The Fatwa Scourge

From The Daily Star:

This is a tragedy that the whole nation should mourn and protest. The national conscience was savagely traumatised. Hena Akhter is a victim of the gender discrimination that prevails in our country. It is an indictment of the poverty that the underprivileged of our country suffer, and the injustice and bigotry that hold them in thralldom.

Much can be said about the law of the land, the uprightness of the judiciary and the vigilance of our non-government organisations. But the bestiality continues to prey on the underprivileged of the society. Only tragedies like that of Hena come to the light. We rise when a life in its bloom is lost.

It is a fact that Bangladesh is a predominantly Muslim country. But there are Muslim countries like Malaysia and Turkey that can pride themselves on their civilised societies. Our problem is that ours is an impoverished country with a large population caught in illiteracy. The rural society carries all the vestiges of feudal setup with lesser lords making the most of political power, money and religion. They strike down the weaker of the tribe. Darbesh Kha and his daughter Hena Akhter of Chamta village of Naria Upazilla belonged to this struggling lot. So, Hena was hunted down and the most sanctified among the weaponry, fatwa, was used.

 

• See these links for more on Hena Akhter:
• The Guardian - Bangladesh whipping case: three doctors investigated for claiming teenage girl had no signs of injury.
• The Independant - Hena's death: Probe body completes task
• The Mid-Day - Bangladeshi family demands justice for 'whipped to death' raped daughter
• CNN - Bangladesh court orders fresh probe into death of teenage girl

Ethiopia: Campaign Against Female Circumcision

From Ezega:

In recent months local and national initiatives have shown a clear intensification of the struggle against the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), also known as female circumcision.

The ancient practice of removing the outer female genitalia and “sewing” the vaginal opening shut has long existed in the region under the pretext of cleanliness and religious piety.

After years of United Nations and international NGO advocacy, recent “homegrown” campaigns have signaled a local increase in the struggle to eliminate the practice in Ethiopia. For example, recent Ethiopian Television programs have targeted the practice by assembling both religious scholars and traditional leaders to advocate against FGM.

Witchcraft in Modern Africa

From Afrik-News:

A human rights group in Malawi is causing a stir as it embarks on a mission to gather 10,000 signatures from locals to force President Bingu wa Mutharika free several jailed witches.

Association of Secular Humanism (ASH) says most of the convicts are women jailed for teaching witchcraft to children. Reports say some are doing jail time of up to six years.

“I’m asking you to sign this petition to help us reach our goal of 10,000 signatures. I care deeply about this cause, and I hope you will support our efforts,” a senior official of the association, Harold Williams is quoted saying.

The petition reads: “Belief in witchcraft is widely held in Malawi by people of all levels of education and stature in society. Whereas the law does not accept the reality of witchcraft, the Police and judicial authorities, many of whom share the belief, distort the law to punish those who are accused of witchcraft”

“It is mainly the elderly, men and women, who are accused of witchcraft and there are many very elderly and infirm imprisoned throughout Malawi - sentenced for up to 6 years without anything that would pass as substantive evidence in courts which do not accept superstition and suspicion as adequate."

And from the New York Times:

Accusations of witchcraft in Africa have gained increasing attention because of the severe impact they can have on the lives of those accused, including imprisonment, deprivation of property, banishment from villages and in some cases physical violence.

The human-rights law program I direct recently partnered with an N.G.O. in Malawi to run a mobile legal-aid clinic focusing on witchcraft cases in two rural communities.

Men, women and children flocked to our clinic seeking legal assistance. The cases were challenging and engaged the question of how to confront accusations of witchcraft, particularly when children and elderly women disproportionately bear the brunt of such accusations.

The persecution of accused witches has not historically been confined to Africa. Witch-hunts have occurred in Europe, America, ancient Rome, Aztec Mexico, Russia, China and India. But the practice persists in poor settings in part because witchcraft can be used in communities without routine access to modern medicine and science to explain seemingly inexplicable instances of death and misfortune.

The Subjugation of Women in 1904

From Hometown Focus:

Their Existence, from Cradle to Grave, is One of Unspeakable Horror and Degradation

A Hindoo grandmother, with a red sahree drawn close around her, told her life’s story recently to 100 Chicago mothers who had gathered tin a little room in Handell hall to hear it.

It was a story that might have been told in Nero’s court, while Christians, burning like candles in their jackets of tar, were illuminating the gardens—it might have been told then because the flames would have made a perfect setting for the story of Sukhiva Vannerjee. is Hindoo grandmother’s hair was as black as ebony and her eyes were the eyes of youth with the fire of a hope burned out. The mothers who hear her story were white-haired, many of them.

Twenty-one years ago Sukhiva Vannerjee was married. She is now 27 years old. The man who took as his bride a girl of six was over 30, was prosperous, and belonged to India’s high caste, as did the child wife.

The woman told her story in broken English. Now and then she was prompted by Miss Josephine Holmes, a Los Angeles woman who brought her to this country to arouse sympathy in American in the movement to abolish the child wife practice in India.

Noor Inayat Khan

From VOA News:

A campaign is underway to honor Noor Inayat Khan, an Indian woman who spied for Britain during World War II.

Born in 1914, she favored India's independence from Britain. But she put her feelings aside to help the British fight Nazi Germany. She was eventually caught in occupied France and executed at Dachau concentration camp.

Songbird: Barbara Smith Conrad

From the New York Times:

Barbara Smith Conrad, a black child of the segregated South, did not seek to vote or to ride in the front of the bus. She just wanted to sing.

But in 1957, when this mezzo-soprano from a small East Texas town was cast opposite a white male student in a University of Texas, Austin, opera production, that was just as controversial. Suddenly Ms. Conrad was thrust into the drama of the larger struggle for civil rights. Her story is now the subject of “When I Rise,” a documentary scheduled to have its national television premiere on PBS’s “Independent Lens” on Tuesday night.

WWII's Female Computers

From CNN News:

It was 2003 and Erickson was interviewing sisters Shirley Blumberg Melvin and Doris Blumberg Polsky for her documentary, "Neighbor Ladies," about a woman-owned real estate agency that helped to peacefully integrate a Philadelphia neighborhood. The twins, long-retired by then, reluctantly mentioned a different sort of job they'd held during World War II: Female "computers."

Computer, at that point, was a job title, not a machine. Long before the sisters were businesswomen, community activists, mothers or grandmothers, they were recruited by the U.S. military to do ballistics research. They worked six days a week, sometimes pulling double or triple shifts, along with dozens of other women.

The weapons trajectories they calculated were passed out to soldiers in the field and bombardiers in the air. Some of their colleagues went on to program the earliest of general-purpose computers, the ENIAC.

It wasn't factory work, but they were "Rosies" nonetheless, filling jobs that men would've taken if they hadn't been at war or wrapped up in other military research.

The Iron Lady: Meryl as Margaret

From BBC News:

Film fans have been given their first glimpse of Hollywood actress Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in upcoming film The Iron Lady.

Shooting has just begun on the film, written by Sex Traffic's Abi Morgan and directed by Mamma Mia's Phyllida Lloyd.

The film follows Baroness Thatcher as she broke through class and gender barriers to become prime minister.

The film also stars Jim Broadbent as Denis Thatcher. The cast also includes Richard E Grant and Anthony Head.

Stone Age Fertility Artifact

From Discovery News:

A Stone Age-era artifact carved with multiple zigzags and what is likely a woman with spread legs suggests that fertility rituals may have been important to early Europeans, according to new research.

The object, which will be documented in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, is made out of a large elk antler and has been radiocarbon dated to about 10,900 years ago.

"The ornament is composed of groups of zigzag lines and a human representation, probably a woman with spread legs with a short zigzag nearby," lead author Tomasz Płonka told Discovery News. "The woman may be nude, but the geometrical style of representation does not allow us to answer (this question)."

The researchers aren't yet certain if the images on the carved antler are associated with Venus figurines, statuettes of women with exaggerated sexual features that date to as early as 35,000 years ago. Some Venus figurines have been excavated in Poland not too far from the Swidwin site.