery, the
case could be as damaging for Nigeria as the hanging of the
environmental campaigner Ken Saro-Wiwa was to the country's former
military dictatorship. Meanwhile in Europe, and among Nigerian
feminist activists, there is growing outrage at the sentence
handed down against Safiya last October in the dust-shrouded city
of Sokoto on the edge of the Sahara.

On 14 January, five Sharia appeal judges adjourned the hearing of
Safiya's entreaty against her own execution until 18 March. Safiya
sat quietly breastfeeding her eleven-month-old daughter Adama in
the court as the judges pondered her fate. Human rights activists,
women's groups and about a dozen defence lawyers were also in the
courtroom. The judges claimed they needed more time to consider
five new grounds of appeal brought by Safiya's defence team.

Safiya was unimpressed. "Only I will be punished, because the
injustice of the law is that men are not punished for impregnating
women," she says. "I insist that my crime is not adultery, but
pregnancy. Since only women can be pregnant this means that the
real crime is being a woman. The man will always commit adultery
and escape. The woman is the only one who can ever conceive, the
unknowing depository of the traitor's semen."

The above is the outline of the terrible fate of mother-of-five
Safiya Hussaini Tungar Tudu. Born the fifth of 12 children to an
illiterate herbal doctor father in the remote and poverty-stricken
village of Tungar Tudu in northern Nigeria's semi-desert, Safiya
was married off at the age of 12, thus beginning the harsh and
difficult life of a typical northern Nigerian wife. Her marriage,
and two subsequent marriages, did not last, as is so often the
case in the region's particular culture of Islam. Divorced by her
third husband in 1998, she began receiving the attention of
another man who, she alleged, raped her.

Meanwhile, full Sharia law was established in Sokoto in June 2000,
a month after baby Adama was conceived. According to the
interpretation of Islamic law by Sokoto's judges, Safiya, as a
woman who has been married, is an adulteress for conceiving a
child outside marriage. For that, the penalty is death by stoning.
If Safiya had never been married, she would have been charged with
the lesser offence of fornication, for which the punishment is 100
lashes.

The Sokoto judgment has been fiercely criticised in the largely
Christian and animist southern Nigeria, and by some Muslim
theologians who question whether stoning adulteresses was ever
sanctioned in the Koran.

As Safiya received no education as a child, spending her early
years fetching water and herbs for her father, she speaks hardly
any English, only her native Hausa, and has difficulty
understanding the complex arguments swirling around her. These are
the factors that prompted Nigerian satirist, Sanusi Lamido, to
take up her cause by publishing The Adulteress' Diary in Safiya's
name. It is a controversial piece, which savages the Sharia
lawmakers, accusing them of gross hypocrisy and questioning their
interpretation of the Koran. Thus, the quotes at the head of this
article are Safiya à la Lamido. Now confined, on bail, to her
blind father's mud hut, Safiya has made only limited statements
herself since her ordeal began.

Lamido is not the only person to pour scorn on the mullahs.
Delphine Nobime, a Christian studying at a polytechnic in Zamfara,
another northern state whose governor, Ahmed Sani, has introduced
full Sharia law, says: "The Moslem leaders preach Sharia during
the day and run after us girls on campus at night. They are the
champions in drinking."

Emmanuella Onorah, a southerner serving with the army in Zamfara,
says: "Sharia only really exists for the poor. It's easy to cut
off the hand of some unfortunate guy who steals a chicken or to
flog a woman who has sex. But no-one asks what actually goes on
behind the tinted windows of the Mercedes owned by government
officials or religious leaders."

Safiya's plight has assumed extraordinary importance because, less
than three years after ending dictatorship, Nigeria, Africa's most
populous country, is struggling with waves of religious and ethnic
killings that threaten its new democratic system and the country's
unity. A series of Muslim -Christian atrocities and inter-tribal
clashes have brought the number of people killed to nearly 8,000
since 1998 - following the death of the dictator, General Sani
Abacha, himself a Muslim , allegedly in the arms of two Indian
prostitutes.

The election in 1999 of a civilian President, Olusegun Obasanjo,
and of a democratic federal parliament raised Nigerians' hopes of
a better future. Under Abacha and previous military dictators, the
Nigerian people had grown poorer despite massive oil wealth.
Nigeria has earned more than £200 billion from oil exports since
it was first discovered in the late 1950s. But its people are
worse off now than they were 30 years ago, when it seemed that the
1970s oil boom would make Nigerians rich beyond their dreams.

Instead, at least half of Nigeria's 120 million citizens live in
abject poverty without access to clean water. The literacy rate is
below that of the Congo, long thought of as one of Africa's
poorest areas. The World Bank ranks Nigeria as the 13th poorest
country in the world. Its foreign debt stands at more than £22.

Added to this, the anti-corruption organisation Transparency
International calls Nigeria the most corrupt nation on earth. One
of its workers, Bilikisu Yusuf, says corruption pervades Nigerian
society so deeply that it has reached "the degree of insanity".

The country's rulers, especially past military dictators who ruled
for 30 of the 40 years since Nigeria became independent from
Britain, have diverted most of the oil wealth into a limited
number of private pockets. Leaders have plundered the country,
sucking out billions of dollars and stashing them in western
banks.

Having survived six successful military coups, four failed coups,
and a civil war from 1967 to 1970 that claimed a million lives,
Nigerians now stand at a new crossroads. Civil war again threatens
and there is a possibility of the break-up of a country created by
Britain in 1914 from more than 250 tribes speaking 200 languages.

Above all, it is the Muslim-Christian clash (accentuated by
America's and Britain's war against the Taleban and Osama bin
Laden in Afghanistan) that could plunge Nigeria into terminal
chaos. Bin Laden has acquired cult status among Nigeria's Muslims:
portraits of the al-Qaeda leader have been selling well. But in
reality trouble was brewing long before Bin Laden became an issue.
Since the end of military dictatorship, President Obasanjo has
come under huge pressure from northern militants who want to
implement full Sharia law.

A mild form of Sharia, confined solely to civil courts and only
for those who wanted it, was practised in the north under British
imperial rule. The British allowed the traditional sultans and
emirs to run their provinces according to their own rules, as long
as they imposed none of the crueller Sharia punishments such as
amputation. The system, it was thought, was cheap and required few
colonial officers to administer it.

But the new Sharia laws being implemented in 12 northern Nigerian
states are harsher and often compulsory for both Muslims and
non-Muslims. They outlaw sex before marriage, and alcohol. They
bar women from many jobs. Public transport and schools will soon
be sexually segregated. Punishments such as stoning for adultery
and amputation for theft - banned not only by the British but
throughout the first 40 years of Nigerian independence - have been
reinstated.

Last year, in Zamfara state, a teenage mother, Bariya Ibrahim
Magazu, was flogged 100 times for having sex before marriage. The
sentence was carried out even though her case, in which she was
planning to argue that she had been raped, had yet to come before
an appeal court to be heard.

The popularity of Sharia in the north - dominated by the big Hausa
and Fulani ethnic groups - has fuelled anger and separatist
agitation in the south, where the dominant Yoruba and Ibo tribes
are largely Christian. The southerners see Sharia as a way of
persecuting Christians. They also fear it will be used to
perpetuate the power the north enjoyed during the years of
military rule: most of the successive military dictators were
Muslims. The southerners also seek more control over revenues from
oil, produced entirely in the south.

One separatist group, the Oodua Peoples' Congress, which has
significant support in the Yoruba southwest of the country, has
led a campaign of violence against northerners that has claimed
about 1,000 lives in the past two years. Still Obasanjo, a
Christian and a Yoruba himself, is under attack by his fellow
southerners. The Christian Association of Nigeria, the biggest
non-Muslim religious grouping, has accused the President of
failing to uphold Nigeria's secular constitution, which forbids
any level of government from imposing criminal law based on
religion.

Increasingly, Islamic law and old ethnic tensions are splitting
the country and may yet propel it towards renewed civil war. "The
roof is already burning over Obasanjo's head. He thinks it is
not," says Wole Soyinka, Nigeria's Nobel Prizewinning author.
"Obasanjo thinks that some accidental rain which is 'The act of
God or Allah' will put out the fire."

Meanwhile, Safiya, almost toothless and looking far older than her
35 years, has changed her original plea from one of rape to having
had consensual sex with a husband who divorced her two years ago.
Before Islam came to northern Nigeria five centuries ago, a woman
was not considered to have had sex outside marriage if she had a
child by a former husband for up to seven years after the divorce.
This pre-Islamic custom has somehow become knitted into Sokoto's
21stcentury Sharia law.

That clash between ancient traditional practice and Islamic
orthodoxy could yet save Safiya's life. In one of the few real
interviews she has given, Safiya, speaking in Hausa, says: "I felt
like dying that day [of the sentence] because of the injustice. I
never thought there would be such a penalty. It is because I am
poor, my family is poor, and I am a woman."

She only recently began to question the law that says an
adulteress should be stoned to death. "That one is too political
for me to answer," she says. "My fate is in the hands of Allah."

To which one letter writer to a newspaper added: "Allah is indeed
merciful, Sharia law not so."