Bamiyan Panorama

Bamiyan Panorama

Friday, February 06, 2015

Photos of Afghanistan in the past few years

Афганистан. Кабул. 19 декабря 2010 года. Афганская художница убирает мусор перед своим граффити в промышленном парке, на котором изображена группа женщин в парандже, поднимающаяся от моря, что должно символизировать чистоту. (REUTERS/Omar Sobhani)
Afghanistan. Kabul. December 19, 2010. Afghan artist stands in front of her graffiti in the industrial park, which depicts a group of women in a burqa, rising from the sea, which symbolizes purity.
 
Афганистан. Кабул. 23 сентября 2010 года. Одна из 29 выпускниц военной академии, которые стали первыми женщинами на службе Афганской национальной армии. (REUTERS/Ahmad Masood)
September 23, 2010. One of the 29 graduates of the military academy, who became the first woman in the service of the Afghan National Army.
 
Афганистан. Кабул. 1 мая 2013 года. Афганская исполнительница хип-хопа во время выступления на единственном арт-фестивале страны в школе Эстегляль. (AP Photo/Ahmad Jamshid)
May 1, 2013. Afghan singer hip-hop during a speech at the only art festival in the country school
 
Афганистан. Кандагар. 17 декабря 2011 года. Сержант Армии США, уроженка Багдада Лидия Адмунабдфани записывает сведения о местной жительнице в Женском центре близ Зари. (U.S. Army/Spc. Kristina Truluck)
Afghanistan. Kandahar. December 17, 2011. US Army sergeant, a native of Baghdad Lydia Admunabdfani writes information about the local woman, who came to the Women's Center near dawn
 
Афганистан. Герат. 18 августа 2011 года. Афганка Биби Хур плачет над своей раненой дочерью. Женщина потеряла троих детей и ещё двое были серьезно ранены во время теракта, унесшего жизни 20 человек. (AP Photo/Hoshang Hashimi)
Afghanistan. Herat. August 18, 2011. Afghan Bibi Hur cries over her injured daughter. The woman lost three of her children and two others were seriously injured in the attack, which killed 20 people
 
Афганистан. Кабул. 6 марта 2006 года. Афганская вдова, принимающая участие в демонстрации у центра гуманитарной организации CARE. Сотни вдов вышли протестовать из-за прекращения распределения продовольствия. (REUTERS/Ahmad Masood)
Afghanistan. Kabul. March 6, 2006. Afghan widow, taking part in a demonstration in the center of the humanitarian organization CARE. Hundreds of widows to protest due to the cessation of food distribution
 
Афганистан. Кабул. 24 ноября 2011 года. Афганские женщины и девушки наслаждаются концертом певца и посла доброй воли ООН Фархада Дарьи — «афганского Элвиса». (MASSOUD HOSSAINI/AFP/Getty Images)
Afghanistan. Kabul. November 24, 2011. Afghan women and girls enjoying a concert singer and Goodwill Ambassador Farhad Darya UN - "Afghan Elvis."
 
Афганистан. Кабул. 11 июля 2012 года. 16-летняя Момтаз — жертва кислотной атаки — участвуют в протесте против недавней публичной экзекуции молодой женщины в провинции Парван. (REUTERS/Omar Sobhani)
Afghanistan. Kabul. July 11, 2012. 16-year-old Momtaz - the victim of an acid attack - involved in the protest against the recent public execution of a young woman in Parwan province.
Афганистан. Кабул. 11 апреля 2013 года. Афганка в парандже держит на руках своего новорожденного ребёнка. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)
Afghanistan. Kabul. April 11, 2013. Afghan in a burqa is holding her newborn child.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Photos of Afghanistan in 1962

I believe these photos were taken by Russians, and that some of the photos have Russians in them.  It seems that they are mostly photos of Afghans.

Русские женщины на автобусной остановке в Кабуле

Кабул

Панорама Кабула

Институт общественного здравоохранения в Кабуле

Базар в Кундузе

Базар в Кундузе

Базар в Кундузе

Старая часть базара Кабула

Деревня Доаб, построенная вдоль дороги, проложенной по всему западному склону Гиндукуша

Маленькая деревня в горах Гиндукуша, в низовьях долины реки Саланг

Женщины в Кабуле, ставшие более независимыми от шариатского принуждения, что является признаком модернизации страны в течение последних 5 или 6 лет

Река Амударья, отделяющая страну от Советского Союза

Советские автокраны осуществляют погрузочно-разгрузочные работы в афганском речном порту Кисиль Кала

Советские автокраны осуществляют погрузочно-разгрузочные работы в афганском речном порту Кисиль Кала


Советские грузовики с товарами из Советского Союза

Советские автокраны осуществляют погрузочно-разгрузочные работы в афганском речном порту Кисиль Кала

Русские женщины в очереди за покупками в Кабуле

Базар в Кундузе


http://humus.livejournal.com/3015180.html



Afghanistan on my Mind Facebook page (no connection to this blog)

Here's the link to another great Facebook page called 'Afghanistan on my Mind' that shows photos of daily life in Afghanistan. 

Afghanistan on my Mind Facebook Page

(There is no connection between this Facebook page which was started in 2012, and my blog with the same name which was started in 2010.)

Afghanistan in Photos Facebook page


Here's a great Facebook page that shows photos of daily life in Afghanistan

https://www.facebook.com/AfghanistanInPhotos?ref=stream

Saving Mothers in Afghanistan: Progress, Challenges and the Road Ahead

 

Saving Mothers in Afghanistan: Progress, Challenges and the Road Ahead


Posted: Updated:
AFGHANISTAN WOMEN
                                                  
 
Afghanistan has once again been labelled one of the worst places in the world to be a mother. According to UNICEF, a woman dies every two hours due to complications during pregnancy in Afghanistan. The main causes of maternal deaths are hemorrhaging, eclampsia and prolonged or obstructed labor, which are all preventable with effective and efficient treatment. Progress has been made, but, with Afghanistan at the bottom of global health rankings, the sustainable improvement of maternal well-being remains a serious and complex challenge in Afghanistan.
The provision and delivery of basic health services has been essential to ensure the general health and well-being of pregnant women and mothers. The Afghanistan Ministry of Public Health (MOPH) created the Basic Package of Health Services to promote equity in primary care services, especially in rural areas. The package promotes good health practices through immunization and the supply of prenatal supplements like folic acid and iron.
The MOPH has additionally set up the Rural Expansion of Afghanistan's Community-Based Healthcare (REACH) program to rectify the shortage of skilled care workers and insufficient health facilities. Together these programs resulted in an impressive rise in the population's access to basic health services (measured as a maximum two hours walk to a facility) from nine percent in 2001 to almost 85 percent today. However, Stewart Britten of Healthprom notes that community health workers are not sufficiently trained to serve as birth attendants or deliver maternal health care.
The success story here is one that has been supported and financially backed by USAID, the European Union and the World Bank. They are contracted by the MOPH to implement its policies and partner with organizations including Jhpiego, Save the Children and Futures Group International to fulfill its goals. These policies are now being implemented by Afghan NGOs.
Three core programs have been created. The Health Services Support Project has helped train thousands of midwives each year. The Community Midwife Education Program trains community midwives for deployment in rural areas to ensure the delivery of clinic-based reproductive healthcare. Maternity Waiting Homes admit pregnant women within four weeks of their expected due dates. In this program, expectant mothers are counseled on warning signs during pregnancy as well as the importance of breastfeeding, hygiene, immunization and family planning. Being staffed by female community midwives has helped build greater reception and utilization of this service.
There has also been a push to train girls in rural areas to become Skilled Birth Attendants. This helps with the continuation of care and referrals to health centers when midwives are not present in particular localities. So far, results have indicated gains in preventing postpartum hemorrhaging and the delivery of postpartum family planning services.
Despite such progress, uptake of care remains significantly low, especially in rural areas, given that a majority of births take place at home without a trained caretaker or birth attendant. While the MOPH has made progress in setting up institutions, programs and services, much more progress is needed. Priorities remain, including promoting greater usage of maternal services, the presence of community midwives in rural areas and improving the quality of care in provincial hospitals. New technology should be sufficiently taught to midwives and birth attendants to help administer timely and effective treatment.
The challenges faced in Afghanistan's maternal health discourse are tied irrevocably to the principle of gender equality in health care. Seeing women's health care as a human rights issue ensures that governments are accountable for their legal commitments to provide and ensure access to reproductive health services without discrimination or prejudice. The Afghan government has ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the National Action Plan for the Women of Afghanistan and is legally committed to protecting and promoting women's rights.
The Afghan Midwives Association is a platform for community midwives to lobby for policy change towards health care needs tailored towards the best interests of women. Integrating gender equity into health services also requires addressing violence against women. CBM's have encouraged male heads of families to take a more active role in the health of their families. Additionally, collaboration between religious leaders, politicians and health officials is essential for disseminating accurate health information while simultaneously addressing the cultural and religious misconceptions around healthcare. Men of all sections of society will continue to be vital in creating safer environments for mothers in Afghanistan.
Despite these improvements in maternal health care, Christopher Stokes, Medecin Sans Frontier's general director, argues for a "reality check" from the international community on Afghanistan's health system, particularly as investment in the last decade has been towards political and security objectives as opposed to the daily needs of Afghans. Women residing in the rural and remote areas of Afghanistan continue to suffer preventable complications and high death rates as a result of inaccessible facilities, unskilled staff and limited provision of services.
So far, progress has been dependent on extensive foreign investment. As such, the withdrawal of foreign forces within the year and cuts to international investment in Afghanistan threaten the sustainability of improvements made in the past decade. In addition, high corruption in Afghanistan and pressure to meet targets on reducing maternal deaths has raised questions about the credibility of the latest statistics published by the Afghan Mortality Survey 2010. The survey reported that there were 327 deaths per 100,000 live births per year. These statistics would mean a dramatic drop from 1,600 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2001, and it would fulfill the obligations of the Millennium Goal five years early. This has been argued as simply too unrealistic. If these statistics are inflated, there is a concern that focus and incentive to prioritize issues on maternal mortality will be reduced, doing little to help Afghan women and girls.
The fact that more women are surviving childbirth is a testament to the headway made by community midwives. Afghanistan has proposed to increase their numbers and ensure that at least 80 percent of women have access to emergency obstetric care by 2020. The coming year for Afghanistan will be crucial to realizing such ambitious goals. The international community must remain committed to providing financial investment for integrated and sustainable maternal care development. While gains remain fragile, women and men have demonstrated a clear voice for change during the elections this month. All women have the basic human right to survive childbirth and experience a future as a mother. There is no greater time to make good on these promises in Afghanistan.
    


Cubans trace roots to remote Sierra Leone village

Cubans trace roots to remote Sierra Leone village


 

For decades the Ganga-Longoba of Perico have been singing the same chants, a tradition passed down the generations.

But until recently this Afro-Cuban community knew little of the origin of the songs, or of their own ancestors.

Now, thanks to the work of an Australian academic, Cuba's Ganga believe their roots lie in a remote village in Sierra Leone from where it is thought their relatives were sold into slavery more than 170 years ago.

"When I first filmed the Ganga-Longoba, I believed their ceremonies were a mixture of many different ethnic groups," says historian Emma Christopher, of Sydney University.

"I had no idea that a large number of Ganga songs would come from just one village. I think that's extremely unusual," she says.

The initial breakthrough came when a group in Liberia saw her footage of a Cuban ceremony and recognised part of a local ritual.

Spurred on to seek the songs' exact origins, the academic spent two years showing the film across the region until she confirmed that the Cubans were singing in the almost extinct language of an ethnic group decimated by the slave trade.

Lone woman photographed through window in Perico Almost a million Africans were forcibly shipped to Cuba during more than three centuries of the transatlantic slave trade
Young drummer with older man behind The Cuban Ganga still perform the songs their predecessors brought with them, almost unchanged
Preparing the drums Now an Australian academic believes she has traced the roots of those songs to one remote village in Sierra Leone where they once formed the initiation rites to a secret society
San Lazaro ceremony – woman with hands on head These days the main Ganga ceremony in Cuba is in December to worship Yebbe, their name for St Lazarus (San Lazaro), with dancing, drumming and singing into the early hours
Three men in field near a monument Once the Cuban Ganga discovered their roots in Sierra Leone they were impatient to visit - many in Perico wonder about their own origins.

Her enquiries finally led her to Mokpangumba, where villagers not only identified the Banta language but recognised songs and dances from the initiation ceremony for their own secret society, devoted to healing.

"That's the moment when they said: 'They are we'," Dr Christopher recalls, describing how the incredulous Africans began singing and dancing along with the Cubans on screen.

They identified nine of the songs in total, despite lyrics twisted over the decades and distance. For the villagers it was compelling proof that the people of Perico were family.
Safeguarding tradition
During more than three centuries of transatlantic trade, just short of a million slaves were shipped to Cuba. The vast majority were trafficked in the 19th Century as forced labour for the island's vast sugar plantations.

Traditional dance in straw costume in  in Mokpangumba
The songs the Cubans have kept alive are in the Banta language, which is almost extinct in Africa now

Man holds a mobile phone trying to get reception
The village of Mokpangumba in Sierra Leone has remained extremely isolated
 

Dr Christopher has singled out a woman known by her slave-name "Josefa" as the likely link between Perico and Sierra Leone. It's thought she arrived in the 1830s when the Gallinas slaving port was most active.

The local plantation owner includes a Josefa Ganga amongst the property in his will: below his real estate, and just above livestock.

Remarkably, Josefa survived to see the 1886 abolition of slavery in Cuba - far exceeding the average seven-year life expectancy for slaves here, where conditions were brutal - and she managed to safeguard the songs and traditions of home.
Divided 'family'
"Someone once said we originated from the Congo, but I always had doubts," says Alfredo Duquesne, an artist whose work has long been inspired by African themes but who has never known where his own roots lay.

"It bothered me. I wanted to know where I came from," he explains in his single-storey home crowded with woodcarvings, near where his ancestors would once have laboured in the cane fields.

The Santa Elena plantation has long gone. But many descendants of its former slaves still remain in the small town of Perico, including the group labelled "Ganga" by those who trafficked them.

Every December they meet to pray to Yebbe, as the Ganga call San Lazaro (St Lazarus), in a night-long ceremony of dance, drumming and song that has remained intact through the decades.

San Lazaro is a saint known for curing the sick, and is revered by Roman Catholic and syncretic faiths in Cuba.

It was Florinda Diago, thought to be Josefa's great-granddaughter, who preserved their heritage in Cuba; she then entrusted that task to the current "grande dame" of the Ganga community, a frail but feisty woman in her 80s known as Piyuya.

The healing secrets have been lost, but Piyuya can still sing every chant: songs of lament and joy for the dead and in celebration. In the 1980s she wrote out their lyrics for the first time, alongside hand-drawn flowers in a now yellowed and tattered notebook.

Organising a reunion for the divided "family" wasn't easy given restrictions on travelling from Cuba at the time, and limited resources. But eventually, four Cubans did make their ancestors' voyage in reverse - to Sierra Leone.

Alfredo Duquesne and Sierra Leone villager embrace in Mokpangumba The villagers of Mokpangumba see the Cuban Ganga as long lost relatives and gave them the warmest welcome

Elvira Fumero dances with villagers in Mokpangumba Elvira Fumero recalls the "explosion" when she first started singing, and the villagers joined in with her

x
The incredible safeguarding of traditions has allowed Afro-Cuban descendants to discover their roots at last
 

"When I opened my mouth to sing, they just stood there staring," Elvira Fumero recalls of her arrival in Mokpangumba.

"Then it was like an explosion. They started to sing the responses, and dance with me. And I knew then that this was where the Ganga came from," she says, smiling.

The Cubans' journey - to Africa, and uncovering their own roots - is captured in a documentary by the Australian academic that shows the two groups singing and celebrating together as well as sharing more modern traditions like baseball.

It's still a rare experience for most Afro-Cubans.

"Cuba was cut off at a time when other nations in the Americas were going through black pride and fighting for some justice for what happened to their ancestors," says Dr Christopher, who points out that the island's 1959 revolution declared racism "solved".

"That left a lot of Afro-Cubans adrift, not knowing how to celebrate where they came from and be proud of it," she says.

Whilst many Cubans of Spanish descent have rushed to seek out their ancestry - and passports - Afro-Cubans have been far less anxious to do the same.

But for Alfredo Duquesne, visiting Sierra Leone changed everything.

"It was as if I'd just left the previous weekend. I touched the soil and thought: 'This is it. I've come back,'" he says, describing himself now as "at peace".

"At last I know where I come from," Alfredo says. "I'm not a stranger any more."

Life along the Afghan ring road

Life along the Afghan ring road



Watch the video here:  http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-24987860

Afghanistan's ring road is a symbol of the country's efforts to build a prosperous, unified country. Completing the highway has been a priority for the international coalition, hoping to connect people and places.

As foreign troops prepare to leave by the end of 2014, reporters from the BBC Afghan Service travelled along the 3,360km (2,100-mile) road to see whether these ambitions have been fulfilled.

BBC Afghan Service reporters travelling the Afghan ring road were:

Mohammad Qazizadah, Hafiz Maroof, Mamoon Durani, Assadullah Jalalzai, Syed Anwar, Ahmad Ilham, Suhrab Sirat, Amir Baryal and Shafi Bighoghli

Project Editor and Narration: Meena Baktash, Slideshow Production: Johannes Dell

Music donated by the National Institute of Music of Afghanistan

Watch the video here:  http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-24987860# 

Girls skating in Kabul


Horrors of India's brothels documented

Horrors of India's brothels documented


A sex worker in Mumbai Guddi, 22, says she is 'trapped' in Mumbai's red light district


British photojournalist Hazel Thompson has spent the last decade documenting the lives of girls trafficked into India's thriving sex industry. She spoke to Atish Patel about her experiences.

Guddi was only 11 years old when her family was persuaded by a neighbour to send her to the city of Mumbai hundreds of miles away from her poverty-stricken village in the eastern state of West Bengal.

They promised her a well-paid job as a housemaid to help feed her family.

Instead, she ended up at one of Asia's largest red light districts to become a sex worker.

Trafficked by her neighbour, she arrived at a brothel. She was raped by a customer and spent the next three months in hospital.
'Harrowing'
Guddi's sad and harrowing story is similar to many of the estimated 20,000 sex workers in Kamathipura, established over 150 years ago during colonial rule as one of Mumbai's "comfort zones" for British soldiers.

"They raped her to break her," said Ms Thompson.

 
Hazel Thompson
  • Hazel Thompson is an award winning British photojournalist
  • She has worked in over 40 countries
  • She has made a short film called Riva & Albert, a story of friendship and love beyond generations


Ms Thompson's journey into Kamathipura started in 2002 when she travelled there to photograph children born into the sex trade. The result is her new, interactive ebook, Taken.

Mumbai's oldest and largest red light district is a maze of around 14 dingy, cramped lanes overlooked by gleaming, new skyscrapers - symbols of India's recent economic prosperity that has lifted millions out of poverty.

But in Kamathipura, time seems to have stood still.

Throughout the 1800s, the British military established and maintained brothels for its troops to use across India.

The girls, many in their early teens from poor, rural Indian families, were recruited and paid directly by the military, which also set their prices.

By 1864, there were eight neighbourhoods in Mumbai which were home to more than 500 prostitutes. Almost 60 years later, there were only two, with Kamathipura being the largest.

"The system is continuing to be fed to this day," Ms Thompson said.

To protect the women from violent customers, police introduced bars to the windows and doors of brothels in the 1890s.

These "cages" still exist today and some women continue to work and live in the same brothels constructed by the British.

"Nothing has changed for 120 years. Nothing," Ms Thompson claimed.

Today the women charge up to 500 rupees ($8; £5) for sex and girls aged between 12 and 16 can earn up to 2,000 rupees($32; £20), she added.

Virgins in Kamathipura are auctioned to the highest bidder.
'Modern day slavery'
The 35-year-old photographer was able to gain access to this secret world after reaching out to Bombay Teen Challenge, a charity consisting of former sex workers and pimps who for more than 20 years have been rescuing and rehabilitating women working in Kamathipura.

Entering the brothels initially under the guise of an aid worker, she shot images discreetly from the back of vehicles, the roofs of buildings and under her scarf.

Book cover Ms Thompson's ebook uses texts, images and videos on life in brothels
 

"The way I worked was I would go in and come out. I would spend a few days and attention would build up so I would leave," she said.

She felt constantly on edge every time she went into the district, reaching a tipping point in 2010 when she was manhandled by a gangster while she interacted with a prostitute.

"Along the journey there were many times I wanted to give up," she added.

Ms Thompson's ebook, which uses texts, images and videos to get a sense of what life is like in Kamathipura, also includes stories from women who managed to escape from a situation she describes as "modern-day slavery".

Lata, for example, was tricked and trafficked by her boyfriend at the age of 16, when she was drugged and taken to Mumbai from the southern state of Karnataka.

But years later, with the help of Bombay Teen Challenge, she was reunited with her family and now lives in a rehabilitation home run by the charity.

"In the 11 years I've been there, I've never met one woman who has chosen to be there. Every woman I've met has been trafficked or born there," Ms Thompson said.

"These girls who have been trafficked can't return to their families because of the stigma and [yet it is] often [they who] are responsible for them being in Kamathipura," she added.

The British photojournalist is also launching a campaign with the UK-based Jubilee Charity calling for India and other countries to criminalise the purchase of sex.

In April, the Indian government amended the law to broaden the types of crimes considered to be a trafficking offence and established harsher sentences for traffickers.

But enforcement of anti-trafficking laws remains a problem, as does official complicity, according to the US State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report 2013.

"Countries like Sweden and Norway have made the purchase of sexual services illegal and it has had a profound impact on demand, causing trafficking to also decrease significantly," Ms Thompson said.

"This change is desperately needed for Mumbai and all of India."

Biolite Stove, creating less pollution

http://biolitestove.com/

Avoidable Pollution

It is not often you come across what looks like a simple solution to a big problem, but in this programme on air pollutants, that’s what we seem to have done. The World Health Organisation claims that each year around 1.3 million people die because of outdoor air pollution. Another two million suffer premature deaths as a result of air pollutants in their own homes.

Much pollution comes from large industry but it is wrong to think of that as the whole picture. For over 30 years, Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Director of the Centre for Clouds, Chemistry and Climate at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, has been conducting ground-breaking research into air pollution. Professor Ramanathan has been working on what are called atmospheric brown clouds or ABCs.

What I found most striking about his work is that it is not just about traditional pollutants coming from big chimneys in big factories. This is often about just small families cooking on open stoves or trying to heat their homes in a very small and what would look like a rather benign, ecological way. He says that much of the avoidable pollution is happening at the scale of an individual house. People burn firewood, cow dung, or whatever they can get their hands on. “That’s roughly 3 billion people in the world who are too poor to access fossil fuels. And you think it’s just one small person burning one little piece of wood, but when you realise there are hundreds of millions of such homes burning it becomes a huge continental scale problem,” he says.

Some months after recording my interview with the professor, I was sitting with an environmental charity in London talking of large scale projects to help cut pollution. Almost as an aside, I was told, the best thing we could do is just give everyone in the developing world a more efficient wood burner. Interestingly that is exactly what the professor is doing with a pilot project in India.

My colleague Rajini Vadyanathan went to the village of Palwal, about two hours drive from Delhi, to see how a piece of new technology, called the Biolite stove, could revolutionise the problem. Inside the stove there is a fan which forces oxygen onto the flame and eliminates the smoke. The second difference is that the stove also generates electricity from the heat of the flame. Thermal electric generators have been around for a long time but never before have they been applied to a cook stove. They use the differential in temperature between the heat inside the flame and the cold air outside the flame and that differential creates electricity through a semi-conductor. It is not cheap and costs around $40, but the company making the stove hope they can convince villagers that the innovation is not just an environmentally beneficial product but one which makes economic sense for them as well. It creates roughly two watts of power in one day’s cooking. That is enough power to fully charge a mobile phone and provide an evening’s worth of light.

Although still in the testing stage, six thousand stoves have now been deployed across India and Africa as part of large scale field trials taking place over the next twelve months. In a world dominated by environmental warnings, the good news here is that air particles do not stay in the air for more than a week or two. So if we stopped emitting them tomorrow then in a couple of months the problem will disappear of its own accord.

Professor Ramanathan says: “I think the key thing to know is my optimism comes from scientific facts. The other beauty of this beast, (the) air pollution beast, is that individual actions can help.”

http://biolitestove.com/

Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Family of Asia Bibi appeal for help over blasphemy charge

Family of Asia Bibi appeal for help over blasphemy charge


Asia Bibi, a poor, illiterate woman from Pakistan's rural Punjab, has been on death row for almost five years after being accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad, a charge she vehemently denies. In a rare interview, her husband has appealed for help from the international community.

In Pakistan, the mere accusation of blasphemy can be a death sentence. It is also enough to make the whole family a target.

This is why Asia Bibi's family members have been in hiding for nearly five years. Soon after her conviction, crowds took to the streets calling for her death, some threatening to kill her if she ever got out.

Asia's husband Ashiq Massih and her five children have been on the run since she was arrested.

He said the danger of someone killing any of them hung over him every day.

The husband and daughters of Asia Bibi Her family now have to remember Asia through photos
 

"We get death threats," he said, looking anxious and weary. "We can't stay in one place for very long.

"We live in hiding. It's very hard especially for the children. They can't settle down or study," he added. "It's not a normal life to be constantly living in fear."

Asia's troubles began when she was picking berries in her village of Itan Wali in Punjab.

She had an argument with a group of Muslim women when she went to get water from the well. They said the water was unclean because a Christian woman had touched it.

Days later the women claimed she had insulted the Prophet Muhammad and Asia was pursued by a mob.

Asia Bibi Asia Bibi was picking berries when a row broke out
 

"They went to fields and beat her and tore her clothes. They beat her in front of us," her 14-year-old daughter Esham said, trying to fight back tears.

"We were crying, begging them to let her go and stop hitting her. They did that for almost one hour.

"They also hit me when I tried to defend her," Esham continued.

Esham said that at the time she could not understand why this was happening to her mother, and was told later that it was about blasphemy.

"I try to forget the way she was beaten and tortured that day," Esham said.

Asia's story generated a debate across Pakistan about reforming the country's blasphemy law. But it is a very dangerous issue here that many politicians prefer to avoid.

Two prominent politicians who spoke out against it were killed.

Pakistani Islamist and supporters of former police bodyguard Mumtaz Qadri, hold his portrait as they shout slogans calling for his release during a protest outside the high court building in Islamabad on February 3, 2015. The killer Mumtaz Qadri is seen as a hero by many in Pakistan


Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, was shot by his own bodyguard because he defended Asia and said she should be pardoned, and the killer is now considered a hero by many in Pakistan.

Not long afterwards, minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti was assassinated for speaking out against the blasphemy law.

Blasphemy is a capital offence in Pakistan - it often provokes violent attacks and, in many cases, murders. At least 50 people accused of blasphemy were killed before their trials were completed.

Pastor Arif Khokar, who has led a poor Christian congregation for years in Punjab, was accused of burning pages of the Koran after a row with a neighbour. He too vehemently denies the charge of blasphemy.

"I felt like I was going to have a heart attack," he told the BBC. "I panicked when the police told me. I never thought this could happen to me."

Pastor Khokar is now on bail - unlike many blasphemy cases neither he nor his family have been attacked but he says they live in fear every day.

"We know the punishment of this accusation and what happens to people - especially Christians. We live under so much tension."

Asmah Jahanghir Blasphemy lawyer Asma Jahanghir says she has been threatened regularly
 

Asia's husband Ashiq Massih Asia's husband says he and his daughters now fear for their lives too


The lawyers and judges who handle these cases are often threatened and attacked. Asma Jahanghir, who has worked on blasphemy cases for more than 20 years, says she has been targeted regularly.

"Religious intolerance is something that people are taking advantage of, and the courts continue to be scared," she said.

"Because you can accuse someone of blasphemy, you then gather a crowd, threaten judges, threaten lawyers and spew anger."

Asma Jahangir said she thought it was unlikely that Asia Bibi would be pardoned because of the outrage it may cause.

Asia's husband said the blasphemy law had "destroyed our lives".

"I call on the international community to help. And I ask the Pakistani government to review this law," he said.

Her daughters visit her from time to time but seeing her in jail is never easy.

"We saw her last December," Esham said. "We asked the warden to open the cell so we can hug her, but he didn't. My mother hugged and kissed us from behind the bars. She cried deep from her heart."