“A heartbreaking story of persecution of women  in Afghanistan.  This seems to be a part of their daily lives.  Where are the human rights activists, where is the UN council on Human Rights.  And we are to accept that the religion that encourages this is a religion of peace?  If some have their way, to speak out against this would be hate speech? Where’s the justice?”

KABUL, Afghanistan — The stitches and bandages are gone, but scars streak across one side of the girl’s face, across her cheek and behind her ear: stark testimony to the brutal attack she barely survived three months ago.

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By ALISSA J. RUBIN

Published: January 19, 2013

When the girl, Gul Meena, is with other people, even those whom she knows at the shelter where she now lives, she pulls a veil across the damaged side of her face, often touching it gingerly and sucking in her breath.

“It hurts,” she said softly.

The man who swung an ax over and over into her face and neck was her brother, according to the Afghan police and her neighbors. His reason, as best it can be pieced together from people who know the family, was that he believed Gul Meena had dishonored their family by running away with a man to whom she was not married.

What made her perceived crime worse — and, in the eyes of some, what made the “honor killing” necessary — was that she, barely past childhood, was married, said relatives and people in her village.

With the thin, small wrists of a child and large eyes looming sadly, Gul Meena’s emotions flicker between the occasional smile and a solemn, distant look, as she seems to retreat into herself. While the doctors who treated her when she was first admitted to a hospital thought she might be 20 years old, now that her bandages are off, she looks far younger; her caretakers at the shelter in Kabul believe that more likely she is about 16.

When talking to people she sometimes sounds confused, even surprised at her situation, like a person who wakes up for the first time in a new place and cannot remember getting there. “I don’t know how this happened to me,” she said as she traced the scars’ raised welts with her index finger.

Neither the doctors nor hospital orderlies who saw her in the days and even weeks after she was brought to a hospital in eastern Afghanistan at the end of September — with her brain protruding from her skull — thought she would survive, much less regain the ability to walk, wash herself, eat and speak. The surgeon who first treated her said he was unsure she would ever regain her motor skills.

She does remember where her family comes from, and talks about it all the time: she has four brothers and two sisters, and they grew up in the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan. On the Afghan side of the border, the area is in Naray district in Kunar Province; on the Pakistani side, it is in Chitral.

Read the rest of Gul’s story and others, click the link below.

via Scars Are Sole Testimony to ‘Honor’ Victim’s Ordeal – NYTimes.com.

Categories: Persecution of women in the middle east, Religion of Peace