[lbo-talk] NYT: Nigerian anti-stoning petition a dangerous mistake

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Mon May 12 06:23:44 PDT 2003


New York Times May 11, 2003

When Do-Gooders Don't Know What They're Doing

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

A BIDJAN, Ivory Coast- Every so often, tales of terrible suffering and

injustice in faraway lands come tugging at the conscience of the

world's privileged. Do something, these stories implicitly demand.

Sign a petition or, these days, double-click on a mouse to save a

life.

E-mail can instantly mobilize the moral condemnation of millions. So

it was with an urgent appeal on behalf of Amina Lawal, an illiterate

Nigerian woman sentenced to death by stoning for the crime of having a

child out of wedlock.

In recent weeks, an e-mail petition of mysterious origin, carrying the

name and logo, in Spanish, of Amnesty International has been zapped

around the globe. Recipients were asked to "sign" electronically, then

send it along to others. Ms. Lawal's execution was imminent, the

message warned; the Nigerian Supreme Court had already upheld the

death sentence.

It soon appeared, however, that the e-mail petition had problems.

Amnesty International said it had nothing to do with it, though it has

been campaigning vigorously on Ms. Lawal's behalf. And the case hasn't

reached the Nigerian Supreme Court, much less been ruled on.

Still, when the petition first came to Deborah Harding, a vice

president of the Open Society Institute in New York, she saw no reason

to hesitate. She signed (or tried to the technology failed her) and

passed it on to friends and colleagues.

"I felt like this is not one I can sit on," Ms. Harding said. "I sent

it along."

From Nottingham, England, to Beirut, Lebanon, to Washington D.C.,

people were e-mailing their protests until Ms. Lawal's Nigerian

advocates began sending their own electronic appeal to cease and

desist. In trying to save the woman's life, they said, the signers may

be putting her and her Nigerian supporters at risk.

"The information currently circulated is inaccurate, and the situation

in Nigeria, being volatile, will not be helped by such campaigns,"

said a "Dear Friends" electronic letter circulated last week from the

organization Baobab for Women's Human Rights, based in Lagos. "If

there is an immediate physical danger to Ms. Lawal and others, it is

from vigilante and political further (over) reaction to international

attempts at pressure."

This collision of well-intentioned foreigners and imperiled Nigerians

illustrates the hazards of using modern global communications to

enable people in the developed world to apply pressure in developing

nations over a range of issues, without some understanding of the

situation on the ground.

Ms. Lawal, 31, who lives in her parents' home in a village of mud huts

off a rutted highway in Muslim-dominated northern Nigeria, became an

international cause célèbre last August, when an Islamic court in

Katsina, her home state, found her guilty of adultery. The court said

Ms. Lawal had confessed to having a child out of wedlock, and

sentenced her to death by stoning after her daughter had been weaned.

Many Nigerians found the ruling horrific, including Olusegun Obasanjo,

the nation's president and an evangelical Christian. Whatever the

verdict of the state court, Mr. Obasanjo said, the sentence defied the

Nigerian Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. That is

something Nigeria's federal judges would have to take into account, if

Ms. Lawal's case came before them.

The case is still under appeal in Katsina state court, and is

scheduled to be heard on June 3. Only after state-level appeals are

exhausted can the case move on to the Nigerian federal courts. Similar

cases are currently under appeal, and some previous sentences have

been reversed. Ms. Lawal's lawyers have said they are prepared to take

the case up to the Nigerian Supreme Court.

Over the last two years, the Islamic penal code, or Shariah, has been

instituted in roughly a dozen northern states, leading to riots that

by some estimates have left 10,000 people dead. The most recent, last

December, was set off by a newspaper commentary that speculated

jokingly about what the prophet Muhammad would have made of the Miss

World beauty pageant, which was to be held in Abuja, Nigeria's

capital. The unrest gutted the main northern city of Kaduna.

In other words, the subjects of religion and religious law are

sensitive in Nigeria, whose population is half Muslim and 40 percent

Christian, with 10 percent subscribing to various indigenous beliefs.

That is why Nigerian women's groups were alarmed by the petition in

support of Ms. Lawal. The claim that she was to be executed June 3

could, these groups feared, prompt the proponents of Shariah to take

matters into their own hands, if they believed that Ms. Lawal's

supporters might succeed in overturning the sentence. That many of

these supporters were foreigners might embolden them even more.

"I really don't know where to put the blame," said Ndidi Ekekwe, a

program officer with Baobab. "But before anyone signs anything, they

should take the extra step of confirming the facts, because it could

just do more harm."

Ms. Ekekwe pointed to a case in 1999 of an unmarried teenage girl in

the northern state of Zamfara who was found guilty of fornication and

sentenced by a Shariah court to 100 lashes by cane. That case too was

met with international protest. The governor of Zamfara, an outspoken

proponent of Shariah, responded by having the sentence carried out

before her lawyers could file an appeal.

The chief appeals judge in Ms. Lawal's case has already said he isn't

interested in the opinion of outsiders.

"The world has no work to do," the judge, Grand Khadi Aminu Ibrahim

Katsina, said in an interview earlier this year. "That's why they're

focusing their attention on this."

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