2023-05-22 12:44:49
Asia Bibi in 2020, during a stay in France. MARTIN BUREAU
NARRATIVE – Imprisoned and then sentenced to death for blasphemy, the Pakistani woman found asylum in Canada. Since the international emotion subsided, she survives far from her family in a miserable existence.
We missed it several times. A bereavement in her family had further delayed the interview, but she ended up appearing, in a WhatsApp window that overlapped that of her friend and lawyer, Aman Ullah – a Pakistani in exile, like her. His features are drawn and his eyes, worried; Asia Bibi’s ever-smiling face bears the marks of undetectable fatigue. His air is not weary but concerned, or perhaps a little sad. She was a name, that of a symbol and a cause. Behind the screen she is nothing more than a woman, this woman who greets us by gathering together for the occasion a few words painfully extracted from English.
The whole world knows his story. This altercation with a Muslim woman, near a well, in 2009, and the charge of blasphemy afterwards; then the arrest, the prison, the trial, finally the sentence, abominable and unjust. And fear, above all, which interfered in her life like a vice that never loosened again, until May 8, 2019 when she…
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#Asia #Bibi #dungeons #exile