Human Rights: Freedom of speech, Afghan style

Few cases illustrate more starkly the huge amount of work required in the liberalisation of post-Taliban Afghanistan than that of Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh.

As a journalism student at Balkh University, Mr Kambakhsh committed the heinous crime of downloading and distributing a document critical of the treatment of women under Sharia Law.

Despite intending only to spark debate among his fellow students and, indeed, under-taking the type of exploratory and investigative work journalists and students of journalism would be expected to do, he was reported to police and arrested. He was later tried in a religious court after being refused legal representation. It was only after intense pressure from the international community, including a campaign by The Independent and strong criticism from the UN, British Foreign Secretary David Milliband and his US counter-part Condoleezza Rice, that his sentence been reviewed by the Afghan legal system.

Because the document is believed to have been written by Mr Kambakhsh’s brother, a reporter at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, the verdict is being deemed an act of political intimidation on the part of political factions previously criticised by the organisation for abuses of human rights.

This case, which is so far beyond a “miscarriage of justice” that the term seems obtusely pedestrian, is a damning indictment of the lack of fundamental freedoms and rights afforded to the citizens of a theocratic state, whether its politicians are elected or not. When inequality is enshrined in a holy text that is dogmatically held up as the divine truth, life becomes near-impossible for those fighting for the rights of the oppressed, even when freedom of speech is enshrined in the country’s constitution, as is the case with Afghanistan.

After international efforts to pressurise the Afghan government into backing down appeared to have paid off, religious clerics and Islamic fanaticists took to the street, rallying behind the initial verdict. Indeed, it is increasingly difficult, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, to see ultra-conservative Islam as being compatible with concepts such as freedom of speech in light not only of this case, but of anti-Danish protests following the publication of the now-infamous Mohammed Cartoons and the shocking murder in the Netherlands of film maker Theo Van Gogh.

It is deeply unfortunate, therefore, that the West will be unable to effectively intervene as a positive influence in the region for many, many decades after the botched invasions and reconstructions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The reputation of the United States in particular has been tarnished to such an extent that its flag has become a hated symbol in many Islamic nations, meaning its effectiveness at wielding “soft power” has been all but lost. Only through diplomacy and cultural exchange could the coaxing of Afghanistan into democratisation ever occur, and this is now very much under threat. Mr Kambakhsh’s case is an extreme one, but perhaps indicative of the slipping of Afghanistan back into the hands of the extremists and the warlords