Word: nigerias
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...ACCUSED. OLUSEGUN OBASANJO, 65, Nigerian President; of ordering soldiers to massacre civilians; by lawmakers from his own ruling party, in Abuja, Nigeria. The accusation is the latest in a series of attempts by the legislature to impeach the beleaguered leader. Obasanjo, a former general whose election in 1999 brought an end to more than 15 years of military rule, has described the impeachment efforts as "a joke taken a little...
...marry her. "I thought that this would end up as a happy thing," she says. But eight days after she gave birth, police arrested Lawal, 30, for adultery, a capital crime under the Islamic law, or shari'a, in effect in her home state of Katsina in northern Nigeria. A courtroom crowd cried, "Allahu akbar (God is great)!" as a shari'a court last week rejected an appeal of her sentence. As soon as she weans nine-month-old Wasila, Lawal is scheduled to be buried in the ground up to her chest and stoned to death...
...reliable witnesses must testify to having seen the sexual act--the case against him was dropped. A hard-line Islamic judge ruled that baby Wasila was proof enough of Lawal's guilt. "We see this as selective application of shari'a against women," says Ugochukwu Okezie, campaign director for Nigeria's Civil Liberties Organization...
Lawal may yet prevail. She has the support of the national government of Nigeria, which did not back the decision of the country's 12 predominantly Muslim northern states to adopt shari'a in criminal cases two years ago. The government of President Olusegun Obasanjo, a born-again Christian, has promised to back Lawal in another appeal. The case may end up in the country's supreme court. In March, Safiya Husseini, the first Nigerian woman sentenced to stoning for adultery, had her sentence dismissed by an Islamic appeals court in another state, in part because she was accused...
...women complain that rape victims are routinely charged with adultery, sentenced to death and then left to languish in jail. The penalty is newest in sub-Saharan Africa, where it has been introduced in Sudan and Somalia over the past decade, though in practice it is rarely used. In Nigeria, the introduction of shari'a is as much about politics as ideology. Worried that power was slipping to southern Christians, the northern Muslim elite has embraced shari'a. "Part of it is an attempt to embarrass Obasanjo," says Paul Marshall of the Center for Religious Freedom, based in Washington. "They...