Children under the sword

Children under the sword

The President and the country are right to rejoice that
Nasiroh has escaped the Saudi sword, although the execution of
Soleha Anam Kadiran earlier in October cast a giant shadow over
the result of this intervention by the government of Indonesia.
Nasiroh is reported as having written of another "16 Indonesians
awaiting the death sentence" -- the government would be well
advised not to see this as "rumor", but instead conduct a very
thorough investigation, and pressurize the Saudi Arabian
government. However many await beheading in Saudi jails, they are
certainly not all Indonesians.

Two girls, one eight and one 13, await a similar fate. They
were members of a large Pakistani family caught drug-trafficking.
The two girls, in fact, were forced to swallow packages of
heroin, in spite of the extreme danger of death should the
packages burst.

Clearly a crime had been committed, but an eight-year-old girl
would not have the maturity to understand the criminal act of
drug-trafficking, as well as having little option but to obey the
commands of male relatives.

In spite of relentless, shocked protest by Amnesty
International and Human Tights Watch, the Saudis have ignored
appeals, and the young girls will enter the same, one-way secret
process as Soleha did -- no access to defense lawyers, and no
appeal procedure. Islamic scholars have reacted with horror to
this possibility, and Dr. Youessef Al-Khoie, head of a major
Islamic foundation in London, said "the problems in such a case
is not the tenets of sharia law, but the fact that the religious
courts in Saudi Arabia follow a particularly narrow school of
interpretation, they are extremist and literalist".

We need not worry the Saudis would draw the line at beheading
children -- the youngest so far reported was a 15-year-old boy,
who was hanged in 1992, for "abandoning his faith." I have seen
no reports of moderate Islamic countries, whose ministers were in
Jakarta recently, offering moral support and assistance to the
government of Indonesia to pressurize the Saudis, whose primitive
concepts of natural law and justice, cause such distress and
revulsion worldwide.

There is, of course, a political element to their devious evil
-- does anyone believe they would ever execute a U.S. citizen,
whatever the charge? No, of course not, much easier to enforce
the law on nationals of countries like Pakistan, the Philippines
and Indonesia, where governments are reluctant to get involved,
in case it jeopardizes the foreign exchange gained by these
nationals working in Saudi Arabia.

The Indonesian government is to be congratulated on the
success of its hasty mission to settle Nasiroh's case.

Finally, I thank my friend, Buhari Abdu, for taking the
trouble to call me and support my earlier letter on the
detestable action of the Saudis. The question remains: Who will
care?

BILL GUERIN

Jakarta