Stoning...Islam.....Stone AGE !!

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=655&e=6&u=/oneworld/4591771591074598265

Kid Slaves Break Back in Pakistan's Labor Camps
Tue Jan 20, 6:55 AM ET Add World - OneWorld.net to My Yahoo!


Ahmad Naeem Khan, OneWorld South Asia

LAHORE, Jan 20 (OneWorld) - Thousands of innocent people, including hundreds of young children, are subjected to unspeakable torture in slave camps in the lawless tribal areas of Balochistan province and the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan (news - web sites).



"Kidnapped children are kept in fetters and forced to break rocks and work in road and bridge construction," says 39-year-old Zakir Hussain who escaped and arrived home after 29 years in a Balochistan camp.


Hussain maintains that many of these camps, commonly called Kharkar Camps, in remote and inaccessible areas of far-flung Pakistan are run in collusion with local law-enforcing agencies.


Still in a state of shock, Hussain gives details about the slave camp, which he says had 250 girls and 500 boys.


"Girls and women are sold in the flesh markets of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Among them was the daughter of a police officer of the southern Punjab city of Bahawalpur. The 25-year-old, attempted to flee twice but failed," narrates Hussain.


Hussain's harrowing tale began in 1976 when he went to the Pakistani port city of Karachi with a mason Allah Bakhsh Awan to find work. Awan sold him to a trafficker from the tribal area who took him to Naushki, a remote town in Balochistan.

Imprisoned in a bonded labor camp, Hussain was chained to a donkey. "Later I was forced to crush stones for the construction of a road near Quetta, the provincial capital," he says.


It was a Dickensenian nightmare from the start. "The inmates had to work 12 hours and were served only once a day - bread and pickle," says Hussain.


"To prevent us from escaping, the traffickers put some kind of drops in our eyes before going to bed, rendering us blind for the entire night," he says.


Torture was routine and inmates were subjected to electric shocks to blunt their memory. Tongues were chopped off so that the inmates would not communicate.


"When an inmate died, they removed his kidneys and threw the body to wild animals," Hussain shivers as he speaks of the horrifying incidents. "The punishment for escape was death."

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Hey, maybe this is where that donated kidneys from the third world rumor came from.

 

Originally posted by Sane
First off, let me say that I respect you for being able to carry on with this conversation the way you have. Specifically, the way other people have not been able to. I don't know about you, but I've already benefitted from discussing this with you, I've learned new things, seen new angles, and its even created questions that I will, myself, need answered soon.I'm happy to hear that. I've enjoyed this conversation myself.





Let me ask you, if you don't believe in this stuff, then what's your purpose in life? What are your goals and what do you want to achieve?
[/QUOTE] I figured you'd eventually ask this. I'll get back to you as soon as I have a little more time.

 

Point well taken. But let me make some notes:

There are only a few Muslim/Arab coutnries listed there. Palestine, Turkey, Nigeria and Egypt. Ethiopia I'm not sure about, but it's probably, and I have no clue about whether or not Bangladesh is or isn't a Muslim country. But anyway, of these countries, only 2 are Arab. I don't know why countries such as Saudi, Iran, Kuwait, the U.A.E., Bahrain, Qatar, and Indonesia aren't being taken into consideration but I'm pretty sure that would severely bog the rates down. As you said, poverty/stress is the main cause of these things, and the countries that are all either extremely poor or have war issues (civil or other).

Also, after takign a clsoer look I saw this: "Percentage of adult women
who have been physically assulted by an intimate partner, 1991/1999"

So first of all, it's 5 years old. Second of all, they said "intimate partner" not wife or husband. How does this differ? Well, there is a MUCH bigger number of non-married couples in North America and Europe when compared to Muslim/Arab contries, skewing these numbers. How? Well I think it's safe to say someone who's married is more likely to beat his wife than someone who's in a non-married relationship. I don't have anything to prove that, but logically, I think we can all agree on that. I'm DEFINITELY not trying to say anything negative about non-married couples, but it's pretty safe to assume that there will be more violence in a marriage than anywhere else. If we're in disagreement here, then I'll try to look up some stats.

DaDa,

I understand you're married. How sure were you that your wife was the right person and what evidence did you have? I follow religion as blindly as you followed your feelings to marry your wife. Ask my proffesors, teachors, friends about how much I questioned Islam a measly 2 or 3 years ago. I looked into it, I found what I wanted, I found something that was obviously created by a supreme being and that I could only TRY to comprehend.

It's easy to trash something when you don't know what it is, just like you'll kick a can lying on the street if you don't know that it's some homeless guy's lunch. But you never bothered to actually find out.


Woofer,

Is that directed at anything I said or.....?

SRF,

I'm trying to find some of those quotes in English, but not much luck. I'll keep trying, but everythign seems to be in Arabic unfortunately.

 

Sane,

The problem is, most of the countries you metioned do not volunteer criminal and domestic violence statistics. However, international rights groups (such as amnesty international, human rights campaign, international women's tribune) have estimated significantly higher rates of domestic violence in the middle east/arab world than in the US/Canada/Western Europe/Japan. Reports are readily available at the respective websites.

Of the countries listed in that cursory UN statistics chart, all of the predominantly muslim countries had higher rates of domestic violence than the developed countries. That said, all of the underdeveloped countries, irrespective of religion, had higher rates of domestic violence.

Among demographers and development economists, there's a pretty widely held notion about the chain of events linking poverty to domestic violence...

(Less Education) => More poverty => Less education => More inequality (towards women, ethnic minorities, etc.)

I put the first Less Education in parentheses because there is an obvious positive feedback mechanism between low education and poverty.

The fact that the data are 5 years old isn't that much of a problem, as there haven't been any radical cultural changes, and if anything, experts think that the rate of decline in domestic violence is far higher in developed countries than undeveloped countries. So if anything, more recent data would indicate a wider gap between US/Western Europe and the middle east.

It's not completely clear to me why non-married couples would have less domestic violence than married couples. I an see reasons supporting that statement, but on the other hand, I can see arguments supporting the opposite. For instance, somebody who is in a violent relationship is less likely to get married. Hence, married couples are more likely to be composed to people who did not previously engange in violence. At any rate, that's a very ambiguous argument.

I'm not saying Islam is disrespectful to women at all. But what I am saying is that you're using very specious reasoning to say that women in islamic countries are treated far better than women in non-islamic countries. Anecdotes aside, the data suggest otherwise.

As I said before, the problem (in my view) is poverty.

 

To whomever pooh-poohed the idea the US has more in common with India than with Pakistan:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0126/p06s02-wosc.html


World > Asia: South & Central
from the January 26, 2004 edition

India rises as strategic US ally

Monday India celebrates Republic Day - and worries neighbors, especially Pakistan.

By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

NEW DELHI – Every Republic Day, India struts its military stuff, dragging out the latest ballistic missiles and tanks and parading the finest soldiers on the subcontinent. But Monday, on this year's anniversary, India has a bit more to strut about.
Just five years after US-imposed sanctions turned India and Pakistan into virtual pariah states for their nuclear-weapons tests in 1998, India has emerged as America's "strategic partner" in South Asia. Far more than its alliance with Pakistan to hunt down Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants, America's new relationship with India is a broad security, political, technological, and economic arrangement on par with America's relationship with Europe or NATO. The US is even talking about sharing roles in joint space missions.

In speeches over the last week, President Bush, Colin Powell, and other US officials have lauded India's new position in the world and growing economic importance on the global stage. Separately, US officials have talked of India's common interests in protecting sea lanes from the Persian Gulf to the Straits of Malacca, an area that India already patrols with its blue-water navy.

Call it the outsourcing of global security, with India once again getting the job.

"If you're looking at the security of the oil lanes or the sea lanes of Southeast Asia or the relationship with China, there's a natural convergence of interests from the US and India on all this," says K. Santhanam, director of the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, a government think tank in New Delhi.

It's a situation that has many of India's neighbors, primarily its nuclear rival Pakistan, wringing their hands.

After Sept. 11, Pakistan reaffirmed its longstanding alliance with the US by severing ties with Afghanistan's Taliban regime. As a result, the US is giving some economic incentives to Pakistan, but the arrangement falls short of America's accelerating relationship with India.

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Not quite stone age, but these Christians take the cake.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/headline/world/2549653
Nigerian Christian tribe kills 80 in Muslim town
Associated Press
ABUJA, Nigeria -- Fighters of a predominantly Christian tribe attacked a town dominated by a rival Muslim ethnic group, razing homes and mosques and killing at least 80 people, Nigerian police said Tuesday.

The ethnic Tarok assailants, armed with machetes, British colonial-era muskets and homemade guns, attacked the predominantly Hausa town of Yelwa, 210 miles east of the capital of Abuja, early Monday morning, said Raymond Nyama, a police officer who visited the scene.

Police counted 80 bodies littering otherwise abandoned streets, Nyama added. An unknown number of mosques were burned.

The death toll was likely to rise as police and family members collected bodies, a police commander said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Nigeria's ThisDay newspaper put the death toll at 100 or more, with three mosques and more than 1,000 homes destroyed.

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I was just thinking that this thread was going to pop up again.

 

I heard about this, but I hadn't heard that they were using muskets to fight. This is a horrible thing, but I'm slightly fascinated by the fact that they used muskets. I wish all armies would use swords and muskets to fight.

 

It's kind of weird that they resorted to hand made guns and muskets when in some countries used AK-47's go for twenty dollars.