Blasphemy

Parwiz Kambakhsh

Literally. You may recall my February 5, 2008 essay about the bizarre death penalty verdict imposed on a student, Perwiz Kambakhsh, in Afghanistan. This is an update.

The New York Times is reporting that Perwiz Kambakhsh, a reporter, has been re-sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment in Afghanistan for blasphemy by an appeals Court. His previous sentence was death. This is an improvement, yes, but the outcome is still beyond comprehension.

Afghanistan's appeal court sentenced an Afghan journalist to 20 years in jail, commuting an earlier death sentence, for distributing an Internet article that said the Prophet Mohammad had ignored the rights of women.

Perwiz Kambakhsh, 23, a reporter with the Jahan-e Now daily, was sentenced to death in January by a court in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

The arrest and sentencing of Kambakhsh, also a university student, drew criticism from a number of Western nations, the Afghan media and rights groups. Kambakhsh downloaded an Iranian article from the Internet and distributed it to friends.

"The court has sentenced Mr. Perwiz Kambakhsh to 20 years jail for the crime he has committed. But this is not the final hearing, he has the right to appeal," judge Abdul Salaam Qazizada told the court.

Under Islamic law -- stipulated in Afghanistan's constitution -- blasphemy is punishable by death.

The offense was distributing an internet article to others. As my previous essay, quoting the Independent, explained:

A young man, a student of journalism, [was] sentenced to death by an Islamic court for downloading a report from the internet. /snip

He was accused of blasphemy after he downloaded a report from a Farsi website [i.e. an Iranian one] which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed.

Mr Kambaksh, 23, distributed the tract to fellow students and teachers at Balkh University with the aim, he said, of provoking a debate on the matter. But a complaint was made against him.

Is this blasphemous, namely

1. a. A contemptuous or profane act, utterance, or writing concerning God or a sacred entity.
b. The act of claiming for oneself the attributes and rights of God.
2. An irreverent or impious act, attitude, or utterance in regard to something considered inviolable or sacrosanct?

Well, no. It doesn't appear to fulfill this definition. Or mine. Or yours, probably.

What kind of justice first gives a death sentence and then modifies it to be 20 years of imprisonment for this ill defined an offense?

Secret Afghani Trials For Detainees

The New York Times this morning is reporting that Afghanistan is holding secret trials for dozens of Afghan men who were formerly detained by the US in Gitmo and Baghram:

Dozens of Afghan men who were previously held by the United States at Bagram Air Base and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are now being tried [in Afghanistan] in secretive Afghan criminal proceedings based mainly on allegations forwarded by the American military.

The prisoners are being convicted and sentenced to as much as 20 years’ confinement in trials that typically run between half an hour and an hour, said human rights investigators who have observed them. One early trial was reported to have lasted barely 10 minutes, an investigator said. /snip

Witnesses do not appear in court and cannot be cross-examined. There are no sworn statements of their testimony.

Instead, the trials appear to be based almost entirely on terse summaries of allegations that are forwarded to the Afghan authorities by the United States military. Afghan security agents add what evidence they can, but the cases generally center on events that sometimes occurred years ago in war zones that the authorities may now be unable to reach.

“These are no-witness paper trials that deny the defendants a fundamental fair-trial right to challenge the evidence and mount a defense,” said Sahr MuhammedAlly, a lawyer for the advocacy group Human Rights First who has studied the proceedings. “So any convictions you get are fundamentally flawed.”

According to the Times, since 2002 the Bush administration has been trying to get various countries to prosecute Gitmo prisoners as part of their "repatriation." Britain and other countries have refused because they say that US evidence won't hold up in their courts. But not Afghanistan:

the Afghan authorities have now tried 82 of the former prisoners since last October and referred more than 120 other cases for prosecution.

Of the prisoners who have been through the makeshift Afghan court, 65 have been convicted and 17 acquitted, according to a report on the prosecutions by Human Rights First that is to be made public on Thursday.

What does the US government say about these remarkable, civilized, reliable, fair trials? Please refrain from scoffing:

United States officials defended their role in providing information [and the defendants] for the Afghan trials as a legitimate way to try to contain the threats that some of the more dangerous detainees would pose if they were released outright.

“These are not prosecutions that are being done at the request or behest of the United States government,” said Sandra L. Hodgkinson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detention policy. “These are prosecutions that are being done by Afghans for crimes committed on their territory by their nationals.”

Ms. Hodgkinson said the United States had pressed the Afghan authorities “to conduct the trials in a fair manner,” and had insisted that lawyers be provided for the prisoners after the first 10 of them were convicted without legal representation. But she did not directly reject the criticisms raised in the Human Rights First report, adding, “These trials are much more consistent with the traditional Afghan justice process than they are with ours.”

Let us briefly review the trial options for Afghani prisoners in Gitmo: indefinite detention without trial and without habeas review by the US courts (depending on pending US Supreme Court decisions) and possibly with interrogations torture, OR possibly torture and then a show trial by a US military commission without confrontation of witnesses, possibly resulting in a death sentence, OR possibly torture followed by a second, illegal extradition to Afghanistan and a "trial" without a record or review that results in decades of confinement in an Afghani prison. Spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam.

Pardon me for being overly fastidious about the trial rights of the accused, but that's an extremely disgraceful, embarrassing list of options.

Afghanistan: Harsh Forms Of Criticism

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh

A young man has been sentenced to death in Afghanistan for downloading a report from the Internet and distributing it.

The Independent reports:

A young man, a student of journalism, is sentenced to death by an Islamic court for downloading a report from the internet. The sentence is then upheld by the country's rulers. This is Afghanistan – not in Taliban times but six years after "liberation" and under the democratic rule of the West's ally Hamid Karzai.

The fate of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh has led to domestic and international protests, and deepening concern about erosion of civil liberties in Afghanistan. He was accused of blasphemy after he downloaded a report from a Farsi website which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed.

Mr Kambaksh, 23, distributed the tract to fellow students and teachers at Balkh University with the aim, he said, of provoking a debate on the matter. But a complaint was made against him and he was arrested, tried by religious judges without – say his friends and family – being allowed legal representation and sentenced to death.

So much for debate and freedom of speech.

The UN, human rights groups, journalists' organizations and Western diplomats have urged the Karzai government to intervene and free Kambaksh. But the Afghan Senate passed a motion on January 30 confirming the death sentence. Welcome to the US puppet government and its barbarianism.

Want to respond to this?

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh's imminent execution is an affront to civilised values. It is not, however, a foregone conclusion. If enough international pressure is brought to bear on President Karzai's government, his sentence may yet be overturned. Add your weight to the campaign by urging the Foreign Office to demand that his life be spared. Sign the Independent's e-petition here

Maybe we shouldn't be surprised at the severity of the verdict. You'll recall that after Salman Rushdie published his novel, Satanic Verses, Ayatollah Khomeni issued a fatwa condemning him to death. It seems that Satanic Verses appropriated the prophet Muhammad as a character and attributed what some thought were insulting things to him. Later, the writer VS Naipaul, one of my heroes, described the fatwah as "an extreme form of literary criticism."

It may be difficult to tell what will insult readers and even make them throw rocks. As Rushdie himself wrote in The Ground Beneath Her Feet,

"Insults are mysteries. What seems to the bystander to be the cruelest, most destructive sledgehammer of an assault, whore! slut! tart!, can leave its target undamaged, while an apparently lesser gibe, thank god you're not my child, can fatally penetrate the finest suits of armour, you're nothing to me, you're less than the dirt on the soles of my shoes, and strike directly at the heart."

Which brings me to two years ago, and this rock throwing and literary criticism news:

Demonstrations against the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad by newspapers in Europe spread across Asia and the Middle East today, turning violent in Afghanistan, where at least four protesters were killed and over a dozen police officers and protesters injured.

The protests gained momentum all over the Muslim world, a day after attacks on the Danish consulate in Lebanon and the Danish and Norwegian Embassies in Damascus, Syria, on Saturday. Muslim clerics led demonstrations in half a dozen cities in Afghanistan, and protesters turned out in Indonesia, India, Thailand, Iran, and even in New Zealand, where local newspapers recently reprinted the offending cartoons.

A teenager died in Somalia in East Africa today when police fired in the air to disperse stone-throwing protesters and set off a stampede. A crowd of about 200 people stoned and broke the windows of the Austrian Embassy in the Iranian capital, Teheran, and tried to hurl gasoline bombs inside, Reuters reported. Police with riot shields prevented further damage and the crowd dissipated after an hour, the agency reported.

I have worried that not enough people would buy and read my 2005 novel, The Dream Antilles. But that seeming problem, a mix of ego, marketing and personal finance, pales compared with the idea that a few people would read my book and then thousands and thousands around the world would run into the streets trying to maim and kill people because of the affronts they perceived in it. Or that they would react in this way to some cartoons. Or to the downloading and distribution of an internet report. Or the conferral of a knighthood on an Salman Rushdie whose best work in my view was Midnight's Children, a remarkable magical realism novel paralleling the birth of India as a nation which won the 1981 Booker Prize and was later awarded the 'Booker of Bookers' Prize in 1993 as the best novel to be awarded the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. People here who know or have heard of only Satanic Verses should treat themselves to Midnight's Children. I just don't get it.

I will admit that I did smile when Mario Vargas Llosa had crowds attack the radio station in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter because of insults to Argentinians. I thought that was a riot, and I laughed aloud. But I am not laughing at today's news from Afghanistan.

I guess I didn't realize that writing could be so dangerous. Or that criticism could be so extreme.