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Divine Injustice

by Janine di Giovanni

Abuja, Nigeria
June, 2002 (The Times of London)

Peter Ajayi sits quietly at an outdoor restaurant, showing a photograph of his three youngest children wearing blue and yellow choir robes. It is a suffocating morning in Kano, northern Nigeria, a city which has operated under Sharia, or Islamic law, since 1999. Since then, Kano, and surrounding towns in other states have exploded into religious violence between the majority Muslims, who support the new law, and the few Christians who are attempting to live under it. Since the establishment of Sharia, thousands of people have been killed in clashes and hundreds of churches have been burnt down.

Life for the Christians - who are unfairly seen as pro-American, pro-West - is becoming intolerable. "We don't have a political voice," says Dr Gabriel Oja, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Kano. His parish has been reduced by 40 per cent since Sharia was established, either by people leaving or being killed. "There is no single Christian in government in Kano. Not even a councilman."

Peter Ajayi's three children - Shola, 14, Dupe, 11 and Moji, eight - are part of that equation. They were children who went to church every day and wanted to grow up to be doctors and accountants. They were ambitious, their father says proudly. But they will never grow up and never go to university because on October 14, 2001, while Peter was away on business, Muslim fundamentalists arrived at the Ajayis' bungalow.

In the previous few days, there had been anti-Christian riots in Kano in response to the US-led bombing of Afghanistan. The riots left hundreds dead. Muslims were attacking Christians with knives, swords and fire. Peter's wife, Christiane, had spoken to her husband that morning and reassured him that she and the children were safe. Now she assumed he had come home early and she answered the door without thinking.

The men at the door looked at Christiane calmly and said, "We have been sent to kill you because you are Christians." They then doused the house, and her, with petrol and set the fuel alight. While Christiane went up in flames, the three children, along with a visiting cousin, were trapped in their rooms. They screamed for their mother, but she was trapped in the kitchen trying to extinguish the fire and could not reach them. In the end, Christiane threw herself out of a window. The children perished.

Peter, wet-eyed, spreads out more pictures on the plastic table; the children at school, at home, playing, singing. The little one had a beautiful soprano voice, he says. They went to church every day, their mother was the choir leader. "They were innocent children. The men who did it saw my wife's face..." He misses everything about them: their smell, their voices, their jokes and their tears.

Then he takes out another set. His wife (now in America and still traumatised by the event) recovering from third-degree burns in a Lagos hospital. More than one year on, her legs are still raw and purple. Her face looks like a mask.

But there is one photograph that Peter has not seen. It is a photo kept locked in the safe of the church he attends, guarded by Dr Oja. It is a photo of four tiny roasted bodies lying next to one another, trying to protect each other from the flames that were engulfing them. Bones poke through the scorched skin. The limbs are twisted at unnatural angles.

The shock of it would be too much for Peter, who has to continue living in Kano, where Christians are under more and more pressure from radical Muslims to leave. Oddly, he bears no malice to his Muslim neighbours, whom he has lived alongside for 25 years. He has no bitterness, no hatred in his heart. "I just miss them so much," he says of his children. "I cannot forget them. I think about them all the time."

ISLAM WAS ESTABLISHED in Nigeria around 900 years ago, as a result of trans-Sahara trading caravans and holy wars. Muslims now account for around 45 per cent of the population and mostly live in the north, with the Christians living mostly in the south. There has long been tension between the two groups, but in the northern regions where the Christians are in the minority, the atmosphere is steadily deteriorating. As Dr Oja says wearily: "People are growing more and more intolerant."

Sharia law, in its purest form, is meant to curb corruption and ensure justice. But when the law arrived in Nigeria - admittedly one of the most corrupt countries in Africa - there were political motives, as northern politicians used Sharia to garner millions of Muslim votes in the region. The people, who live in villages without electricity, without clean drinking water, without even polio vaccinations for their babies, accepted it because they believed it would end the chaos of their miserable lives. "There was pressure to implement Sharia law because conventional Nigerian law had not worked," says one Nigerian attorney.

As Islamic commentator Dr Akbar Ahmed explains: "In the ideal, Sharia provides justice and compassion in society. However, the reality today is - from Nigeria to Pakistan - that ordinary people can expect little justice and no compassion. This is particularly true where women are concerned because of ignorance and prejudice.

"Most Muslim nations have not clarified the legal codes which were set up when they achieved independence half a century ago. The Sharia, tribal custom, and central government laws inspired by Western sources, overlap, clash, and are juxtaposed. A priority for Muslim leaders must be to bring the different sources of law into consonance with the demands of life in the 21st century."

Since Sharia - which is also implemented in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkey, Pakistan and Libya - began to be implemented in Nigeria in 1999, there have been three amputations, four people have been sentenced to stoning, and 11 children await amputation for petty theft, some for stealing a cow, some for stealing a shirt. All this, despite the fact that the constitution of the Nigerian Federal Government prohibits cruel punishments such as stoning or amputation.

In Nigeria, human rights groups and lawyers attempting to defend the victims say that Sharia only applies to the poor, those without a voice, who silently accept that they must suffer for Allah. "There has never been a rich person sentenced to stoning," says one aid worker. "Yet there are judges who have sentenced others to death, while their own girlfriends have become pregnant. There are rich men whose daughters have got pregnant. Nothing happens to them. It is only the poor who suffer."

And so people live with Sharia hanging over their heads. But perhaps what is most chilling is the meekness of the victims, their willingness to accept their fate. When you meet Amina Lawal, for instance, the 31-year-old mother of three who has made headlines all over the world since she was sentenced to be buried up to her neck and stoned to death by 2004 or whenever she finishes weaning her ten-month-old daughter, she smiles gently and talks about Allah's will, Allah's way, Allah's path. Her faith is real, yet her meekness is hard to fathom given the sentence hanging over her: how could she not worry about the fate of her daughter, or the agonising death that she may undergo?

"This is divine law, we are slaves of Allah," Judge Labaran Mohammed told me, at the Upper Sharia court in Gusau, Zamfara state. "There are no options, no debate about it."

Bizarrely, these medieval and barbaric practices take place in the same country that was to host the Miss World contest until the deaths of more than 200 rioters caused it to move to London. When I was there, preparations were still under way, and it was impossible to ignore the strange and horrible irony in the red carpets rolled out for the contestants. Some had boycotted the event, but others said they were showing their solidarity by attending. Although quite how strutting around in high heels and full make-up will help the fate of ignorant village women condemned to death is baffling.

The women arrived in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, from London, the same evening that Amina Lawal arrived from her small northern village to meet me. The "Queens", as the Nigerian press dubbed the contestants, are predictably beautiful, young, thin. Amina is also beautiful, but her prospects are somewhat less alluring. The Queens wore very little, despite the fact that it was the strict holy month of Ramadan here, and the widespread disquiet felt at their presence by many senior Muslims which was to erupt into such violence.

Hajiya Laila Dogonyaro, the chairperson of the governing board of the National Council on Women's Development, condemned the pageant, saying: "No religion could ever tolerate the show of nudity and anything that could lead to the abuse of women's rights" - which is at the very least hypocritical, given that the Nigerian government has done nothing to protect women under Sharia law.

The Abuja Hilton, where the Queens were spending their first night, was awash with young girls in miniskirts, tight jeans, belly-baring tops, skirts slit up to the thigh and platform shoes. Ten minutes away from the chaos of the girls, the dancers and the traditional Nigerian music that was pounding out in the lobby, Amina waited for me in the house of her lawyer, Hauwa Ibrahim. Wrapped up in a green hajib, she was barefoot and nursing her baby Wasila, who is scrawny and has scared eyes.

Amina's face is wide, clear and devoid of fear. She has tiny feet and hands and seems lost in the hajib, which she pulls tight around her. While she has been made a symbol of the suffering of women under Sharia and used by the press as an unwilling spokesperson on the Miss World subject - she was cajoled by Italian aid workers into saying that she wanted the Queens to come to give her solidarity - in fact, Hausa Ibrahim says Amina knew nothing about the Miss World contest. This is hardly surprising, bearing in mind that Amina lives in a village with no electricity. Having now been made aware of this bizarre contest, she says that she would watch it "out of curiosity" if she was in a place that had a television set.

Speaking in Hausa, Amina talks about her life, which has been predictably miserable. "Life was having just enough food to eat." Unschooled, she was born into a large family and married off to a man before she began menstruating - she says, "I grew to love him" - later giving birth to two children while still a teenager. He left her, she married and divorced again, and she went back to live with her father and his four wives. Life with her family was hard. She was befriended by a man, Yahaya, who one day took her on his motorbike to meet his relatives. But he stopped in a field and raped her. From that one encounter, she fell pregnant with Wasila.

When Amina's pregnancy became obvious, the hizbah - the religious vigilante police - took her to prison. Yahaya denied the rape and was cleared because under Sharia a man can only be prosecuted if four people swear that they saw him having sex with the woman. Amina was sentenced to death by stoning in March 2002. Her first appeal, in August, was rejected. Hauwa Ibrahim is waiting for another and says she will go all the way to the Nigerian Supreme Court if she has to, to prevent the death.

Amina seems so preoccupied with her baby that she shrugs off her sentence. Is she frightened? "God will take care of me," she says. And her baby, who will take care of her? She rolls her eyes heavenward. "God." She bears no hatred, no anger towards the man who raped her or towards the judges who sentenced her. But she does say she is angry at the law. "Yes, I'm angry," she says, holding the baby against her cheek. "But I leave everything to God." If she wins her appeal, she says she just wants to get married again. Under Sharia, it is the only way a woman can be protected.

Sharia was implemented as full-scale criminal law in Zamfara state in 1999 and quickly spread to 11 other states in the north. Its birthplace was Gusau - the state capital, and now one of the strangest places on earth - where Governor Sani used it as a political platform. He launched it in a fiery speech in Akilu Square, a dusty patch of ground where children - boy children - now play football.

A remote, dusty "capital" perched high near the Niger and Benin state border, Gusau resembles Saudi Arabia more than Nigeria. Women are clothed head to toe in hajibs. Signs in Arabic - which few people read as Hausa is spoken widely in the north - spell out inscriptions from the Koran, or demand vigilance. Bus stops designate that women can, or cannot, wait there. Posters dot shops and houses, calling out for Sharia: "I support Sharia. The constitution of true believers. It saves, cares, protects, judges."

At night, the town goes dead black - there is no electricity - and the hizbah, consisting entirely of volunteers, cruise the streets in blood-red uniforms. They use vans borrowed from the Nigerian Boy Scouts and look for sinners who will be picked up and packed off to Sharia court in the morning.

In the morning heat, we go to one of the many Sharia courts scattered across Gusau. It is virtually a shack in a dirt yard with goats and chickens and cows in the front. A young father, Ibrahim Namadi, was caught stealing a cheap gold-plated necklace to feed his family. It was his first crime. He is sweating and close to tears, waiting for his sentence. A crowd gathers, open-mouthed, waiting to hear the judge, who wears a blue silk kaftan, white snakeskin shoes and a blue turban.

Ibrahim Namadi gets 40 lashes, and not amputation, because the state did not provide for him, and he was forced to steal. His face shows no emotion as he is led outside to a bench, where he lies while a man with a whip stands over him. Someone begins to count as the whip falls. The "counter" holds a tape recorder, the product of which will be played on local radio - a warning to anyone else thinking of lifting a cheap necklace to feed their children. Ibrahim is writhing on the bench as the whip falls, trying to protect himself. He moans and makes animal-like noises. The crowd is silent, fascinated. It is terrible to watch. Afterwards, the judge lets me talk to the victim, who is clearly in shock. His eyes are wet, he is sweating and a rank smell comes from him: fear. Under the eyes of the beaming judge, he tells me that he "will never commit a crime again".

There is little sign of life, or joy, in Gusau. There is more a pervading sense of fear, or more importantly, of an indigenous culture being crushed and another one being imposed. Now, under Sharia law, people live joylessly, almost as though they are waiting for the blow to come down.

In June 2000, Buba Bello became the first man to undergo amputation in Nigeria. Now 43, he wears a bright pink Kaftan specially sewed to hide the stump on his right hand. Urged on by his "patron" - the chief of the anti-corruption unit in Gusau and one of the men responsible for chopping off his hand - Buba tells of a life of crime from the time he was a teenager. He says that he was almost relieved when he received the sentence for amputation, because it meant his life of crime was over.

The operation was painless. He was given a general anaesthetic and woke up with a neatly sewed stump. That in itself makes it more chilling for me - that a doctor, trained to save lives, took the time and effort to anaesthetise a patient and then hack off his perfectly healthy hand. But Buba is oddly cheerful. "The state provides for me now," he says. They also gave him an all-expenses paid trip to Mecca, so now he bears the title of al-Haji, one who has made the Haj. He's got a new, young wife. And he will certainly never steal again, one of the anti-corruption officials says menacingly. However, a local official later tells me that Buba was picked out to be an example because Sharia was newly installed, and someone had to show the people that the government was serious. Afterwards, to show they were also merciful, they sent him on the trip to Mecca.

When night falls in Gusau, the people come out on the street for Iftar, the traditional breaking of the Ramadan fast. They eat under the orange lights of the lanterns which dot the central square. Around 11pm, the hizbah begin gathering, some in red uniforms. "Originally, when they first started up, people were really afraid of them," says Mohammed Dosara, a local journalist. "Now people have got used to their presence."

There is one place in Gusau where the hizbah cannot go. On the edge of town, inside a federal army base, local people have constructed their own Sin City. The soldiers - who come from all over the country and are not all Muslims - would have had a revolt if beer had been banned on their base, so local people took advantage of this protection and used it as a way to have their own "safe haven" from the hizbah.

The contrast from the centre of Gusau to here - a distance of maybe five miles - is extraordinary. Corrugated iron shacks have been turned into bars, complete with red lights fired from a generator. There are discos, even a makeshift cinema - showing a forbidden action video to an open-mouthed crowd. There are prostitutes, there is roasted dog-meat, there is hut after hut full of people laughing, watching Jennifer Lopez shimmy around in a bikini on a beach on MTV, and there is lots of alcohol.

But the place does not stay open all night long, and eventually people have to go back to their homes, trying to avoid the hizbah who wait to clamp down on the sinners who are often so drunk they fall by the side of the road. Is it worth it? The courthouse, the lashings, maybe prison? One man who sits drinking a huge bottle of Star beer in a flashing red-light disco says that it is. "For a few hours here, everyone forgets about Sharia," he says.

In New Gawu, a village off a dirt track three hours' drive from Abuja where the Miss World Queens slept soundly, two people are condemned to death by stoning because they fell in love. They are both awaiting their appeal. One of them is Fatima Umaru, 31, who gave birth to a daughter from this union, a little girl who later died. Fatima is now under house arrest in the village, ill with abdominal troubles and heavily pregnant by her fourth husband. The other is her former lover, Amadu Ibrahim, the most handsome man in the village, who is married to a teenager. He is the first man to be sentenced to death by stoning.

The tragedy of his and Fatima's case is that they were lovers and conceived a child before Sharia law was introduced to their state, Niger. It was Fatima's father, in fact, who turned them in - he wanted his daughter to get compensation from Amadu, who is dirt-poor. But his plan backfired. An original five-year prison sentence was passed on the lovers which was later overturned to death by stoning.

I visit Fatima's parents in their hut. It is brutally hot and a crowd of barefoot and naked children gather. Fatima's mother, Rakiya, says she is not happy that her daughter has brought this kind of shame on the family. "I taught my daughter to be a good Muslim," she says, sitting on the ground shelling peanuts which will be their lunch. "I taught her to say her prayers. Now people in the village are not happy."

Fatima's father, Usman Omar, who clearly feels guilty that he started the ball rolling in the first place, says the last time he saw his daughter, a few weeks previously, she could not stop crying.

A short distance away is Fatima's lover's house. Amadu, who is a firewood stacker, takes us to a field behind the village mosque, where he tells me that he loved Fatima, who had been his neighbour for many years. They first fell in love, he says, on a rainy afternoon when they were trapped in a market stall escaping the bad weather. "She started it!" he says. Afterwards, they were inseparable. They used to go for secret walks in the bush outside of the village. But when Fatima became pregnant, Amadu would not marry her. "She was too old," he says. "She's older than my first wife."

Instead, Fatima married someone else, her third husband. But when he found out about the child, he left her. Then her baby died. Then the religious police came. Fatima married again, while still under investigation, and got pregnant again. Now she sits in another village, away from her family - who scorn her - and her former lover. She is due to give birth in the next few weeks.

"I last saw her when they took us both out of prison after 66 days," Amadu says. He does not seem bothered that she married again. "I looked at her. She looked at me. We didn't say anything." He pauses. "I still love her!" he exclaims. "Even with all of this."

We leave the village with its African-style Shakespearean cast of characters: a pair of star-crossed lovers; Fatima's four husbands; her father who tried to use her situation to make money; her bitter mother. "In these poor places, sex is the only way of having fun," says Felix Onuah, a local journalist. "A law preventing it will never work. You can't break the fabric of village life just because you decide to change the law."

the Nigerian FEDERAL Government says it will never allow Amina, or others, to be stoned. In the wake of the Miss World controversy, a deputy minister in the Foreign Ministry issued a statement reassuring the contestants that it could not happen. But lawyers say that the Federal Government has never intervened before. It has never challenged Sharia hard enough. It was not there when the 12 state governments fell to Sharia, or when these authorities chopped off hands or flogged people for lying. It was not there when women were stopped from riding the same buses as men, or ordered to wear head-to-toe coverings. Hauwa Ibrahim says a woman from the government's Women's Ministry once came to a Sharia court session. "She just didn't understand at all," says Ibrahim. Nothing came of her attendance.

Hauwa Ibrahim was born and raised a Muslim, but she refuses to talk about religion. The 35-year-old lawyer, who is married to an Italian, takes on cases like those of Fatima and Amadu, Amina, and others without pay. Her first Sharia case was in 1999 when she fought in vain to stop a woman being lashed 100 times for lying. Hauwa has a soft, round face. She loves her country, but she also fears for its future, particularly in the wake of September 11, after which the Muslim and Christian gulf seems ever wider. We stand outside her house talking about Amina. The sun is sinking; it is growing close to Iftar. Nearby, a mosque begins the scratchy recording of the muezzin's call to prayer.

"People in Europe tell me Amina will never be stoned," I say. Hauwa looks at me. She does not agree. "Until the law is tackled, the cases will keep coming," she says. "There are a lot of fundamentalist fanatics who have lost their minds. They can do anything."

Sindi Medar-Gould from Baobab, a women's human rights group, says emphatically, "We will not let them carry out Amina's stoning," and vows that her organisation, and others, will fight to the end to free the victims. "Sharia was meant to end corruption and bring order to the chaos," she says. "But the reality is slowly beginning to dawn on women, many of whom do not understand the law."

Hauwa Ibrahim believes that someone, eventually, will have to be stoned to death, as an example that Islamic justice will be served. It might be Amina, it might not. The Miss World controversy brought the world's attention to the plight of these people, but as Hauwa Ibrahim wearily pointed out, "The moment the Miss World glamour goes, we will still be here."

© Janine di Giovanni

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