The rate things are going here, someday soon we’ll see stories like this one, except all the names will be American.
A three-judge panel in northern Afghanistan has sentenced a student journalist to death for distributing a paper he printed off the Internet that allegedly blasphemed Islam, according to international media groups.
But media groups in the country say the journalist is in fact being punished for investigative pieces his brother wrote.
Those articles exposed human rights abuses by political and paramilitary factions in northern Afghanistan.
Sayed Perwiz Kaambaksh, 23, was tried behind closed doors and without representation in Mazar-e-Sharif Tuesday, the group Reporters Without Borders said.
Soon after, the deputy provincial prosecutor in charge of the case threatened to imprison any reporter who expressed support for Kaambaksh, the group said in a statement.
The charges of distributing anti-Islamic propaganda are based on a document that Kaambaksh downloaded from the Internet last October and shared with students at Balkh University in Mazar-e-Sharif where he is a journalism student.
…Media groups in the country believe Kaambaksh was actually arrested for articles his brother wrote that criticized provincial authorities.
“(The brother) feels very strongly that it’s a campaign of intimidation against him and others like him who might want to take on these powerful commanders,” Jean Mackenzie, country director of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, told CNN.
The brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, is one of the leading independent journalists in the region and has written numerous stories that detail human rights abuses, MacKenzie said.
…”(Ibrahimi) is a very brave reporter and I’ve never known him to falter,” MacKenzie said. “But having his brother sentenced to death has made him very, very anxious.”
And I saw this via Chris Floyd, who asks the blogosphere to swarm the story. He has this to say about the whole affair:
The case is like a perfect transplant of the noxious Bush-era ethos: Huckabee-like theocrats operating with Cheney-like secrecy cover up sexual hypocrisy and rampant corruption by McCain-like militarists with Romney-style disregard for due process and Guiliani-like draconian punishment. But far more important than these domestic echoes is the very real danger hanging over the life of Kaambaksh. Perhaps if enough noise is made about his plight, the resulting bad PR will cause the satrap appointed by our own autocrat to grant clemency. For yes, that is what are reduced to in our ultra-modern 21st-century world: pleading for mercy from tyrants and their tools, just like the lowliest serf coming in supplication to the Tsar.
