سوات کے طالبان پچھلے 2 سال میں اپنی عدالتیں قائم کرنے کے بعد برسرِ عام کوڑے لگانے کی سزا 25 بار مردوں کو 2 بار عورتوں کو دے چکے ہیں ۔ یہ تمام واقعات جن میں ایک عورت کی وڈیو عام دکھائی گئی ہے سوات کے طالبان سے معاہدہ سے پہلے کے ہیں ۔ خبر یہ ہے

The videotape shown on television and displayed on websites Friday wasn’t the only time that a woman was publicly canned by the Swati Taliban. However, no videotape of the other incident, which took place on October 20, 2008, is available in which a woman and her father-in-law were flogged in Ser-Taligram village near Manglawar in Charbagh tehsil. The woman had been divorced by her husband but her father-in-law kept her in his house. The two were accused by the Taliban of having illicit relations. Villagers said the man was whipped 50 times while the woman was given 30 lashes.

The canning of the 17-year-old girl, who according to certain accounts was 16, shown by television channels on Friday was reportedly filmed by someone with a mobile phone. A reporter of a private TV channel in Swat said the two-minute footage was in their possession for sometime and was being transferred to a large number of people through cell phones. “To be honest, we didn’t want to send it to our TV channels for use due to fear of Taliban and also on account of concern that this would bring a bad name to Swat and endanger the peace accord,” he said while requesting anonymity.

The girl who was publicly canned in Kala Killay village in Kabal tehsil was reportedly named Chand. An Indian TV channel coined a couplet while reporting the incident on Friday by figuratively referring to Chand, which is the Urdu word for the moon. The boy, who like the girl was also lashed 30 times, was named Adalat Khan, son of Muslim Khan.

Incidentally, the Taliban spokesman in Swat who defended the public flogging in several interviews on Friday is also named Muslim Khan. He apparently mixed up the two incidents of public lashing of women in Swat on Taliban orders by saying that the girl videotaped during her canning was convicted of having illicit relations with her father-in-law. That incident happened in Ser-Taligram village in Charbagh tehsil while the videotape is of the girl belonging to Kala Killay in Kabal area.

One of the stories making the rounds in Swat was that a Talib saw the accused, Adalat Khan, who was an electrician by profession, leaving the home of the girl, Chand. He called other Taliban and accused the two of committing adultery. The boy defended himself by arguing that he was asked to fix some electrical appliances in the girl’s house. The Taliban then went ahead with the punishment of 30 lashes awarded to both the boy and the girl. Subsequently, as the story goes the Taliban got the two to marry and even cooked rice to hold a feast for celebrating the occasion.

It is possible that this story is cooked up or is one of the many being told and retold. But it is a fact that Taliban courts punished the two women and about 25 men by lashing them in public. Besides, drug addicts were routinely canned wherever they were found taking drugs.

Among the widely quoted cases, Taliban publicly canned two butchers in Ningolay village for selling meat of dead animals. They also awarded lashes to two men in the same village for committing unnatural sexual offences.

Two Taliban fighters were also publicly whipped 40 times each in Bar Thana village in Matta tehsil after being found guilty by a Shariah court for extorting Rs 360,000 from a goldsmith hailing from Chupriyal village. A Taliban commander known as Khairo was also involved in the same crime as he was the one who imposed the Rs 360,000 fine on the goldsmith after accusing him of running a propaganda campaign against the Taliban. When the Taliban leadership came to know about the incident, they asked the goldsmith to identify the three Taliban who had extorted the money from him. Subsequently, the two Taliban foots-soldiers were lashed in public and their commander, Khairo, was publicly executed in Sinpoora, the village of former provincial minister and JUI-F leader Qari Mahmood, near Matta.

This was Taliban justice, quick and brutal and publicly awarded.

بشکریہ ۔ دی نیوز