Twitter Is Proud Of Shahzadi Rai And Chandni Shah, The First Transgender Members Of Karachi Metropolitan Corporation
New Age
Islam News Bureau
13 June 2023
• Twitter Is Proud Of Shahzadi Rai And
Chandni Shah, The First Transgender Members Of Karachi Metropolitan Corporation
• German Professor Hurls Racist Insults
At Muslim Student, Gulsen Kurt, Wearing A Headscarf
• Iranian Actresses, Azadeh Samadi, Leila
Bolokat and Zahra Ahooei Summoned for Hijab Violations
• Notorious Moroccan Belgian Jihadist
Recruiter, Malika El-Aroud Paved the Way for Francophone Jihadism in Europe
• It’s The Karimov Era 2.0 For Muslims
In Uzbekistan: 57-Year-Old Woman Sentenced To Three Years Of Restricted Freedom
For Liking A Social Media Post
• With ‘Lucrative Job Offers’ From Dubai,
Punjab Women Fall Victim To Trafficking
• How Torture, Deception And Inaction
Underpin UAE's Thriving Sex Trafficking Industry
• Afghan Women In Mental Health Crisis
Over Bleak Future
Compiled by New Age Islam News Bureau
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/shahzadi-chandni-transgender-karachi/d/129984
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Twitter Is Proud Of Shahzadi Rai And Chandni Shah, The First Transgender Members Of Karachi Metropolitan Corporation
Photo: The
Dawn, Pakistan
-----
08 Jun, 2023
Shahzadi Rai and Chandni Shah have
become the first transgender members of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation
(KMC) City Council. They just took oath on Wednesday and Twitter (just like us)
couldn’t be more proud.
Amid disappointment that the Federal
Shariat Court struck down the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act,
2018, the news of Shah and Rai’s election and oath-taking come as rays of hope.
Rai, a violence case manager at the
Gender Interactive Alliance, has been consistently working as a political
activist for the legislative rights of the Khwaja Sira community in Pakistan.
Similarly, Shah is a prominent advocate for transgender rights, affiliated with
the JI.
Their recent appointment as members of
the KMC City Council is a first for their community, but hopefully not the
last. In January, Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah chaired a meeting of the
provincial cabinet in which he approved the creation of two reserved seats for
transgender people in local councils.
In absolutely heart-warming tweets, Rai
said it is an “honour to have been entrusted to serve the community”. She also
thanked PPP Chairperson Bilawal Bhutto Zardari and Sindh Labour Minister Saeed
Ghani.
Congratulations and celebrations poured
in from members of the Khwaja Sira community, activists and netizens alike,
many lauding the beauty of democracy and its ability to emancipate marginalised
communities.
Many pointed out what a massive win this
is, not just for Rai and Shah but for their entire community and Pakistani
society at large, especially given the recent setback.
The transgender community is among the
most underrepresented and vulnerable communities in Pakistan and we’re so glad
it finally has brave leaders like Rai and Shah to champion its causes. Just as
we had lost hope in the current political wasteland, the enigmatic women have
given us a reason to believe again. We wish them the absolute best luck for
their time in the council and hope to see progress in the right direction.
Source: dawn.com
https://images.dawn.com/news/1191840/twitter-is-proud-of-shahzadi-rai-and-chandni-shah-the-first-transgender-kmc-city-council-members
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German Professor Hurls Racist Insults At
Muslim Student, Gulsen Kurt, Wearing A Headscarf
It was the latest in a string of
anti-Muslim incidents and hate crimes in Germany, particularly affecting women
wearing Islamic covers. / Photo: AA
------
12-06-23
A Muslim student Gulsen Kurt has been
racially insulted by a university professor in Germany because she was wearing
a headscarf, her lawyer said.
"Article 4 of the German
Constitution protects religious freedom, and a student can attend lessons by
wearing a headscarf. The attitude of this professor is absolutely
unacceptable," her lawyer Fatih Zingal said on Monday.
The professor used racist slurs and even
compared the Muslim woman’s headscarf with the swastika symbol of neo-Nazis,
Zingal said.
The incident occurred during an
economics class at the campus of the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg university in northwestern
Germany.
Twenty-three-year-old Kurt, who was
shocked by the lecturer’s use of racist slurs, said most of the students
reacted and left the class in protest.
"The professor said that he will
not allow a student with a headscarf to attend the class, just as he would not
allow a neo-Nazi wearing a swastika. He shouted at me, saying ‘you are an
Islamofascist’, and that he will report me to the directorate," she said.
Kurt said the directorate had apologised
over the racist slurs in class and underlined that the behaviour of the
lecturer is not approved by the university administration.
Source: trtworld.com
https://www.trtworld.com/discrimination/german-professor-hurls-racist-insults-at-muslim-student-13593402
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Notorious Moroccan Belgian Jihadist
Recruiter, Malika El-Aroud Paved the Way for Francophone Jihadism in Europe
June 12, 2023
On April 6 this year, Malika El-Aroud,
the notorious Moroccan Belgian jihadist recruiter, died in a Belgian prison with
minimal news coverage. The 64-year-old was little-known outside of jihadist
circles, although she had been on the radar of Western security agencies for
decades. She first gained notoriety as the widow of Abdessattar Dahmane, the al
Qaeda assassin who killed Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghan leader of the Northern
Alliance, two days before 9/11.
Later, Aroud gained notoriety in her own
right, becoming in effect the “First Lady of Jihad” and completely rewriting
the rule book for jihadist women in Europe. She was one of the earliest
keyboard warriors, who harnessed the power of the internet, sending men and
women to their deaths in the cause of jihad, shedding much blood both at home
and abroad. This was long before the media’s fascination with Jihadi Janes, White
Widows, Lady al Qaeda or Bethnal Green girls running off to join the Islamic
State group (IS).
From the 1990s onwards, Aroud harnessed
her considerable persuasive power to send fighters to conflict zones. What is
perhaps more extraordinary is that, unlike many of her male counterparts, who
did such things from rugged caves in Afghanistan or Yemen, Aroud did all this
from the heart of Europe.
Nor did she only persuade strangers.
Swiss intelligence chiefs believed it was Aroud who influenced her second husband,
Moez Garsalloui, to orchestrate terrorist attacks in Central Asia as well as
the Toulouse attack in 2012. Again and again, as I’ve covered terrorism and
jihad in multiple countries, I’ve found the fingerprints of Aroud, a woman who
was barely a year into her first marriage when she achieved the jihadist cult
status of becoming a “martyr’s widow” — a status gifted her by one of the most
audacious attacks in Afghanistan, one which paved the way for an even more
consequential strike on the other side of the world.
Aroud arrived in Brussels when she was
only 5 years old, in 1964. As an adult, she lived a life of excess, according
to Paul Cruickshank, a journalist who interviewed her in 2006. She did
“everything that is bad,” Aroud admitted. At the age of 32, in 1991, she was a
single mother with a string of broken relationships and was at her most
vulnerable and suicidal. That’s when she discovered Islam.
Like many born-again Muslims, she threw
herself wholeheartedly into the faith. That’s how she fell under the influence
of the radical Syrian Islamist Bassam Ayachi, who ran the Centre Islamique Belgique
(CIB) in the Brussels municipality of Molenbeek. The Belgian authorities were
already wary of Ayachi’s radical activities. Not only was he linked to the siege
of Mecca in 1979, when zealots had taken over Islam’s holiest of holy sites,
but he was also linked to European jihadist networks that were active in the
Bosnian War (1992-1995) and the First Chechen War (1994-96).
It was Ayachi who inadvertently set Aroud
on the path of becoming the First Lady of Jihad. He introduced her to her first
husband, Abdessattar Dahmane, in 1999. Dahmane, a Tunisian who had come to
Brussels on a student visa in 1987, was Ayachi’s protege. When they met in the
late 1990s, Dahmane was already a person of interest to the Belgian security
services. By the time of the Bosnian conflict, he was plugged into the network
of Belgian and French jihadists, with contacts all over Europe. Dahmane had
studied with jihadist scholars such as Abu Qatadah. He had tried and failed to
enter Kosovo, where Serbs were threatening Muslim Kosovars in 1996; such was
the transnational nature of his network and activities. By the time Ayachi
married the couple in 2000, Aroud was already immersed in jihadism and was a
devotee of Osama bin Laden.
Shortly after the wedding, Dahmane left
for the al Qaeda training camps of Afghanistan. In 2001, Aroud followed him.
She was a housewife in Jalalabad, a town that had endured decades of war, first
the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979-89 and then a bloody civil war in which the
Mujahideen factions fought each other for power. The Taliban, members of a
fanatical, austere religious movement, had swept in to put an end to the
fighting in 1996 and Jalalabad was under their control. The town was also an al
Qaeda stronghold. Bin Laden, the al Qaeda chief, had backed the Taliban
financially and was close to the movement’s leader, Mullah Omar. What Aroud
didn’t know was that her husband was on a secret mission to assassinate the
last man who stood against the Taliban: Ahmad Shah Massoud. If Dahmane
succeeded, the Taliban hoped to gain total mastery over the country.
According to Anand Gopal in “No Good Men
Among The Living,” Dahmane became “the first suicide bomber in Afghan history.”
Drawing on Dahmane’s jihadist networks in Europe, he and his accomplice
Bouraoui el-Ouaer were supplied with fake passports, fake journalist IDs, visas
and a letter of recommendation from a prominent London Islamist. Masquerading
as the journalists Karim Toussani and HassimBakkali, the assassins secured an
interview with Massoud two days before 9/11. As Dahmane interviewed Massoud,
el-Ouaer detonated the explosives hidden in the camera, killing the commander.
As Jalalabad celebrated the news with gunfire, Aroud accepted the $500 Bin
Laden gave her to clear her husband’s debts, not fully realizing that her own
stock had also risen with his passing. She was now a martyr’s widow, which is a
lofty status among jihadists.
But she didn’t have time to grieve for
her husband. The Americans and the Northern Alliance were in an unforgiving
mood; the former had just seen the Twin Towers collapse and the latter had lost
a key figure. They sought to root out the Taliban and al Qaeda once and for
all. Aroud fled. The Northern Alliance caught her. Had it not been for a daring
attack by some al Qaeda fighters, perhaps they would have locked her up inside
a giant container and suffocated her or, as often happened, gang-raped her. She
made it across the Pakistani border and presented herself to the Belgian
Embassy in Islamabad. Her government duly repatriated her, expecting her to
reciprocate this goodwill. If she had done so, or just returned to a quiet life
in Brussels, perhaps her recent death would not even warrant a mention in the
papers; there are many jihadist wives who live out their lives in domestic
quietude, including the wives of Bin Laden.
But Aroud did not repay the Belgian
authorities by supplying them with information on the terrorist organization.
Instead, she became a fully fledged devotee of Bin Laden, leveraging her new
status and her jihadist contacts from the 1990s. And, as if anticipating the
age of the influencer by a decade, she became a keyboard warrior, a
propagandist par excellence, which secured her jihadist legacy for posterity.
It was this step that made Claude Moniquet, the president of the European
Strategic Intelligence and Security Centre, say that she was “a source of
inspiration” and “extremely dangerous.” It was her ability to evade the law and
spread her message in the heart of Europe that made the press dub her “Mama
Jihad.” Arguably, she caused more damage from her tiny flat in Belgium than
most jihadist ideologues working from remote hideouts.
After her return to Belgium, she spent
nearly 10 years recruiting and proselytizing. After beating the Belgian
prosecution’s allegation that she, alongside 22 others, was an accomplice to
Massoud’s murder, she married again in 2003. Her second husband,
MoezGarsallaoui, was several years younger than she was and, like Dahmane, was
a Tunisian radical who had sought exile in Switzerland. Fortunately for Aroud,
among his many interests was a nerdy enthusiasm for computers. The newlyweds
moved to a small village in Switzerland. Instead of enjoying a healthy outdoor
life in a picturesque Alpine village, Aroud set about calling for jihad to her
dedicated subscribers under the pen name OumOubeyda, and running Minbar SOS and
other websites and forums. It was online that she exerted her influence. It was
behind the screen that she acted as a bridge with the 1990s jihadist networks
and grafted them onto the age of the internet.
Aroud had realized the power of words.
“It’s not my role to set off bombs,” she said. “I have a weapon. It’s to write.
It’s to speak out. That’s my jihad. … Writing is also a bomb.” Behind a
screensaver photo of her first husband, she contributed regularly to online
Francophone jihadist platforms like Ansar al-Haqq and became an effective
propagandist and recruiter. Harnessing the power of guilt, she played her ace
card deftly, guilt-tripping Muslim men for their seeming lack of concern for
the “ummah,” the global Muslim community. (She was so successful, in fact, that
her second husband, perhaps sick of that screensaver, abandoned his keyboard
and state benefits for the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 2007.)
Perhaps more powerful than guilt was her
primary message: glory. That word had a special pull for some Muslims,
particularly those who lived humdrum, unassuming lives in Europe, dreaming of a
time in the past when their Muslim predecessors ruled in Spain and Sicily and
Vienna. “Glory,” to those who have nothing, is a powerful force. Aroud, as she
herself admitted, had detested the timidity and acceptance of the banal in her
own family, and couldn’t stand the feeling of marginalization. She offered
people who were living dissipated lives a shortcut to the path of repentance —
martyrdom. By joining the jihad, her recruits were promised they could,
somehow, join a pantheon of heroes. Perhaps, in some small way, Aroud offered a
way out of a certain existential angst.
But Aroud did more than just offer
words. In 2005, Swiss authorities arrested her for online incitement because
she posted “manuals for the manufacture of bombs” as well as “images of
murder,” and for letting groups linked to al Qaeda post information on her
websites. Aroud got off lightly with a mere slap on the wrist, an 18-month
suspended sentence, although her husband was sentenced to six months in prison.
According to an expert on Belgian jihadists, Guy Van Vlierden, by 2007, Aroud
had managed to send “at least seven men” off to Afghanistan, as well as,
allegedly, the first European female suicide bomber, Muriel Degauque, who
carried out a suicide attack on American troops in Iraq in 2005.
Still, despite these activities, most of
the charges that the Belgian authorities threw at Aroud didn’t stick. In 2003,
she was arrested and released over the Tunisian professional footballer Nizar
Trabelsi’s conspiracy to attack a NATO air base near the Belgian-Dutch border.
Trabelsi admitted to meeting Bin Laden and dreaming of being a suicide bomber.
In 2007, Aroud was arrested for her involvement in a conspiracy to spring
Trabelsi from prison before his extradition to the U.S. — but the case didn’t
make it to court. The following year, Aroud was arrested again, on yet another
terrorism charge — this time for being part of an imminent suicide attack on
European summit leaders in Brussels. All the participants had received training
in Afghanistan and used her website, Minbar SOS, to communicate. By 2007 she
was, according to Swiss prosecutors, directing her second husband
MoezGarsalloui’s terror activities. Garsalloui had fled to Afghanistan in late
2007 and had become the leader of Jund al-Khilafah, or the “soldiers of the
caliphate.” He was responsible for several attacks in Central Asia and, in
2012, claimed responsibility for training Mohammed Merah, a Frenchman of
Algerian descent, who murdered several women and children in a Jewish school in
Toulouse. Garsalloui was eventually killed in a drone strike in the same year
in Miranshah, Pakistan.
Aroud was able to stay largely out of
jail, perhaps partly because the authorities were wholly unprepared to deal
with jihadists and radicals like her and partly because she trod the fine line
between the legal and the illegal. The law found it hard to pin anything
explicit on her, because the effect her words had was intangible. Bernard
Bertossa, the Swiss judge at her trial in 2007, said that she exploited the
right to freedom of expression and peddled propaganda. It seems that these were
tactics she used with great skill. Her words had a way of finding themselves on
the bookshelves of radical jihadis all over the Francophone world, in the same
way Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” might find its way onto the bookshelves of the far
right.
In 2010, the Belgian authorities finally
convicted Aroud for jihadist recruitment and jailed her. Despite her
incarceration, however, her status as the “First Lady of Jihad” was ascendant,
and she continued to wield influence. Now, she was able to leverage a well-worn
Islamic trope — that of being a prisoner for Islam. She wasn’t just a martyr’s
widow, nor merely a self-styled caller to the “truth,” who was trying to awaken
the Muslim world from its torpor. She was also someone who the infidel powers
were trying to shut down. Through her friends, Aroud was still able to
communicate and post about her “suffering” to Francophone jihadist websites.
This influence became even more pronounced
as IS made its appearance in Syria in 2012-13, and fighters began to make their
way to the Syrian battlefield from France and Belgium. According to Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty, France became the biggest exporter of jihadists in
Europe, while Belgium had the highest number of fighters per capita of any
Western nation.
While researching my book on the
Afghanistan War, having covered many of the terrorist attacks of the last
decade, including in Paris and Brussels, I noticed that Aroud’s subtle but lethal
influence became increasingly apparent through the wreckage. According to
Vlierden, when French prosecutors accused Yassin Salhi of beheading his
employer and ramming a truck into a U.S.-owned chemical factory in 2015, they
traced the ringleader to a French IS operative in Syria — Sebastien
YunesVoyezZairi. When they raided Zairi’s home, they found Aroud’s 2004
autobiography, “Les Soldats de Lumiere” (The Soldiers of Light) in his home.
“Les Soldats” turned up in the belongings of the Charlie Hebdo attacker,
CherifKouachi, as well. French police also found the book in the home of Hayat
Boumeddiene, whose husband AmedyCoulibaly went on a murderous spree at the same
time as a manhunt for the Kouachi brothers was underway in January 2015. After
the Charlie Hebdo attack, Boumeddiene escaped to Syria and joined IS. She was
later sentenced to life in a French court in absentia.
Aroud’s associates also cropped up
regularly in Europe and Syria. Leonard Lopez, the administrator of the jihadist
website Ansar al-Haqq, “helpers of the truth,” to which Aroud was a regular
contributor in the 2000s, took his whole family to the IS “caliphate.” He was
sentenced to death by an Iraqi court in 2019. Another associate, Amor Sliti,
convicted for his involvement in the assassination of Massoud, joined IS and
died in Syria. His daughter, Hafsa, was repatriated from a camp in northern
Syria and sentenced to five years in prison in Belgium. Aroud’s loyal friend
Fatima Aberkan, wife of Trabelsi, went to the Turkish-Syrian border to help
fighters cross over into Syria. Several of Aberkan’s sons fought and died with
IS and earned Aberkan the nickname “The Mother of Jihad” from the Francophone
press.
Another close associate of Aberkan was
the notorious recruiter Khalid Zerkani. The Zerkani network was “by far the
most dangerous,” says Pieter Van Ostaeyen, a researcher of Belgian jihadist
networks. Belgian prosecutors say Zerkani perverted a whole generation of
Belgian youth. I obtained some of the material that Zerkani fed his recruits;
they were texts published on Lopez’s jihadist website, the same website to
which Aroud contributed. It was those recruits who laid Syrian villages to
waste because the villagers wanted democracy. It was his recruits who killed
innocent people in Paris and Brussels in 2015 and 2016. And just to make the
connection and influence of Aroud explicit, it was Al-Wafa Media, a pro-IS
channel, that justified the terror attacks by citing the imprisonment of “our
sister Malika.” Aroud’s influence, though hard to pinpoint, was undeniable.
But it was Aroud’s work in redefining
the role of women and jihad that arguably made her the “First Lady of Jihad.”
Traditionally, with a few notable exceptions, Islam discouraged women from
taking part in the battlefield. A woman’s role was usually considered
auxiliary, such as tending to the wounded or looking after the warrior’s family
from afar, in a place of safety. The fact that Aroud had gone to Afghanistan to
support her husband broke that convention. Here was a novel way to support the
jihad, she seemed to say. Moreover, her example was counter to scholars who
argued that women needed permission from their parents to embark on such
jihadist adventures. She offered a model to radical women through her lived
experience. A woman’s role was to stand beside her man and give him steely
resolve, to make sure he kept his commitment, to call others to jihad and raise
the next generation. This is why Aberkan said that Aroud was an “inspiration
for women because she is telling women to stop sleeping and open their eyes.”
Many of the Francophone women who joined
IS came of age in a world that Aroud helped create, most notably Boumeddiene.
In many ways, these French and Belgian “jihadi brides” (as they became known)
emulated Aroud. Just like her, they recruited, albeit on social media. They
celebrated when their husbands were martyred and posed with Kalashnikovs,
taunting the men into action. Furthermore, following the defeat of IS in 2019,
when they were corralled into al-Hol and Roj, all-women camps the size of small
towns in northern Syria, they became prisoners “for” Islam who asked the ummah
to save them from the rapacious hands of the “infidel” powers, in this case the
Kurdish militias.
In 2018, the Belgian authorities, fed
up, stripped Aroud of her citizenship and tried to deport her to Morocco, her
country of birth. Aroud appealed, claiming that she would be subjected to
torture. Rabat, understandably, didn’t want her back either, and so she
remained incarcerated while her case ping-ponged between Brussels and the
European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, until her death in April 2023.
Even beyond the grave, however, her
troubling legacy remains. For policymakers currently wrestling with the
repatriation of jihadist women, Aroud’s life and death are a constant reminder
of the powerful role these “jihadi brides” played in the Syrian conflict and
the chaos they could cause at home. Arguably, her ghost goes a small way to
explaining why human rights organizations accuse the French government of
willfully slowing down the process of repatriation. Given the terror attacks in
Paris and Brussels, it is understandable that these governments take the view
that the women, though they are French or Belgian citizens, are not simply
groomed victims or mere housewives but potential criminal accomplices and
extremely dangerous.
Aroud’s case demonstrated how hard it
was to convict radicals like her. It becomes even harder to establish guilt in
a fluid conflict zone, where evidence and testimonies are difficult to collect
and collate. The undertaking, in terms of cost, is huge. To take them at their
word, that they were just housewives busy with home and hearth, would have been
easier to swallow had their husbands not been busy committing mass murder
outside. What if they were like the German IS bride Jennifer Wenisch — a
mistress who abused her Yezidi slave and the woman’s 5-year-old daughter? She
left the poor child chained to the bed, dying in agony, as the daytime heat
reached 50 degrees Celsius. Moreover, reports from al-Hol and Roj suggest that
the women’s extremist ideas have not abated but are very much alive. In the
minds of policymakers, then, there is always fear that these repatriated IS
wives will radicalize others. After all, both France and Belgium have large
Muslim populations. What if these returnees hatched new plots or turned out to
be like Aroud?
One can see the political logic behind
the French and Belgian governments’ decisions that the fate of their citizens
in Iraq must follow local jurisdiction. This will not only prevent their own
judicial and penitentiary systems from being overwhelmed, but also save them
from making politically unpalatable decisions. It seems far easier for the
Iraqi justice system to deliver dubious but swift “justice.” Somehow, the Iraqi
judiciary has figured out a way of passing life and death sentences in less
than 10 minutes. Iraqis are in no mood to show clemency, since it was their
country that suffered the consequences. Many believe that these young women
jihadis must own their actions.
Nevertheless, for European policymakers,
the “First Lady of Jihad” should serve as a stark reminder that it will do them
no good to abandon their citizens who are now in northern Syria. Without a
systematic policy of repatriation with security, fairness and justice at its
core, European governments’ actions may breed many more like Aroud, more
“prisoners for Islam,” in the future — not to mention what the governments’
decisions will mean for the multitudes of innocent children who had no part to
play in the actions of their parents. After all, Aroud’s legacy may yet produce
a new batch of radical jihadists.
Source: newlinesmag.com
https://newlinesmag.com/essays/how-malika-el-aroud-paved-the-way-for-francophone-jihadism-in-europe/
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It’s The Karimov Era 2.0 For Muslims In
Uzbekistan: 57-Year-Old Woman Sentenced To Three Years Of Restricted Freedom
For Liking A Social Media Post
June 12, 2023
On May 31, a 57-year-old woman from
Navai region was sentenced to three years of restricted freedom for liking a
social media post in 2018, when she was in Turkey. The video she “liked” on the
Odnoklassniki.ru social media platform was a religious speech in Uzbek
delivered by a person named RafikKamalov.
It could have been a video of the late
imam MuhammadrafiqKamalov, who was born in Kyrgyzstan. He was famous for his
lectures on politics and Islam before he was reportedly killed in a 2006
special joint operation between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan against alleged
members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Kamalov was, and remains, a
controversial figure.
The video lecture essentially claimed
that people who do not offer namaz, a ritual prayer to be observed five times a
day by Muslims, “have no proof of being a Muslim, have not no right to consider
themselves a Muslim.” The court verdict said that the video is full of “ideas of religious fanaticism, and it is
prohibited to import, prepare and distribute it (the video) in the territory of
Uzbekistan.” Although the woman was outside Uzbekistan, the verdict maintains
that when she liked the video she distributed it to her 130 virtual friends on
the platform.
Over the past year or so there has been
a rise in these kinds of cases in Uzbekistan. Young people in particular are
facing prison terms for sharing religious content with their friends on social
media platforms. In January 2023, 21-year-old SardorRahmankulov was sentenced
to five years for sending a nasheed – an Islamic song – to a friend via
Telegram back in 2020. He was held in prison for six months during the trial
and was allegedly “ferociously” tortured. In May, 21-year-old student
JahongirUlughmurodov was given three years imprisonment for sharing a YouTube
link to a nasheed in a Telegram group chat with his classmates. The Committee
of Religious Affairs found the song to be “infused with ideas of fanaticism.”
These and other reported cases created a
wave of criticism both among netizens of Uzbekistan and activists. “[Y]oung
people aged 19-20 are being imprisoned for a long term. Last year, a
19-year-old boy was sentenced to 12 years and 3 months. … we are at the
beginning of the trend during the Karimov era,” human rights activist
AbdurahmonTashanov told Kun.uz, a local news outlet.
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The 2023 annual report from the U.S.
Commission on International Religious Freedom named Uzbekistan among the
countries it recommends the U.S. State Department include on a “Special Watch
List” for violations of religious freedom. The report noted that Tashkent
“continued to severely restrict freedom of religion or belief through its 1998
law On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations, as amended in 2021,
which requires religious groups to obtain registration to engage in religious
activity and prohibits unregistered religious activity, the private teaching of
religion, missionary activity, and proselytism, in addition to other undue
restrictions.”
In many cases, those arrested are young
individuals, and often not even religious. Most do not speak Arabic and
therefore do not understand the content of the nasheeds they share. It took a
whole religious committee to identify the aforementioned nasheeds as extremist.
How would a 20-year-old know?
The Ministry of Justice of Uzbekistan
has a published list of “organizations and resources recognized as terrorist.”
The activities of these groups and dissemination of materials listed on the
website are prohibited by a 2019 decision of the Supreme Court. But the list
only includes 166 names and materials.
How arrests on spreading extremist
materials are being handled is another side of the problem. The initial legal
basis for arresting certain young people is not always clear; it’s only after
they have been detained that their phones and social media accounts are
scrutinized for religious content, often years-old. Ulughmuradov’s mother said
law enforcement representatives said that they were taking her son due to a
theft that had occurred nearby. She insists neither she herself nor
Ulughmurodov knew what a nasheed was. “My son said ‘I listened to it as a
song,’” the mother said in a video appeal to the president and the Supreme
Court, begging for a second chance for her son.
In another similar case, last year in
April, 20-year-old AbdurahimAbdughaniyev’s phone was checked by representatives
of the Department of Combating Terrorism and Extremism of the Ministry of
Internal Affairs. They found prohibited religious material in Abdughaniyev’s
phone. The court verdict declared that Abdughaniyev “downloaded it from the
Internet without knowing that it was a prohibited material, and then sent it to
two friends” via Telegram. Yet, among other charges, the 20-year-old was
charged under Article 159 of the Criminal Code. The article is reserved for
cases of “openly calling for unconstitutional change of the current state
system… usurpation of power or removal of legally elected or appointed
representatives of the authorities, or violation of the territorial integrity
of the Republic of Uzbekistan in violation of the Constitution,” as well as
acting to “prepare, store or distribute materials of such content for the
purpose of distribution.”
RuslanSaburov, a journalist at Kun.uz,
notes that the same article was used in a trial against “the organizers of
demonstrations and riots” of the 2022 Karakalpakstan unrest. Abdughaniyev was
sentenced to six years in prison although there was no proof of him attacking
the constitutional regime. Later, the regional court changed his sentence to
3.5 years following an appeal.
As of publication, eight more people
have been detained with charges of “failure to report terrorist acts” and
“financing terror” in Tashkent. Their relatives claim the accused had a
Telegram group where they collected money for donation purposes. Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty’s Uzbek Service, Ozodlik, reports that there are bloggers
among the arrested who cover religious topics on Uzbek social media platforms.
The case is being held in a closed court as there might be other “accomplices
who are not yet known to the investigation.” This may chill reporting on the
case, with bloggers and journalists concerned that they could be named next.
In Mirziyoyev’s New Uzbekistan,
religious freedom remains as oppressed as it was in the old Karimov era.
Although Mirziyoyev released religious and political prisoners in his initial
years in power, those emptied cells are again being filled with new inmates.
Men with long beards are frequently detained on streets and forced to shave,
while women are harassed for wearing hijabs. Religious publications are
controlled. To compare, many groups or materials that are restricted in
Uzbekistan are not illegal in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, yet Kyrgyzstan has not
turned into a caliphate.
The authorities in Tashkent see a
political enemy in any version of Islamic practice that is not approved (that
is, controlled) by the state. The situation, however, might get even worse. On
July 9, Uzbekistan will hold a snap presidential election, and Mirziyoyev will
win. After the election his regime will have nothing to lose, and the crackdown
on the regime’s critics — journalists, activists, as well as religious
community — will harshen further.
Source: thediplomat.com
https://thediplomat.com/2023/06/its-the-karimov-era-2-0-for-muslims-in-uzbekistan/
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With ‘lucrative job offers’ from Dubai,
Punjab women fall victim to trafficking
13th June 2023
CHANDIGARH: Promising respectable and
lucrative job offers, many Punjab women were taken to Dubai on a tourist visa,
not a work visa. From Dubai, however, they were sent to other Gulf countries
and pushed into menial and other jobs.
These facts have emerged in an
investigation carried out by the state police’s Special Investigation Team
(SIT) following 18 cases of trafficking of women to West Asian countries. The
police have so far arrested eight suspects.
The SIT is headed by Superintendent of
Police, Ferozepur, Randhir Kumar and started working a few days back after the state
government ordered an investigation last month. In some cases, women duped by
travel agents were able to return home to share their woes with SIT members.
These women mainly came from lower
middle class or poor families and travel agents promised good jobs in Dubai in
beauty parlours and as help in taking care of the elderly. They were supposed
to go on work visas.
“They were taken to Dubai but on a
tourist visa, and from there to Muscat by road. After a few days as their visa
expired, they were told that they were illegal in the country and were pushed
into doing menial jobs where they were poorly paid,” said a police officer.
He said the women were treated
inhumanly; they were not given proper accommodation and meals. “When they asked
the travel agents to send them back, they were told that they will have to pay
another `2 lakh for their return. Since they were not financially sound, they
had no option but to stick to their jobs.’’
The SIT is trying to unravel a network
of agents spread across Punjab, Delhi, Kerala and Telangana. These travel
agents use sub-agents and are given some amount of commission. These sub-agents
check the family histories of the girls before recommending their names to
their bosses.
“The passports of these women are taken
away so it is difficult for them to return. We have a few cases where some of
these women approached the Indian embassies,’’ said a senior officer. Sometime
back 15 women had returned from Oman and narrated their ordeal. They told cops
about being trapped by travel agents. So far, 23 women from Oman have been
rescued, while another 14 are still trapped.
‘Inhuman treatment’
Superintendent of Police, Ferozepur,
Randhir Kumar said the women were treated inhumanly; they were not given proper
accommodation and meals. “When they asked to be sent back, they were told to
pay another Rs 2 lakh for their return.”
Source: newindianexpress.com
https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2023/jun/13/with-lucrative-job-offers-from-dubaipunjab-women-fall-victim-to-trafficking-2584503.html
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How torture, deception and inaction
underpin UAE's thriving sex trafficking industry
June 12, 2023
On a pleasure boat cruising Gulf waters
near Dubai’s glittering skyline, a Nigerian woman in a white dress and gold
jewelry nodded and swayed as a gathering sang “Happy Birthday” to her.
Videos of Christy Gold’s 45th birthday
party were posted in May last year on an Instagram account that showcases her
glamorous lifestyle, months after Gold fled Nigeria, where she was facing sex
trafficking charges.
Gold – whose name appears in court
records as Christiana Jacob Uadiale – was a ringleader in a criminal network
that lured African women to Dubai and forced them into prostitution in
brothels, backstreets, bars, hotels and dance clubs, according to six Nigerian
government anti-trafficking officials, a British human rights activist who has
tracked her operation and five women who say they were trafficked and exploited
by her.
Three of the women said in interviews
that Gold told them that if they didn’t do as they were told, they’d be killed
and dumped in the desert. Those who didn’t make enough money for her were taken
to a room in an apartment in Dubai, where Gold’s brother starved them, flogged
them and shoved hot chili paste into their vaginas, according to three
anti-trafficking officials and five women who provided detailed accounts in
interviews and court statements.
“They beat the hell out of me,” one of
the women said. “The suffering was too much.”
In a statement to the court after she
was charged, Gold denied that she and her brother were sex traffickers. “I am
not involved in human trafficking and I do not have any girls in Dubai working
for me as a prostitute,” she said.
Gold remains a fugitive from justice –
part of what anti-trafficking activists and officials say is a thriving
underground of suspected Nigerian sex traffickers who have taken refuge in the
United Arab Emirates, a Gulf nation known for its wealth, futuristic
skyscrapers and what rights groups say is a poor record on protecting foreign
workers and basic freedoms.
The UAE is a major destination for sex
trafficking, where African women are forced into prostitution by illicit
networks operating within the country, an investigation by the International
Consortium of Investigative Journalists and Reuters has found.
Emirati authorities do little to protect
these women, according to anti-trafficking activists, Nigerian authorities and
interviews with trafficked women.
This story is based on interviews with
25 African women, mostly from Nigeria, who described being lured to the UAE by
Gold or other alleged traffickers, as well as dozens of interviews with
humanitarian workers, investigators, Nigerian government officials and others
with knowledge of sex trafficking in the Emirates. Their accounts are
corroborated by court records and case files from Nigeria’s anti-human
trafficking agency.
Human traffickers keep African women in
sexual slavery by playing on their financial desperation and creating webs of
manipulation and coercion, the reporting shows. They subject them to threats
and violence. They ensnare them in crushing debts, often totaling $10,000 to
$15,000 – huge sums for women from poor families. And, in many cases, they
exploit traditional African spiritual beliefs to make victims believe that they
have no choice but to do what the traffickers tell them.
This article is part of a reporting
collaboration led by ICIJ, Trafficking Inc., which is examining sex trafficking
and labor trafficking in many parts of the globe. ICIJ’s media partners on the
project include Reuters, NBC News, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism
and other news outlets in multiple countries.
Gold did not respond to questions for
this story. In her statement to the court in Nigeria, Gold said she had helped
Nigerian women and men move to the UAE by subletting space to them in an
apartment she owned in Dubai.
“I even go as far as advising them like
a mother so they too can make it in Dubai,” she said. But she told the court,
“I cannot tell what these people did for a living in Dubai.”
In a written reply supplied by the Dubai
government’s media affairs office, the emirate’s police agency said claims that
Gold had engaged in the sex trafficking of African women in Dubai are “false
and have absolutely no basis in fact.” The statement said Gold had “entered and
exited Dubai legally and was not implicated in any illegal activities.”
The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs said
any suggestion the UAE “tolerates human trafficking or that it has little
regard to the victims of this heinous crime is utterly false.” Such
allegations, the ministry said in response to questions, were “baseless and
without foundation.”
The ministry said the UAE’s laws on sex
trafficking carry heavy fines and prison sentences. A report the ministry
shared said the UAE had referred 20 “human trafficking cases” to the courts in
2021, most for “sexual exploitation.”
The UAE has been involved in
international police operations against trafficking networks, the ministry
said.
Human rights activists and Nigerian
authorities say the UAE doesn’t live up to its anti-trafficking commitments.
Fatima Waziri-Azi, director general of
Nigeria’s National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, said
there has been “no cooperation” when NAPTIP has reached out to Emirati
authorities for help hunting down traffickers working out of the UAE.
Angus Thomas, a British activist who
founded an anti-trafficking education organization based in Ghana, said UAE
authorities, including the police, were uncooperative when he urged them to
help African women get away from Gold and her associates.
“I wrote, I phoned, I emailed, asking
them to help me get the girls, sending addresses of apartments,” he said. “And
I heard nothing.”
In plain sight
Sex trafficking is one form of human
trafficking, which is generally defined as using force, fraud or coercion to
induce someone to provide a service.
Most of the 25 women interviewed for
this story said they were promised other types of work but were driven into
prostitution. Others said they chose to do sex work but were trapped in
situations in which they were abused, their earnings were stolen and they were
unable to get away.
The UAE made sex trafficking a crime in
2006 and has established an interagency anti-trafficking panel and opened
shelters for survivors. The U.S. State Department said in 2022 that the UAE has
made “significant efforts” to combat human trafficking but still falls short in
key areas – including failing to “consistently screen vulnerable populations for
trafficking indicators, which may have penalized some victims for unlawful acts
traffickers compelled them to commit, such as immigration or ‘prostitution’
violations.”
The UAE follows Islamic law, yet
prostitution and sex trafficking are open secrets. Business cards with photos
and WhatsApp numbers for brothels disguised as massage parlors litter many
areas of Dubai. Spas, dance clubs and bars are filled with sex workers.
“I have never at any time instructed him
to beat any of the girls as I have never had cause to beat any of them.”
Christy Gold, in a statement to a
Nigerian court about her brother Solomon.
A hierarchy based on skin tone plays an
important role in the UAE’s sex industry, according to interviews with
trafficked women and visits to spots where prostitutes congregate in the UAE.
Lighter-skinned women from Europe are generally trafficked into higher-end
venues serving wealthier customers. Darker-skinned women are often steered to
alleys and street corners, providing sex to low-income migrant workers from
South Asia and Africa.
One Nigerian woman described being taken
by a trafficker to an open-air brothel in the desert between Dubai and another
emirate, Abu Dhabi. She said she and other women would take off their clothes
and spread them on the ground, and men would come to have sex with them from 5
p.m. to 11 p.m.
A Nigerian mother in her 20s said a
trafficker led her and two other women to a parking lot in Ajman, one of the
emirates that make up the UAE, and forced them to have sex with male clients
amid vehicles that were being painted and repaired. At the end of the night,
she said, the traffickers took all the money, leaving them with nothing to buy
food.
After she broke free of the trafficker,
the woman said, she slept in the streets and begged for food. She nearly lost
her mind, she said, before a nurse from Nigeria rescued her and helped her get
home.
A view of the Abu Dhabi skyline. Much of
the construction in places like Abu Dhabi and Dubai has been done by foreign
workers, who make up nearly 90% of the population in the UAE. REUTERS/File
photo
The UAE's sex industry is shaped by the
country's distinctive demography and economy.
Nearly 90% of its population comes from
somewhere else – mostly foreign workers employed in construction, hospitality
and other industries. Most of them are men and they arrive alone. As a result,
69% of the UAE’s population is male. The government deals with these
demographic realities by deploying extensive surveillance in the UAE – and by
allowing a bustling sex trade as a way of pacifying male workers, according to
two former diplomats who were based in the UAE and monitored sex trafficking.
Gold and Mercy
On New Year’s Eve 2019, Thomas, a
photographer and anti-trafficking activist, had a one-day layover in the UAE
before heading home to London. He was going into a supermarket in Dubai when a
19-year-old Nigerian woman approached him and offered him sex.
He declined, but asked her if she wanted
to return to her home country.
She told him, Thomas said, that she and
22 other women were under the control of a trafficker named Christy Gold. Back
in London, he sent her money to rent a safe place to stay and then arranged a
flight home to Nigeria.
Thomas said he began trying to rescue
other women trapped in Dubai. He started a campaign called Send Them Home,
raising money to cover victims’ escape and travel costs. Over several months,
Thomas said, he helped rescue eight other women who said they’d been held
against their will by Gold or other traffickers operating in the UAE. Thomas’
account was confirmed by Nigerian anti-trafficking officials and women who
Thomas helped escape from traffickers.
He also shared information that he had
gathered about Gold with Nigeria’s anti-trafficking agency NAPTIP, which can
arrest and prosecute alleged traffickers. His efforts included tracking Gold’s
Instagram account, where she displays hundreds of online posts featuring
lion-shaped gold pendants and other jewelry she sells through a gold trading
business she runs from Dubai.
In a May 2022 email to Waziri-Azi, the
Nigerian anti-trafficking agency’s director, Thomas wrote that Gold was
“flaunting her wealth built on the backs” of young women “she trafficks to
Dubai.”
Little is known about Gold’s background.
In her written statement to the Nigerian court, Gold said that she traveled to
Dubai in 2009 and after that began shuttling back and forth, buying gold, shoes
and handbags in the UAE and selling them in Nigeria.
According to victim statements to the
court and interviews, Gold and her associates targeted Nigerian women who were
desperate for work and new lives, promising them jobs in hair salons,
restaurants and other retail businesses in Dubai. Gold’s associates helped them
obtain Nigerian passports and tourist visas to travel to the UAE.
Descriptions of her operations come from
five women who said they’d been trafficked by Gold. Three gave detailed
interviews. Two of the three women interviewed for this story, along with two
other women, have submitted witness statements in Gold’s criminal case.
Each of the three women interviewed for
this article said she was trafficked after being approached by a recruiter, Mercy
EwereOwuzo, who worked with Gold.
One said she was working in a shop in
Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, in July 2019 when Owuzo told her that she could
make much more money as a salesperson in a store in Dubai.
“I didn’t ask any questions because she
told me she is trying to help young women and I thought, ‘She is a kind
person,’” the woman, 25, recalled.
She said Owuzo paid for her passport,
plane ticket and UAE tourist visa.
After arriving in Dubai, she said, she
talked by phone to Owuzo, who told her there was no job for her in a store.
Instead, she would be going to clubs, restaurants and hotels to sell her body.
It was the only way, she said she was told, to pay down the $12,000 debt that
she owed Gold for bringing her to the UAE.
The three women said Gold also
controlled them by confiscating their passports. Then, they said, she created
fake passports that appeared authentic enough to get them through routine
police stops or past front desks at hotels – but not enough to get them out of
the country.
It’s not clear from witness accounts and
court documents whether Gold was the topmost leader of the alleged trafficking
network. The three women interviewed for this story said she exercised a
substantial level of authority and was deeply engaged in the network’s
operations – personally threatening, for example, to leave their corpses in the
Arabian Desert if they didn’t comply with her demands.
“Every time we don’t bring money, they
would beat us, put pepper in our vagina, pepper in our eyes,” said one of the
three women, who said she was working as a hairstylist in Nigeria before Owuzo
promised her a better-paying job in Dubai. “Many of us had wounds, but we
weren’t taken to hospitals because they don’t want people to know what they
were doing to us.”
All three of these women spent time in a
two-bedroom apartment in Dubai controlled by Gold. At one point, they said,
Gold occupied one bedroom, while as many as 18 women were crammed into the
other, with most sleeping on blankets on the floor.
It was here, according to interviews and
court statements, that women marked for punishment were sent and where Gold’s
enforcer – her brother Solomon – sexually assaulted them and beat their
malnourished bodies with a hookah hose, broomstick or other implements.
NAPTIP officials said Solomon has not
been charged with a crime. Gold said in her court statement that she never
ordered Solomon to hurt anyone who stayed in her apartment in Dubai.
“I have never at any time instructed him
to beat any of the girls as I have never had cause to beat any of them,” she
said.
ICIJ and Reuters were unable to contact
Solomon.
Victoria Oburoh, one of NAPTIP’s top
prosecutors, confirmed that Gold and Owuzo worked together. In May last year,
NAPTIP was able to win a conviction of Owuzo on sex trafficking charges in
federal court in the Nigerian state of Delta. Oburoh said that case and the one
pending against Gold are “sister cases.”
A lawyer who represented Owuzo during
her trial declined to comment.
NAPTIP began an investigation of Gold
after one of her alleged victims reported her to the police in Nigeria.
Authorities charged Gold with six counts of violating Nigeria’s sex trafficking
law.
After a judge released her on bail, she
failed to show up for a scheduled court appearance on Nov. 3, 2021. Her lawyer
told the judge that Gold had been “found half dead on the bed” and taken to a
hospital.
The judge ordered that Gold be taken
back into custody. But authorities had no luck tracking her down, NAPTIP
officials say.
‘Put me in prison’
Loudspeakers announced evening prayers
at a mosque in Al Baraha, a working-class neighborhood in Dubai’s populous
Deira district, when a reporter visited last August.
Steps away, young women in colorful wigs
and low-cut evening dresses lined up in front of shabby buildings for their
day’s work: providing sex to men. On the fourth and fifth floors of one
building, South Asian men sat in the stairway, scrolling on their phones,
sipping beer and waiting for their turns with the sex workers.
All the while police vehicles slowly
navigated the district’s narrow alleys – part of the policing and surveillance
apparatus that keeps UAE authorities deeply informed about what’s going on in
Dubai and other emirates.
One of the sex workers was a young woman
who arrived from Ghana in June 2022. She said she was promised a job as a
housemaid but found herself doing an entirely different kind of work.
She rolled up her dress to show the
bruises that came with the job.
“A few days ago, my eyes were swollen
after being hit in the face and slapped when I failed to meet the target,” she
said. “It’s my boss who did this to me.”
He told her, she said, that if she
wanted to gain her freedom, she had to pay a debt of nearly $10,000.
“Where do I go? What do I do?” she
asked, breaking into tears. She said her trafficker, whom she didn’t name, had
taken away her phone and passport.
Another way traffickers and their
subordinates control African women is by using the power of juju, a traditional
African spiritual belief system.
Women targeted for sex trafficking are
required to take “juju oaths,” solemn vows to do the bidding of the recruiters
who have promised to help them find work abroad. As part of the oath-taking
ceremonies, they are told to strip naked, kneel for hours and swallow noxious
drinks that can make them dizzy. They’re warned that breaking their vows of
obedience could put a curse on them that could cause injury, death, even
generational misfortune for their families.
Most of the women interviewed for this
story said they had been required to take a juju oath, with some of the
ceremonies conducted in Nigeria and others after they arrived in the UAE.
Three women said in witness statements
in Gold’s criminal case that Gold’s associates required them to do oath-taking
ceremonies in Nigeria before they traveled to Dubai.
“She makes us believe she has juju,” one
woman who claims she’d been trafficked by Gold said in an interview. “That is,
if we run away, we can become mad or die.”
In her statement to the court, Gold
denied organizing such ceremonies.
When women brave the threats of real
violence and otherworldly consequences to try to escape their traffickers, they
say they often get little help from Emirati authorities.
A 25-year-old Ugandan said that after
she fled a brothel in the Deira district of Dubai where she was forced to work,
she headed to the nearest police station. She said a police officer took her
back to the brothel and negotiated with the trafficker to return the passport
to her. The officer left without doing anything else, and the trafficker took
the passport back again, she said.
She got away for good only after she
reached out to NyondoRozet, a Ugandan YouTube broadcaster based in the UAE.
Rozet posted a video about her plight, which raised the money for a plane
ticket home.
Rozet, whose videos primarily appeal to
the Ugandan community in the UAE, said in an interview that a woman who called
her, saying she was the trafficker, offered her money to take the video down.
When she refused, Rozet said, other people contacted her to threaten harm if
she didn’t delete the video, telling her: “You are not going to survive.”
The Dubai police did not respond to
questions about the incident.
A 23-year-old woman from Nigeria’s
northeastern farm belt said she thought UAE police would help her after she
fled a brothel in Abu Dhabi where she and six other women had been locked in a
room filled with steel beds separated by curtains. Every night, she had to have
sex with half a dozen men.
She had slipped away when her boss got
drunk and left the key in the door. But when she walked into a police station
in the Khalidiya area of Abu Dhabi, she said, an officer told her, “Go to where
you came from.”
She said she pleaded: “Put me in
prison!” But “they turned their back to me. I was crying, but they paid no
attention. They said: ‘To Hell with Africa.’”
The police station in Khalidiya did not
respond to a request for comment.
Extradition request
For years, large numbers of migrants
from Nigeria and other African countries have sought jobs and new lives in
Europe. Migration routes have changed as European Union members have pushed
migrants back to Libya, the main transit point across the Mediterranean Sea.
With the way to Europe increasingly blocked, African migrants have turned, in
growing numbers, to the UAE and other rich Arab nations.
Oburoh, the NAPTIP prosecutor, said that
when trafficking cases have links to Europe, governments there provide
information and cooperation that help the agency apprehend and prosecute
traffickers. But when it comes to the UAE, official cooperation is nonexistent,
Nigerian anti-trafficking investigators said.
At home, NAPTIP operates in an
environment where some government officials also have been accused of engaging
in human trafficking – and where, NAPTIP officials say, convicted traffickers
often avoid jail terms.
The Nigerian government did not respond
to a request for comment.
Source: reuters.com
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/uae-trafficking-sex/
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Afghan women in mental health crisis
over bleak future
5 June
"I just want someone to hear my
voice. I'm in pain, and I'm not the only one," an Afghan university
student tells us, blinking back tears.
"Most of the girls in my class have
had suicidal thoughts. We are all suffering from depression and anxiety. We
have no hope."
The young woman, in her early twenties,
tried to end her own life four months ago, after female students were barred
from attending university by the Taliban government in December last year. She
is now being treated by a psychologist.
Her words offer an insight into a less
visible yet urgent health crisis facing Afghanistan.
"We have a pandemic of suicidal
thoughts in Afghanistan. The situation is the worst ever, and the world rarely
thinks or talks about it," says psychologist Dr Amal.
"When you read the news, you read
about the hunger crisis, but no-one talks about mental health. It's like people
are being slowly poisoned. Day by day, they're losing hope."
Note: The BBC has changed or withheld
the names of all interviewees in this piece, to protect them.
Dr Amal tells us she received 170 calls
for help within two days of the announcement that women would be banned from
universities. Now she gets roughly seven to 10 new calls for help every day.
Most of her patients are girls and young women.
In Afghanistan's deeply patriarchal
society, one worn out by four decades of war, the UN estimates that one in two
people - most of them women - suffered from psychological distress even before
the Taliban takeover in 2021. But experts have told the BBC that things are now
worse than ever before because of the Taliban government's clampdown on women's
freedoms, and the economic crisis in the country.
It's extremely hard to get people to
talk about suicide, but six families have agreed to tell us their stories.
Nadir is one of them. He tells us his
daughter took her own life on the first day of the new school term in March
this year.
"Until that day, she had believed
that schools would eventually reopen for girls. She had been sure of it. But
when that didn't happen, she couldn't cope and took her own life," he
says. "She loved school. She was smart, thoughtful and wanted to study and
serve our country. When they closed schools, she became extremely distressed
and would cry a lot."
It is evident that Nadir is in pain as
he speaks.
"Our life has been destroyed.
Nothing means anything to me anymore. I'm at the lowest I've ever been. My wife
is very disturbed. She can't bear to be in our home where our daughter
died."
We have connected his family and others
quoted in this piece to a mental health professional.
The father of a woman in her early
twenties told us what he believes was the reason behind his daughter's suicide.
"She wanted to become a doctor.
When schools were closed, she was distressed and upset," he says.
"But it was after she wasn't
allowed to sit for the university entrance exam, that's when she lost all hope.
It's an unbearable loss," he adds, then pauses abruptly and begins to cry.
The other stories we hear are similar -
girls and young women unable to cope with their lives, and futures coming to a
grinding halt.
We speak to a teacher, Meher, who tells
us she has tried to take her own life twice.
"The Taliban closed universities
for women, so I lost my job. I used to be the breadwinner of my family. And now
I can't bear the expenses. That really affected me," she says.
"Because I was forced to stay at home, I was being pressured to get
married. All the plans I had for my future were shattered. I felt totally disoriented,
with no goals or hope, and that's why I tried to end my life."
We started looking into this crisis
because we saw multiple articles in local news portals reporting suicides from
different parts of the country.
"The situation is catastrophic and
critical. But we are not allowed to record or access suicide statistics. I can
definitely say though that you can barely find someone who is not suffering
from a mental illness," says Dr Shaan, a psychiatrist who works at a
public hospital in Afghanistan.
A study done in Herat province by the
Afghanistan Centre for Epidemiological Studies, released in March this year,
has shown that two-thirds of Afghan adolescents reported symptoms of
depression. The UN has raised an alarm over "widespread mental health
issues and escalating accounts of suicides".
The Taliban say they are not recording
suicide numbers, and they didn't respond to questions about a surge in figures.
Because of the stigma attached to it, many families do not report a suicide.
In the absence of data, we've tried to
assess the scale of the crisis through conversations with dozens of people.
"Staying at home without an
education or a future, it makes me feels ridiculous. I feel exhausted and
indifferent to everything. It's like nothing matters anymore," a teenage
girl tells us, tears rolling down her face.
She attempted to take her own life. We
meet her in the presence of her doctor, and her mother, who doesn't let her
daughter out of her sight.
We ask them why they want to speak to
us.
"Nothing worse than this can
happen, that's why I'm speaking out," the girl says. "And I thought
maybe if I speak out, something will change. If the Taliban are going to stay
in power, then I think they should be officially recognised. If that happens, I
believe they would reopen schools."
Psychologist Dr Amal says that while
women have been hit harder, men are also affected.
"In Afghanistan, as a man, you are
brought up to believe that you should be powerful," she says. "But
right now Afghan men can't raise their voice. They can't provide financially
for their families. It really affects them.
"And unfortunately, when men have
suicidal thoughts, they are more likely to succeed in their attempts than women
because of how they plan them."
In such an environment, we ask, what
advice does she give her patients?
"The best way of helping others or
yourself is not isolating yourself. You can go and talk to your friends, go and
see your neighbours, form a support team for yourself, for instance your
mother, father, siblings or friends," she says.
"I ask them who's your role model.
For instance, if Nelson Mandela is someone you look up to, he spent 26 years in
jail, but because of his values, he survived and did something for people. So
that's how I try to give them hope and resilience."
Source: bbc.com
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65765399
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URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/shahzadi-chandni-transgender-karachi/d/129984