It only takes a minute for everything to turn wrong.
This was a special crowd situation — in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, after the announcement that Husni Mubarak was stepping down from his long-held — since the assassination of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat — post as Egypt’s president. There had been months of tension, weeks of world attention, adrenalin was flowing, the crowd was mixed and certainly infiltrated with people with all kinds of motives.
But, what happened to Lara Logan, CBS reporter visibly working in Tahrir Square with her producer and cameraman and crew and bodyguard who was suddenly set-upon set, in a frenzy, in an instant, can — and has — happened in other situations as well.
She was taken as a symbol, and not as a human being. This happens to women all the time, in many places around the world — but it seems to happen differently, if not more, in the area stretching from North Africa through West Asia.
Mukhtaran Mai, the then-illiterate Pakistani woman who was hauled before her village council, because they had actually ordered her to be raped. This outrageous order, a violation of all religious principles and all laws, was given for the most unjust of reasons: to avenge for something here 12-year-old brother was alleged to have done with a woman from a different tribe [later reports indicated that he had in fact been raped himself by men from that other tribe, and there was clear reason to believe he had not done what he was accused of]. The gang rape of Mukhtaran Mai then took place more or less in public, on the spot, and she was forced to walk home “semi-naked”, reports said — when they could more accurately have written “naked”. It was done without any pity, without the slightest pity, to an innocent human being. Last week, on 21 April, five out of the six of her assailants who were tried and convicted were released by Pakistan’s Supreme Court, and the sentence of the sixth man was commuted from the death penalty to life in prison. She has now said that with the release of the five men earlier convicted of raping her (there were apparently at least 13 other men involved who were not prosecuted), she fears for her life…
Continue reading “There was a moment that everything went wrong": Lara Logan