22 May 2014

This is justice?

The Clarion Project has an article about another shari'a moment:
A young widow in Aceh, Indonesia will be caned for having an affair with a married man under the province’s shari'a law, after being gang-raped by her accusers. Extramarital affairs are strictly forbidden in the province, where shari'a law governing behavior was adopted in February of 2014 for both Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Shari'a vigilante groups, although officially illegal, are “common and even condoned by the local clergy and authorities”.
In this case, the vigilantes, composed of eight men, including a thirteen-year-old boy, broke into the woman’s home and allegedly caught the couple about to engage in sex. The accused man is forty years old and married. The vigilantes proceeded to tie up the man, after which he was beaten. The woman was taken to another room and raped by each man. Afterwards they doused the couple in sewage before taking them to the authorities for the crime of “tarnishing the village’s reputation”.
The city’s shari'a police, the Wilayatul Hisbah, announced that the couple would be caned for committing adultery. “We want the couple to be caned because they violated the religious bylaw on sexual relations,” said Ibrahim Latif, the head of the shari'a office in the eastern town of LangsaIbrahim said the fact that the woman had been raped would not be taken into consideration when prosecuting her for the crime. “They have to be caned as a form of justice because the rapists will also be processed, but in a criminal court,” he said. “Besides, they’ve confessed to having sex on several previous occasions, even though the man is married and has five children.”
According to shari'a law instituted in the province, the couple could each publicly receive nine cane strokes. Commenting on the case, Nursiti, the head of a women’s empowerment group in Aceh, said: “Instead of protecting the victim of this heinous crime, the authorities want to have her caned. What kind of government is this that won’t protect its citizens?”
A week after the rape, the woman was still being held by authorities. To date, three of the rapists have been found and arrested, including the thirteen-year-old. Under shari'a, they would have received the same number of cane strokes as the victims, however, the rapists will be tried under Aceh’s criminal law system. Police said they know the identities of the other five rapists, and asked their families to turn them in.
Teungku Faisal Ali, the head of Aceh’s chapter of Nahdlatul Ulama, the country’s largest Islamic organization, agrees with that the couple should face the full shari'a punishment for the crime, but also wants the rapists to be tried under both shari'a and criminal law.  “The punishment for the mob that raped the victim must be much harsher because they have set back efforts to uphold shari'a in Aceh.”
In other cases of shari'a vigilantism in the province, a twenty-year-old university student was raped by three shari'a police officers in Langsa in January of 2010 for riding on a motorcycle with her boyfriend. In that case, two of the rapists were caught, tried, and each sentenced to eight years in prison. The third perpetrator remains at large to date. The town’s shari'a police chief was also fired.
Ismail Hasani, a scholar at Jakarta’s Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University, said: “Sure, the law has to be enforced, but a punishment like caning is excessive. The punishment is imposed based on sexual imagination, instead of legal facts. Historically, caning in Islam is implemented strictly based on strong evidence. But, in Aceh, it is done arbitrarily. The enforcement of shari'a law is done based on prejudice and even for political reasons.”
The national government, for its part, has remained silent on the issue. All provinces in Indonesia are given a large degree of autonomy, but Aceh, in particular, is one of three provinces that have extra-autonomous status according to a 2005 peace accord signed to end a violent thirty-year struggle for autonomy by the Islamist Free Aceh Movement.
Part of the peace accord allows the establishment of shari'a laws governing behavior in the province, including the prohibition of close contact between men and women who are not related to each other, the prohibition of alcohol, and the selling and public consumption of food during Ramadan; the obligation of women to wear a hijab (the Islamic head covering) as well as prohibiting them from wearing tight pants and straddling motorcycles, among other restrictions.
Rico wonders how they can portray themselves as anything other than barbaric... (As if 'dousing them with sewage' and gang-raping the poor woman isn't 'tarnishing the village’s reputation'...)

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