Afghanistan - Friday Night Specials

The most publicized change is the practice of public executions. A step up from the extrajudicial killings and rapes that occurred before the Taliban but it's the packed crowds in the UN-rebuilt sports stadium that makes it odd. Victims are judged by a shura and in murder cases the victim's relatives get to execute the killer with a machine gun or knife. In some cases the killer's father must do the killing and buy the bullets used to end his son's life. Public amputations of thieves' hands are common and are performed by doctors who administer a painkiller first. Sometimes the hands are put on display in an odd form of saying "Welcome to Kabul." For local listings of the executions in your area stay tuned to Radio Shariat.

http://www.afghanradio.com

http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news/press/eje.shtm

How 'bout two out of three?

Life is never boring for the former BBC correspondent in Kabul, William Reeve. Other than covering the regular rocketings, feuding aid workers and contributing to the slowly diminishing whiskey supply at the UNICA guesthouse he gets to cover the odd walling, the execution of sexual miscreants by pushing a wall over on them. Being a homosexual is punishable by death in Afghanistan. Walling, or rajim, is supposed to be death by stones but with the time restraints of the modern world, the Talibs figure pushing over a whole wall of cinderblocks gets the job done quicker with less mess to clean up afterward.

Reeve covered the walling of an 84-year-old man who had been accused of molesting a 12-year-old young boy at guesthouse in Maidan Shahr. The man protested that he didn't even have sex with his wife, let alone the boy, but the Talibs apparently tortured him into a confession. Witnesses initially said that he was dead, but as luck would have it, they discovered when the rubble was cleared away 30 minutes later that the 15-foot wall did not kill the man as originally planned. He was let go. Someone who survives a walling is considered innocent of the crime.