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The cruellest death

7th June 2007 by Helena 11 Comments  

Zakia Zaki (centre)A story in today’s Daily Mail made we want to throw up. Zakia Zaki, a 35-year-old Afghan journalist, was shot dead as she slept with her 20-month-old baby at her home north of Kabul. In the same room was her three-year-old toddler. Her four other children were asleep elsewhere in the house.

Zakia has long been unpopular with the Taliban, she was one of the few journalists who spoke out against them when they were in power. She also ran the US funded radio station Radio Peace. But what made her a target more than anything else was the fact that she was a working woman.

What kind of man goes into someone’s home along with two others and shoots a woman seven times in the head and chest as she sleeps with her baby in front of a three-year-old? I can’t imagine.

What kind of man stones his sixteen-year-old daughter or niece or neighbour to death as happened only a few weeks ago in Iraq? Whatever you think of the Daily Mail, it was the only UK paper to carry that story on its website for several days.

The fact is we’re more worried about a chief executive pinching someone’s bottom than the truly serious feminist battles that still need to be won. I can guarantee that some secretary suing would get more headlines than Zakia’s tragic and cruel death. I was amazed to even see it in the Mail to be honest.

The fact that women are being killed for being women that dare to do something, be it write, or go to school, or voice an opinion or work or even fall in love is something worth fighting against. And it’s not as if this only happens in far-flung places. There are plenty or arranged marriages and so-called “honour” killings in England.

Maybe we can’t impose our culture on another, but we can and should impose basic human rights. A woman’s right to sleep alongside her baby should never be taken away in such a brutal way, wherever she lives.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007


Filed Under: Women, blog --> Tagged With: cruellest, death

11 thoughts on The cruellest death

  • Motheratlarge says:
    7th June 2007 at 1:33 pm

    Depressing to read your posting, but thank you for writing about such a difficult subject. Not to belittle the struggles faced by working women in other countries, including the UK, (and I have to say I’d be horrified if anyone pinched my bottom in the work place – not that they’re likely to since it’s so big post-pregnancy) but this story does put things in perspective.

  • aminah says:
    7th June 2007 at 3:13 pm

    “Maybe we can’t impose our culture on another, but we can and should impose basic human rights”- there is no maybe about it. No Nation can tell another nation how to run their domestic affairs. And when it comes to “basic human rights” who would you put up for the job? The UK? Or USA? When bombs were being showered over the heads of children and mums in Iraq and Afghanistan, were the brits and the americans thinking about”basic human rights”?

  • Jonathan Miller says:
    7th June 2007 at 4:25 pm

    Right on, Helena! Ecrasez l’infâme!

  • alchesay says:
    7th June 2007 at 5:20 pm

    thats monstrous, how can those bastards even sleep at night?!

  • Robert Williams says:
    7th June 2007 at 6:28 pm

    The name Atefah Sahaaleh will always stay with me, as how backwards these countries are. “Crimes again Chastity”..yeh right.

  • Motheratlarge says:
    7th June 2007 at 8:55 pm

    Have put a link to your site in my latest posting.

  • lady macleod says:
    8th June 2007 at 12:40 am

    It is indeed a horrible tragedy that follows the murder some months ago of one of the few women in government there working for women’s rights. this is not a political issue, this is a woman’s issue. When there is oppression the women and children are ALWAYS the ones who are first in line. Kudos to you for writing about the subject. We all need to make noise about this kind of abuse. No, it not our country, but it is our world.

  • Greg Taylor says:
    8th June 2007 at 1:44 pm

    There’s a great line in a Wallace Stevens poem – ‘But to impose is not to discover’, and for me it sums up so much of what’s happening in the middle east. Imposing our superior ways of being on people of a 15th century mindset isn’t going to work. In fact, the more we push, the more they’ll resist. Better to let them discover democaracy and liberalism for themselves. And with satellites and the internet, the dissemination of good ideas is now faster and more difficult to stop than ever before.

  • Arthur Burland says:
    9th June 2007 at 2:35 pm

    1. Miss Hilton seems to have some serious mental problems which are not to her credit, but it would seem the gloating public also have problems: rather like 1945 when women were stripped, had their heads shaved and were publically humiliated. Would this be the treatment preferred for her?

    2. I so agree with Aminah – “No nation can tell another nation etc. etc. ”
    We should have left S. Hussein alone, along with his boys; they were only playful after all. What became of the nice daughter’s husbands? Everybody has good points somewhere along the line.

    Why on earth did we make enemies of those nice Serbs when all they wanted was to exterminate a very few Muslims? And they were so supportive during World War 1. It was not the business of the West. Live and let live say I.

    In India the British did their best to put a stop to Suttee and Thugee – age old pastimes. The only sensible thing the British did was to get out in quick time and allow the people to be beastly to each other, indulging in their very own domestic affairs. If they wanted to kill each other it was their business. Compared with Mr Mao and Joe Stalin the numbers killed were few after all.

    Why did the British make their pact with death in foolishly trying to stand up against that quaint little fellow A. Hitler ( an erstwhile war hero) who only wanted to unite Europe after all ? – A man ahead of his time, and great at organising parades. It didn’t do Britain much good: even friends bankrupted the so called British Empire in the end.
    It never pays to get involved in anything.

    And in 1914 why pick on that rather odd handicapped man with the funny helmet? He & Von Turpitz only wanted a bit of sun and a few big ships, and a slice (small, of Africa). What harm in that?

    And then there was Napoleon. He was doing so well in Egypt and working on his codes, still used today. What was Wellington, an Irishman, doing in Belgium waiting for a Prussian general to help him defeat a little man suffering from piles? I ask you is it right?

    We should all stay out of Africa, despite give us your flaming money Geldorf. They don’t want us and should be allowed to sort their ownselves out.
    We should let Sunnys and Shits blow each other up if they want to. It’s a pity that women & children get hurt but it is their business and their quarrel in their land. Everybody should go back home and trust in the essential goodness of man or do I mean mankind? No more Samaritans, good or bad and no more interfering. Ezekial.

  • Chiara Alice says:
    10th June 2007 at 11:36 am

    Thank you very much for this great post. We should never forget how other women live ( or can’t live) in other countries.
    One episode of so-called Honour killing schocked Italy too last Summer: one young girl was killed in a rich town in Northern Italy by his brother and cousin because she was engaged with an italian boy and was planning to go and leave with him. We can’t accept things like these and we can talk about respect of other cultures and religions if there is no respect for human life.

  • Suze says:
    14th August 2007 at 5:26 am

    Why is all this anger always taken out on women? It’s like a predator choosing the weakest prey. I don’t understand a culture that treats women and children as punching bags and target practice. ….it’s sickening

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Helena Frith Powell was born in Sweden to a Swedish mother and Italian father, but grew up mainly in England. She is the author of eleven books, translated into several languages including Chinese and Russian. She wrote the French Mistress column The Sunday Times about life in France for several years. She is a regular contributor to the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Tatler Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar.

Helena has been the editor of four magazines, including M Magazine, a supplement for the Abu Dhabi based National Newspaper and FIVE, a high-end fashion glossy, also published in Abu Dhabi. Helena was also editor in chief of 360 Life, a quarterly glossy magazine published with the Sports 360 Newspaper in Dubai, part of the Chalhoub Group.

Helena contributes regularly to UK-based newspapers and magazines and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge. Helena is working on a thriller called Thin Ice that will be published in 2021 as well as a novel about the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield called Sense of an Echo.

Her latest non-fiction work Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles came out in hardback in 2016 and in paperback in April 2018.

Helena, who was educated at Durham University, lives in the Languedoc region of France with her husband Rupert and their three children.

Bibliography

More France Please, we’re British; Gibson Square 2004

Two Lipsticks and a Lover 2005; Gibson Square (hardback)

All You Need to be Impossibly French; (US version of above) Penguin 2006

Two Lipsticks and a Lover; Arrow Books (paperback) 2007

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (hardback) 2006

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (paperback) 2007

So Chic! (French version of Two Lipsticks) Leduc Editions 2008 (also translated into Chinese, Russian and Thai)

More, More France; Gibson Square 2009

To Hell in High Heels; Arrow Books 2009 (also translated into Polish)

The Viva Mayr Diet; Harper Collins 2009

Love in a Warm Climate; Gibson Square 2011

The Ex-Factor; Gibson Square 2013

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles; Gibson Square 2016

The Arnolfini Marriage; Amazon Kindle December 2016

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles (paperback); Gibson Square spring 2018

The Longest Night; Gibson Square spring 2019

 

 

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