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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