A few bits of good news, two

This, somewhat related to the previous posts, comes via the good JayV of Blazing Indiscretions, quoting The Independent (UK) for Wednesday.

A gay man who faces the death penalty in Iran has won asylum in the UK after protests prompted the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, to reconsider his case.

Family and supporters of Mehdi Kazemi, now 20, welcomed the decision yesterday not to send him back to Iran where his boyfriend was arrested by the state police and executed for sodomy. ...

Mr Kazemi came to London to study in 2005, but in April 2006 discovered his gay partner had been arrested and named him as his boyfriend before his execution. Fearing he might suffer the same fate if he returned, Mr Kazemi decided to seek asylum in Britain. His claim was refused and he fled to the Netherlands where he also failed to win asylum before returning to Britain last month.

His case won support from MPs and peers who signed petitions supporting his claim for refugee status in this country, prompting a surprise intervention by Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, who agreed to reconsider the case. ...

Yesterday, the UK Border Agency said it had decided to allow him asylum, granting him leave to remain for five years.

The "but" in this case - and it's a big one - refers to another man also potentially condemned for what would seem to be a basic human right, in this case the right of free speech. Another connection is that The Independent has been running a petition campaign on his behalf.

His name is Sayed Pervez Kambaksh,

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

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.

Government officials upheld the verdict and several of them demanded the sentence be carried out as quickly as possible, while a senior government prosecutor warned journalists they would be punished if they protested the sentence.

There is one difference, one significant difference, between this story and the one about Mehdi Kazemi: Pervez Kambaksh's arrest and trial did not take place in Iran. It took place in Afghanistan, six years after "liberation" and under the supposedly democratic rule of US ally Hamid Karzai.

Such is the "freedom" we have wrought.

The verdict brought international protests and the government backed off somewhat the following week, with

[a] ministerial aide, Najib Manalai, insist[ing]: "I am not worried for his life. I'm sure Afghanistan's justice system will find the best way to avoid this sentence."

Some even suggested it really was all a political maneuver by some of Karzai's opponents among the various warlords, who wanted to trap him in a position of having to choose between the mullahs and the international community. Be that as it may, just a week ago Kambaksh had his first public hearing after sitting in prison since January. He pleaded innocent to a charge of blasphemy and

told an appeal court in Kabul that he had been tortured into confessing.

Mr Kambaksh, 24, vehemently denied that he had been responsible for producing anti-Islamic literature. He insisted the prosecution had been motivated by personal malice of two members of staff and their student supporters at the university in Balkh, where he was studying journalism.

He was convicted in proceedings behind closed doors in a trial which he said had lasted just four minutes and where he had been denied legal representation.

Get this next part:

Yesterday, in the first public hearing of the case, the prosecution claimed that Mr Kambaksh had disrupted classes at the university by asking questions about women's rights under Islam.

It is the hallmark of the fundamentalist mindset of any stripe to find questions disruptive. Even so, those are questions that certainly need to be asked, particularly about the form of sharia enforced by the mullahs in Afghanistan and endorsed by the government - considering that the emancipation of women from the "severe repression and brutality" inflicted on them by the Taliban was repeatedly invoked by the Shrub gang as justification for the attack on Afghanistan.

The thing is, the answers to those questions won't be pretty.

Six years after the US and Britain "freed" Afghan women from the oppressive Taliban regime, a new report proves that life is just as bad for most, and worse in some cases.

Projects started in the optimistic days of 2002 have begun to wane as the UK and its Nato allies fail to treat women's rights as a priority, workers in the country insist.

The statistics in the report from Womankind, Afghan Women and Girls Seven Years On, make shocking reading. Violent attacks against females, usually domestic, are at epidemic proportions with 87 per cent of females complaining of such abuse – half of it sexual. More than 60 per cent of marriages are forced.

Despite a new law banning the practice, 57 per cent of brides are under the age of 16. The illiteracy rate among women is 88 per cent with just 5 per cent of girls attending secondary school.

Maternal mortality rates – one in nine women dies in childbirth – are the highest in the world alongside Sierra Leone. And 30 years of conflict have left more than one million widows with no enforceable rights, left to beg on the streets alongside an increasing number of orphans. Afghanistan is the only country in the world with a higher suicide rate among women than men.

Meanwhile, Sayed Pervez Kambaksh is appealing a sentence of death for daring to ask, in effect, if this is what the prophet had in mind - and is doing so without legal counsel because fundamentalists have threated to kill anyone representing him. Despite the early assurances of Najib Manalai, the fact that in April the Afghan Supreme Court issued a mass ruling upholding 100 death sentences does not inspire confidence.

Footnote: Women's rights campaigners say things are somewhat better in Kabul than they used to be but that may change:

[A] parliamentary committee [has] revealed plans to ban women wearing makeup, men wearing jeans or jewellery, and couples talking together in public – signalling a possible return to Taliban-style morality rules.

And even in the absence of such a ban, the fact is that whatever improvements exist, just like the Karzai government itself, evaporate just a few miles outside Kabul. Which raises the question: Why are we pouring blood and money into this snake pit of medieval fundamentalism?