Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow. POLITICS - Last week 13-year old Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was stoned to death in Somalia by insurgents because she was raped. Reports indicate that she was raped by three men while traveling by foot to visit her grandmother in the capital, Mogadishu. When she went to the authorities to report the rape, they accused her of adultery and sentenced her to death.
Aisha was forced into a hole in a stadium of 1,000 onlookers as 50 men buried her up to the neck and threw stones at her head until she died. When some of the people at the stadium tried to save her, militia opened fire on the crowd, killing a boy who was a bystander. The incident highlights the extreme nature of violence against children and women in Somalia, which has been heightened by the increasing lawlessness. Aisha's death not only serves as a reminder of the brutality towards children in the midst of war, but a reminder of the brutality towards women. Stoning Mary, Royal Court, London. Words alone do not make drama: what one craves is a marriage between action and language.
And, although Debbie Tucker Green's third play is boldly directed by Marianne Elliott on a peninsular platform that occupies the Royal Court stalls, it still feels more like an acted poem than a fleshed-out play. Tucker Green interweaves three apparently discrete stories. One involves an Aids-afflicted husband and wife who can only afford one life-saving prescription between them. A second story has middle-aged parents endlessly wrangling over their teenage soldier son.
The third segment deals with a woman's visit to her imprisoned sister awaiting death by stoning. You can see what Tucker Green is trying to do: shock us into new awareness by transposing three putative third world stories into a white culture. I don't deny our capacity for violence, but I would have been more shocked if the play had shown us how death by stoning, for instance, sprang from cultural and religious practices.
Stoning victim 'begged for mercy' A young woman recently stoned to death in Somalia first pleaded for her life, a witness has told the BBC.
"Don't kill me, don't kill me," she said, according to the man who wanted to remain anonymous. A few minutes later, more than 50 men threw stones. Human rights group Amnesty International says the victim was a 13-year-old girl who had been raped. Theatre: Living on a knife edge - Times Online.