فضية لبنى فى صحف العالم من سيدنى الى سياتل (تتورطون)

Quote: Ready to take a flogging for wearing trousers Talal Osman and Nick Meo in Khartoum August 4, 2009 Turning the tables ... Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein leaves the cafe where she was arrested. Turning the tables ... Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein leaves the cafe where she was arrested. Photo: Reuters A SUDANESE journalist facing 40 lashes for wearing ‘‘indecent’’ trousers vowed on the eve of her judgment she is ready to be whipped 40,000 times in her attempt to change the harsh laws. Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein is to be judged today under Article 152 of Sudanese law, which sanctions 40 lashes for anyone ‘‘who commits an indecent act which violates public morality or wears indecent clothing’’. Mrs Hussein, who works for the media department of the United Nations Mission in Sudan, waived the immunity granted to UN workers. As the morality police crowded around her table in a Khartoum restaurant on July 3 to see what she was wearing, Mrs Hussein had no idea that she was about to a symbol for women’s rights. She had arrived at the Kawkab Elsharq Hall on a Friday night to book a cousin’s wedding reception, and while she waited she watched an Egyptian singer and sipped a Coke. She left less than an hour later under arrest as a ‘‘trouser girl’’ – humiliated in front of hundreds of people, then beaten around the head in a police van before she was hauled before a court to face a likely sentence of 40 lashes for the ‘‘sin’’ of not wearing traditional Islamic dress. The officials who tried to humiliate her expected her to beg for mercy, as most of their victims do. Instead she turned the tables on them. In court today Mrs Hussein will dare judges to have her flogged, as she makes a stand for women’s rights in one of Africa’s most conservative nations. She has become an overnight heroine for thousands of women in Africa and the Middle East, who are flooding her email in-box with supportive messages. To the men who feel threatened by her she is an enemy of public morals, to be denounced in the mosques and newspapers’ letter pages. As she recounted her ordeal in Khartoum on the weekend, Mrs Hussein, a widow in her late thirties who works as a journalist and UN press officer, managed to crack jokes, despite the real prospect that in a couple of days she will be flogged with a camel-hair whip in a public courtyard where anyone who chooses may watch the spectacle. ‘‘Flogging is a terrible thing – very painful and a humiliation for the victim,’’ she said. ‘‘But I am not afraid of being flogged. I will not back down. ‘‘I want to stand up for the rights of women, and now the eyes of the world are on this case I have a chance to draw attention to the plight of women in Sudan.’’ Like many other women in the capital, Mrs Hussein fell foul of Sudan’s Public Order Police, hated groups of young puritans employed by the Government to confront drinkers of alcohol and women who, in their view, are insufficiently demure. Despite their claims of moral superiority, they have a reputation for dishonesty and for demanding sexual favours from the women they arrest. Mrs Hussein declined to admit her guilt and insisted on her right to go before a judge. She has received death threats and since her first court appearance she has not slept at home, moving between the houses of relatives. She believes that her mobile telephone calls have been screened by the securi

(عدل بواسطة Hashim Badr Eldin on 08-06-2009, 11:06 PM)