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	"Farkhunda is Our Sister": A martyr, a murder, and the making of a new Afghanistan? by Ann Jones TruthOut, IWPR, agencies   I went to Kabul, Afghanistan, in March to see old friends. By chance, I arrived the day after a woman had been beaten to death and burned by a mob of young men. The world would soon come to know her name: Farkhunda. The name means “auspicious” or “jubilant.” She was killed in the very heart of the Afghan capital, at a popular shrine, the burial place of an unnamed ghazi, a warrior martyred for Islam. Years ago, I worked only a few doors away. I knew the neighborhood well as a crossroads for travelers and traders, a market street beside the Kabul River, busy with peddlers, beggars, drug addicts, thieves, and pigeons. It was always a dodgy neighborhood. Now, it had become a crime scene.   In April, at the end of the traditional 40-day period of mourning for the dead woman, that crime scene became the stage for a reenactment of the murder by a group of citizens calling themselves the Committee for Justice for Farkhunda, which was pressing the government to arrest and punish the killers. Shortly after the performance, the office of the attorney general announced formal chargesagainst 49 men: 30 suspected participants in the woman’s murder and 19 police officers accused of failing to try to stop it. On May 2nd, a trial began at the Primary Court, carried live on Afghan television. Farkhunda is now dead and buried, but her story has had staying power. It seems to mark the rise of something not seen in Afghanistan for a very long time: the power of people to renounce violence and peacefully reclaim themselves. This makes it worth recalling just how events unfolded and what messages they might hold for Americans, in particular, who have been fighting so fruitlessly in Afghanistan for 13-plus years.   On Thursday afternoon, March 19th, Farkhunda visited the Shah-e Du Shamshira shrine. There, about 30 other visitors watched as a few young men began the attack that would end her life. Some of the onlookers took up a cry that summoned yet more: Allah-u Akbar ("God is great"). When, less than an hour later, the woman’s body was torched, police estimated that the crowd had reached 5,000 to 7,000 people. From the start, onlookers used their mobile phones to take photos or videos, many of which were later posted on Facebook and watched by tens of thousands more throughout the country and eventually the world.   Ashraf Ghani, who had been president of Afghanistan for only six months and had not yet formed a working government, was preparing to spend five days in the United States. During that time, the shocking murder would assume an alarming life of its own, for even in the capital the great mass of illiterate Afghans maintain a word-of-mouth culture in which rumor, gossip, and guesswork travel faster than the speed of social media, and mullahs more often than not have the last word. Before leaving Kabul, Ghani wisely named 10 distinguished Afghans, six men and four women, to a commission charged with uncovering the facts in the killing. Among them were Islamic and legal scholars, parliamentarians, and specialists in human rights.   He also released a statement about the case, pitched straight down the middle between the contending voices already speaking out. He assured one side in the developing argument over Farkhunda’s death that dispensing justice is the duty of courts, not individuals, who would be “dealt with strongly” for taking the law into their own hands; while, with a nod to the other side, he also condemned “any action that causes disrespect to the Holy Quran and Islamic values.”   While the president then cajoled Americans in Washington and New York to support his new regime, the commission in Kabul worked as a single force to retrieve from the stream of accusation and conjecture the hard facts of the death of the woman known only as Farkhunda.   This is what they found: at age 27, she was a very religious woman who had not married but had graduated from high school and devoted herself to religious studies at a private Islamic madrassa, aspiring to become a teacher of Islamic law. She lived at home with her parents, the fourth of their 10 children. That Thursday, she went to the shrine wearing the black abaya of the devout believer, with a black half-veil covering the lower portion of her face.   There, she said her prayers and spent some time cleaning the area of the shrine where people pray. After that, she exchanged words with a man who worked as a cleaner at the Shah-e Du Shamshira mosque across the street, while running a little sideline business at the shrine selling tawiz, bits of paper bearing handwritten Quranic verses, widely credited with magical properties.   The commissioners could not discover just what Farkhunda and the cleaner Zainuddin had said to each other, but that gap in the story has since been filled in by Farkhunda’s family and friends. She evidently expressed to the cleaner her disapproval of his business of peddling un-Islamic amulets to poor, superstitious women. That story serves to explain -- and justify to some -- what the cleaner did next. While the commissioners found no witnesses to their exchange, the cleaner himself told them that he had shouted out to the people gathered at the shrine: "This woman is an American and she has burned a Quran." Farkhunda turned to people in the courtyard and said in a strong voice heard by many witnesses, “I am not an American and I have not burned a Quran.”   Though the accusations were false, they stirred a quick response. As angry young men approached the accused woman, a policeman intervened and with the help of another young man took her to a room within the shrine. That young man then planted himself in front of the door, saying to others, “Leave her alone. Don’t do this.” (He was roughly the same twenty-something age as those who would kill Farkhunda and seems to have been the only citizen to offer her help that day.)   The policeman wanted to take her to the police station for her safety. Farkhunda insisted on a female escort, but when a policewoman arrived and opened the door to the inner room where she waited, angry men rushed in and dragged her out. Some of them hit her, tearing off the veil that covered her hair and bloodying her face.   She fell to the ground but managed to sit up, supporting herself with one arm and raising the other in defense. Photographs of that moment show the legs of a uniformed policeman beside her.   That policeman or others pulled Farkhunda up and dragged her onto a low roof over which she might have escaped the mob. Another policeman, gripping her leg, pushed her from below, but an attacker struck his wrist with a stick, causing him to let go. Farkhunda then slid from the roof and fell to the sidewalk below. One or more of the police fired shots into the air, but it was too late. Menace had turned to frenzy. Some 10 or 12 men beat, punched, kicked, stomped, and stoned Farkhunda to death..   Within hours, everyone knew that the murder of Farkhunda was nothing like so many other commonplace acts of violence in Kabul. It was not an act of war, nor was it terrorism, nor political assassination. It was not a revenge killing, nor an honor killing, nor a family murder. In broad daylight, at a popular shrine, a mob of ordinary young men had murdered a young woman unknown to them with their fists and feet and whatever weapons came to hand. While shocked Kabulis struggled to make sense of this, some public figures were quick to tell them what to think.   A number of government officials immediately turned to Facebook to endorse the murder, assuming that if the Quran-burning woman were not actually American, her ideas must have been so. The official spokesman for the Kabul police Hashmat Stanekzai, for instance, wrote that Farkhunda “thought, like several other unbelievers, that this kind of action and insult will get them U.S. or European citizenship. But before reaching their target, they lost their life.” The Deputy Minister for Culture and Information Simin Ghazal Hasanzada also approved the execution of a woman “working for the infidels.” Zalmai Zabuli, chief of the complaints commission of the upper house of parliament, posted a picture of Farkhunda with this message: “This is the horrible and hated person who was punished by our Muslim compatriots for her action. Thus, they proved to her masters that Afghans want only Islam and cannot tolerate imperialism, apostasy, and spies.”   The day after the murder, a great many imams and mullahs also endorsed the killing during Friday prayer services in their mosques. One of them, the influential Maulavi Ayaz Niazi of the Wazir Akbar Khan mosque, warned the government that any attempt to arrest the men who had defended the Quran would lead to an uprising.   The next day, however, when Niazi showed up at Farkhunda’s burial, mourners asked him to leave. Within days, the police department dismissed its spokesman and, after the Deputy Minister of Culture and Information appeared on television to defend her views, she, too, was sacked. This time, it seemed that the threat of an Islamist uprising in Kabul, a menace that had intimidated government officials for a decade, had hit a wall. This time, the uprising turned out to be on the other side..   President Ghani had asked the commission he appointed to consider the murder of Farkhunda from three perspectives: Islamic Sharia law, Afghan law, and Afghan society. The commission itself included three eminent Sharia scholars who instructed their colleagues on the difference between Islam and its Afghan extremist distortions. Under Sharia, they said, a man who repudiates Islam by burning a Quran should be imprisoned for three days and offered a chance each day to repent. If he has not by then returned to the faith, he should be executed. A woman who commits the same crime should also be jailed and offered a similar chance to change her mind. If she refuses, she should not be put to death. Instead, she should be held in prison indefinitely. It followed that those who killed Farkhunda must be held accountable not only because she was innocent of the offense alleged against her, but also because to take her life in the belief that she had burned a Quran was itself a violation of Islamic law.   The question of Afghan law required less erudition. Murder is murder. The police had found no mitigating circumstances at all: no physical evidence of a Quran burning, no witnesses to such an event, no photos, nothing. Working from photographs and tips from citizens, the police quickly detained most of the principal instigators and assailants, and more than a dozen negligent policemen who stood by and watched the murder unfold. Within 10 days they had arrested almost 50 people. But at least four of the killers were still at large. They were known to be members of a popular body-building club sponsored by a prominent and influential man. This being Afghanistan, such simple facts immediately raised the question of whether the offenders would ever be “found,” or if found charged, or if charged prosecuted, or if prosecuted convicted, or if convicted sent to prison, or if imprisoned actually kept behind bars for the duration of their sentences.   The previous Afghan president Hamid Karzai had a habit of ignoring crimes against women and pardoning men inconveniently charged with committing them. Legal procedures under the new president had yet to be tested.   To place this murder in the context of Afghan society was the hardest task the presidential commission faced. For even after 35 years of war and brutality, few could recall a public event that had elicited as much grief -- as much shame among men, as much anger and fear among women -- as this enthusiastic murder. The victim had been a devout Islamic woman, beyond reproach. Her killers were not bad men, neither criminals nor mercenaries nor drug addicts nor foreign thugs, but ordinary Afghan citizens, as were the thousands who stood by and looked on.   Across the country, men and women watched the murder on Facebook and wept. Men and women alike said they could not sleep afterwards, that they had to struggle to hold themselves together, and repeatedly broke down in tears. Few, it seemed, could talk about anything else. In Kabul, young women students left the university to stay at home. Women of any age were scarce on the city’s streets. People of all social ranks kept their children and their friends close. They asked themselves a hard question: Is this who we have become?   The Afghan historian and political commentator Helena Malikyar had the answer: yes. In an article for Al Jazeera, she recalled Afghanistan before the long wars: a poor, underdeveloped country to be sure, but characterized by dignity, a code of honor, and an “Islam, heavily influenced by Sufi culture, [that] was moderate and tolerant of the ‘other.’”   “Above all,” she wrote, “the pre-war Afghan leadership always maintained moral authority and used it to implement the rule of law and reforms.” Three decades of war had changed all that, codifying a culture of violence that was passed from one generation to the next. She summed up the disaster of twenty-first-century Afghanistan this way: “Since the U.S.-led international intervention of 2001, strongmen have thrived tremendously, having become financially rich and politically powerful. Using force and brutality, therefore, pays off. Crime is rampant and goes mostly unpunished. Corruption among the police, prosecutors, and judges has emboldened criminals, and citizens have little faith in the rule of law. The lines between morality and immoral behavior, lawful and illegal acts, and righteous and sinful deeds have blurred to the point that most people are not even aware of their wrongdoings.”   It would be nice to believe that the historian exaggerated, but the clerics and the public officials who reflexively praised the murderous mob illustrated her point perfectly. So, too, did a confused and divided public. Was beating a woman to death in the street the right thing to do? Or not? A male parliamentarian from Herat made a predictable point, if further proof were needed. Farkhunda, he said, should never have gone to the shrine in the first place.   The Collective Crisis of Kabul   Even before the murder, Kabulis were facing a collective identity crisis. It seemed as if they no longer recognized themselves. Over the previous decade, the city had almost tripled in size. It now teemed with displaced people driven into the capital by never-ending combat in the countryside, as well as refugees returning from Pakistan and Iran with new beliefs and behaviors. They brought music and violence from Pakistan, makeup and religiosity from Iran. Television boomed. Especially popular with the non-literate public, it drew viewers in to alluring imported lifestyles: the sexy song-and-dance sagas of Bollywood, the overheated family dramas of Turkish soaps, and the endless high-tech violence of American films..   * Ann Jones, a writer and photographer, has worked with women in conflict and post-conflict zones, principally Afghanistan, and reported on their concerns. An authority on violence against women, she has served as a gender adviser to the United Nations. Access the link below to read the complete article.   http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/05/12/citizens-revolt-afghanistan http://iwpr.net/global-voices/afghanistan-farkhundas-death-prompts-self http://iwpr.net/focus/promoting-human-rights-and-good-governance-afghanistan http://iwpr.net/global/afghanistan http://iwpr.net/global-voices http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/afghan-photo-exhibit-seeks-redefine-peace http://www.frontlineclub.com/christina-lamb-farewell-kabul/ Visit the related web page
	Doctors and patients battle to resuscitate Russia’s dying healthcare system by Alexander Nurik, Georgy Borodyansky Equal Times, Open Democracy   Mar. 2016   Millions more Russians living in poverty as economic crisis bites. (AFP)   Russia’s recession-hit economy has propelled the country’s poverty rate to a nine-year high, state statistics showed, as the country struggles to cope with a crippling economic crisis.   An average of 19.2 million Russians – or 13.4% of the population – were living last year on less than 9,452 roubles ($139) a month, the minimum subsistence level determined by the Russian government in the fourth quarter.   This figure represents a 20% increase year-on-year, with an average 16.1 million people living below the poverty threshold in 2014.   More Russians have been slipping into poverty on the back of low oil prices that have battered the country’s energy-dependent economy and significantly diminished purchasing power. Western sanctions as result of the conflict in Ukraine have further constrained growth.   But 2015 poverty indicators are still lower than in 2000, when 29% of the population found itself below the poverty threshold, according to the official Government statistics.   Increasing poverty represents a setback for President Putin and the Russian Government, whose popularity had been fuelled by the economic growth that resulted from high oil prices in the first decade of his presidency. Though the benefits of growth were very unevenly distributed, and corruption was endemic.   Russia’s energy-reliant economy shrank by 3.7% in 2015 and is set to continue suffering this year. In September, the World Bank warned against a “troubling” increase in poverty in Russia resulting from a sharp drop in the income of the most vulnerable social groups including pensioners.   Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev conceded in January that increasing poverty was “one of the most painful” consequences of the economic crisis. Real wages in the country shrank 6.9% last month in comparison to the same period last year.   October 2015   Doctors and patients battle to resuscitate Russia’s dying healthcare system, by Alexander Nurik. (Equal Times)   Russian authorities have said they will reverse a number of controversial cost-cutting measures following protests, work stoppages and even hunger strike action by beleaguered health care staff.   Numerous proposed hospital closures have been rescinded and authorities are promising to increase the amount paid out to some of the estimated 14,000 medical staff that will lose their jobs between 2015-2017 in Moscow alone as a result of “optimisation” measures.   But the government vows to continue what it describes as an attempt to modernise Russia’s Soviet-era health care system, while cutting costs and making it more accessible to ordinary people.   Healthcare in Russia is free under a compulsory medical insurance scheme but over the past five years, Russia’s healthcare system has been gutted by massive layoffs.   In Moscow alone, some 9,500 medical staff were made redundant in 2014. Nationwide, that figure is though to be around 90,000.   In terms of actual hospitals and clinics, according to the Moscow Times, between 2005 and 2013, “the number of health facilities in rural areas fell by 75 per cent from 8,249 to 2,085. That number includes a 95 per cent drop in the number of district hospitals, from 2.631 to only 124, and a 65 per cent decline in the number of local health clinics, from 7,404 to 2,561”.   Most worrying, these massive job cuts are thought to have had a devastating impact on mortality rates. According to the Auditing Chamber of Russia, 18,000 hospital deaths were linked to the cutbacks.   “The reform has only one aim – to destroy free health care,” says Simon Halperin, a neurologist who was actively involved in anti-reform protests in Moscow. “It is impossible to render a hospital inefficient based on how much money a bed brings to it. No professional doctor would think of such a criterion when taking decision to close the medical institution."   In the face of growing criticism, the Russian government has tried to defend its measures, noting that growing and ageing populations everywhere are resulting in ballooning health care costs worldwide.   But health care cutbacks across the country, and a suggestion from the Minister of Health Veronika Skvortsova to replace local staff with “Skype doctors” in regions where even mobile phones are scarce, have been backfiring.   In 2014, a broad public campaign against the collapse of the Russian health care system was launched by the Deystvie union, the Russian Confederation of Labour (KTR), the Pirogov doctors movement, the ‘Together for Decent Medicine’ protest group and other civil society organisations.   Thousands of doctors took to the streets of Moscow and 46 other cities across the country to protest over the closure of a number of hospitals, maternity centres and specialist departments.   For Boris Kravchenko, president of the KTR, these protests were the last-resort action of workers pushed to the brink, and will only stop when the authorities are ready to consult them on the tumultuous changes taking place.   "We demand consideration of all our requests, transparent public discussion of the strategy and content of the reform," Kravchenko said at the time. "Prior to the start of full-fledged discussions, we demand a freeze to the process of massive layoffs, a recall of the dismissal notices received by doctors, and the prevention of similar practices in other regions of Russia".   http://www.equaltimes.org/doctors-and-patients-battle-to#.ViMHCG6pUd8   Looking after yourself in Siberia, by Georgy Borodyansky.(Open Democracy)   The ‘rationalisation’ of medical and social services in rural Russia has compelled people to acquire new skills in order to survive, but life for the weakest is very hard – and very expensive.   Circumstance has forced the inhabitants of Kurganka, a village in Russia’s Omsk Region, to become their own medical service. They have worked out how to give one another injections, avoiding the need for a doctor’s’ prescription. For a prescription you have to go to Muromtsevo, the district centre, 50km away – an expensive exercise and risky as well; it never rains here but it pours, literally, and even if you get though the deluge there’s no guarantee a doctor will see you. The queue starts forming at 8am, and if you’re a bit late, tough! And the bus from the outlying villages only arrives after 9am.   ‘There have been so many times when I’ve arrived too late to get an appointment’, says pensioner Lyudmila Afinogenova, ‘and then you lose the whole day: the bus doesn’t go back until the evening. I gave up going there ages ago. I went just once last year with my granddaughters; the older one was starting school and the school health worker said all the children needed to have various jabs first. So off we went, taking her little two-month-old sister along as well. A friend agreed to drive us there and back, for 1,600 roubles [the average monthly pension is 10,000 roubles]. But when we got to the hospital they said we weren’t on their lists; according to their information, we’d moved out of the area. So we had to go home without the jabs.’   This February, medics from the Central District Hospital deigned to come to Kurganka to do the immunisations. The baby was then 15 months old, and it was the first time anyone from the medical profession had shown any interest in her.   Lyudmila herself has diabetes, for which she needs regular insulin injections. ‘If your blood pressure goes up to 220, you need insulin or you’ll die’, she says. ‘Mind you, if you do die that’s not so bad, but you might have a stroke instead and that’s such a pain for your family.’   Life without medics   Sometimes Lyudmila does her own injections, sometimes, family members do it for her. Many people in Kurganka and the other settlements in the area have learned this skill; after the First Aid station that served four villages closed down, medical services have turned into a cross between volunteering and small business. There’s no other way to earn any money here: back in the 80s the prize-winning local collective farm was never out of the newspapers, but by the mid-2000s agricultural activity was reduced to a cooperative with 200 head of cattle that is now in receivership. And even while it was running, employees were mostly paid in hay and firewood – cash only appeared on special occasions.   The Kurganka First Aid Station effectively closed down at the start of the 2000s, but it was still officially listed as a medical facility until 2009, when the Novaya Gazeta daily published an article exposing this anomaly. The mythical facility was resurrected soon afterwards, but not for long: the nurse practitioner appointed to run it went back home after a year and a half, without waiting for the 500,000 roubles he had been promised under the ‘Governor’s Medical Programme.’   ‘It was such a pity’, says pensioner Lyubov Znayeva. ‘Our Aleksandr was such a good nurse. He was kind and sensitive; you could turn to him any time – evenings, Sundays, he would always be ready to help.’   Lyubov is 77 and is registered disabled: she had a stroke 19 years ago and now she says she relies on injections to keep her heart and brain going. ‘We give them to each other – not for free, of course, but for a lot less than you’d pay if you went into Muromstsevo. I have an arrangement with a neighbour who used to work as a nursing assistant: she gives me 20 injections for 200 roubles.’   The residents of Kurganka can’t survive entirely on their own efforts, of course; they still need qualified medical help from time to time, not to mention emergency treatment. They tell me about how, three years ago, Maria Kuklina, a young woman of 36, had a heart attack. They phoned for an ambulance but were told there was none available: they would have to get her to the hospital in Muromtsevo themselves.   It took them two hours to find a car in the village, and they had gone only six kilometres when Maria’s heart stopped.   The rationalisation of rural life   In 2001 the Znamya Truda (Banner of Labour) newspaper wrote that the Muromtsevo district (with 24,000 inhabitants) contained four hospitals, six polyclinics and more than 40 village First Aid stations.   That was in the turbulent, poverty-stricken 90s. In the following period, when Russia was getting up off its knees, big changes took place in local healthcare; and, as I have now learned from Dmitry Shchekotov, a member of the district council who has a visual impairment himself, there are now only three hospitals, one polyclinic and ten village First Aid stations.   The district is no better, and no worse, off than the rest of the Omsk Region. In the neighbouring Sargatskoye district, for example, many villages have not only no First Aid station or school, but no water fit for washing and other household needs, let alone for drinking. The locals use water from a lake, at some risk to their health. Pyotr Plesovskikh, a farmer and social activist, told me that many villagers had had enough and that ‘it could all get out of control.’   Last October, 40 people from Novotroitskoye, where he lives, and the neighbouring village of Despozinovka blocked the local highway in protest, demanding repairs to the road along which their children have to travel to school. Some of the potholes, says Plesovskikh, are half a metre deep, and it takes the bus over two hours, and longer in bad weather, to cover 40km. So the children spend five to six hours a day shaking about in the bus, while their parents wait for them at home with their hearts in their mouths.   The protest could be described as successful: the regional highways department found one million roubles for repairs to the road, a small sum considering it had had no repairs for 20 years, but something at least – the most dangerous potholes were filled in with clay.   This is, however, the farmer points out, a temporary measure: ‘Come spring, we’ll be up to our ears in mud.’ However, he and three other organisers of the blockade were fined 30,000 roubles and given 50 hours of community service, but considered it was worth it.   Last year the Omsk Region website announced that in-patient facilities were to be closed at two rural hospitals in the Cherlaksky district. The nearest hospital beds would now be in the district centre, 57km away from one of the villages served.   Medical facilities are also being ‘rationalised’ in the area around Omsk, with in-patient services closed at a hospital serving seven residential areas, and also in Omsk itself; in February, the city’s Hospital No.2 closed its in-patient department, losing 200 beds.   None of this is the fault of the regional authorities: neighbouring regions, and those further afield, are facing the same cuts. In the Sverdlovsk Region, for example, the number of village First Aid stations has fallen from 248 to 177 in the space of four years, and in the Orenburg Region, 54 have closed down over two years.   All health, education, social services, and benefits in the Omsk region have been ‘rationalised’ since the beginning of the year. Free school meals, for example, are now available only to children in low-income families, those earning under 1.5 times the living wage; in some other regions it is only families with an income lower than the living wage whose children are entitled to a free school meal.   Meanwhile the ‘Social Assistance Standards’ for the elderly and disabled, also introduced on 1 January, have effectively reduced this assistance to nil. Previously, home care workers visited four clients a day; now their workload has doubled and they need to get round eight people in the same eight-hour shift. ‘There’s usually a 15-20 minute walk between clients’ houses in the villages’, says Dmitry Shchekotov, ‘and if you take that out of the hour, there’s not much time left for actual care. And the fees the old people now have to pay for the service are often beyond their means.’   The rise in social service charges over the last decade (until 2006 all these services were free) is a good indicator of the humanitarian concerns of the state. Even ignoring inflation, they have increased by several times and are now exorbitant; and now disabled people and war veterans have even lost their 50% discount on service charges.   * Georgy Borodyansky is an Omsk-based correspondent for Novaya Gazeta. Visit the related web page
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