This is not about "who is to blame." It is about all of us. It poses the following questions:
- Is it possible to quantify human rights violations?
-Can the violation of the rights of a person be restricted to a specific geographic and political context?
-How many victims does it take to bring a case against a criminal?
-How many human lives must be ruined for the UN to initiate a lawsuit against a criminal? Is one human life not enough for a criminal to be punished?
In the first 6 months of 2021, 1,659 civilians died in Afghanistan, 3,524 people were injured during this period. 2.5 million refugees, 444 dead humanitarian workers, 75 dead journalists. The scale of the disaster is truly enormous.
When we say that this doesn’t concern us, we are ourselves ensuring that it will happen to us. The virus of terror and dictatorship is contagious, and what is happening now in one country may soon infect everyone, even in the most prosperous countries.
When we ask for help for the victims in Belarus or Afghanistan, we ask for help for every citizen of the world.
When an Afghan woman gets stoned for being falsely blamed for burning a Quran book (Farkhunda killing, 2015) or gets publicly whipped for talking to a man (April 2021), or when a Belarusian journalist gets imprisoned for a live broadcast (February 2021), EVERY person in the world is put in the same degree of danger.
It's like with COVID. Unless everyone is immune, no one is immune and runs the risk of dying from the virus.
We have NO MORAL RIGHT to measure the situation by the severity of repression. Violation of rights is an ABSOLUTE EVIL, regardless of the number of those killed or imprisoned.
We often hear it said that the situation in Belarus is much better than in Myanmar or Afghanistan, so there’s nothing to talk about, and no reason for alarm bells.
In saying this we are failing to understand that these are all links in the same chain. NO ONE IS IMMUNE. When things happen in Afghanistan and Myanmar, it's already TOO LATE to sound the alarm. Terror is already the norm there. Respect for human beings for and the most basic human values has long become a deviation.
Even the citizens of Myanmar and Afghanistan find it difficult to know how to fight. It is impossible. There is no option other than to figure out how to escape from a land that is long lost.
When our women leave Akrestina and say "I got off lightly. THEY DID NOT BEAT ME", this is already the beginning of another Afghanistan or Myanmar.
We take for granted that we can be thrown in jail for posting on social media or wearing red and white socks. We arrive EXPECTING to be beaten and then we rejoice when we are not beaten. This is the BEGINNING of Afghanistan and Myanmar in our minds.
Violation of any clause of the Convention on Human Rights is a reason to set alarm bells ringing. It doesn't matter if there are fatalities, or "just" the first-year student summoned to the Dean’s office for a ‘conversation’ with the KGB, without notifying the parents, providing a lawyer, or even introducing themselves.
If the first question that came to mind when you read the last sentence was WHAT THE STUDENT HAD DONE, it means that you have already ACCEPTED THESE VIOLATIONS AS THE NORM. You have mentally accepted these abuses of human rights. It follows that soon the men in gray WILL COME FOR YOU AND YOUR CHILD.
Human rights violations CANNOT BE MEASURED by whether you were killed or merely wounded. Any violation must be stopped, a SINGLE act of violation should be enough to file a case against a CRIMINAL. If not, soon we will all live in one big Myanmar, from which there will be NOWHERE TO RUN.
UPDATE: there is information that the woman had died earlier at the hands of the groom's relatives. There is also information that the girl's relatives are afraid of revenge from the Taliban and did everything possible to prove that the Taliban were not involved in her death.