Nigerians warn against mysterious e-mail petition

By Somini Sengupta

 May 13, 2003

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast: Every so often, tales of terrible suffering and injustice in faraway lands come tugging at the conscience of the world's privileged. Do something, these stories implicitly demand.

Sign a petition or double-click on a mouse to save a life. E-mail can mobilize the moral condemnation of millions. So it was with an urgent appeal on behalf of Amina Lawal, an illiterate Nigerian woman sentenced to death by stoning for the crime of having a child out of wedlock.

In recent weeks, an e-mail petition of mysterious origin, carrying the name and logo, in Spanish, of Amnesty International has been zapped around the globe. Recipients were asked to "sign" electronically, then send it along to others. Lawal's execution was imminent, the message warned; the Nigerian Supreme Court had already upheld the death sentence. It soon appeared, however, that the e-mail petition had problems.

Amnesty International said it had nothing to do with it, though it has been campaigning vigorously on Lawal's behalf. And the case has not reached the Nigerian Supreme Court, much less been ruled on.

"The information currently circulated is inaccurate, and the situation in Nigeria, being volatile, will not be helped by such campaigns," said a "Dear Friends" electronic letter circulated last week from the organization Baobab for Women's Human Rights, based in Lagos. "If there is an immediate physical danger to Lawal and others, it is from vigilante and political further (over) reaction to international attempts at pressure."

Lawal, 31, who lives in her parents' home in a village of mud huts in Muslim-dominated northern Nigeria, became an international cause c�l�bre last August, when an Islamic court in Katsina, her home state, found her guilty of adultery. The court said Lawal had confessed to having a child out of wedlock, and sentenced her to death by stoning after her daughter had been weaned.

Many Nigerians found the ruling horrific, including President Olusegun Obasanjo, an evangelical Christian. Whatever the verdict of the state court, Obasanjo said, the sentence defied the Nigerian Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The case is still under appeal in Katsina state court, and is scheduled to be heard on June 3. Lawal's lawyers have said they are prepared to take the case up to the Nigerian Supreme Court.

Over the past two years, the Islamic penal code, or Sharia, has been instituted in roughly a dozen northern states, leading to riots that by some estimates have left 10,000 people dead. The subjects of religion and religious law are sensitive in Nigeria, whose population is half Muslim and 40 percent Christian, with 10 percent subscribing to indigenous beliefs.

That is why Nigerian women's groups were alarmed by the petition in support of Lawal. The claim that she was to be executed June 3 could, these groups feared, prompt the proponents of Sharia to take matters into their own hands, if they believed that Lawal's supporters might succeed in overturning the sentence.