A Nigerian woman saved from death by stoning for committing adultery, was made an honorary citizen of Rome today and prayed that another woman who faces the same fate under Islamic law might be saved too.
"You don't know me and I don't know you but I am most grateful to you for saving my life. God bless you all," Safiya Hussaini Tungar-Tudu said, speaking in Hausa through an interpreter.
Hussaini was spared from death by stoning imposed under Islamic sharia law after an international uproar earlier this year. She was later acquitted under a legal technicality.
Hussaini, whose village has no electricity, running water or paved roads, was literally a world away in Rome, where she was driven in a luxury car to receive honorary citizenship in a building designed by Michelangelo.
"Now that I am free I will pray to the Almighty God to allow Amina to be free too," she said at a conference in her honour as her year-and-a-half-old daughter Adama cried for attention.
Last month, a Nigerian court rejected an appeal by 31-year-old Amina Lawal Kurami, who gave birth out of wedlock, and confirmed the sharia court's sentence that she be stoned to death.
Kurami was initially sentenced to death in March by a lower court in her state of Katsina, which like a number of others in northern Nigeria has adopted sharia law.
A judge has ordered the stoning not be carried out until Kurami has weaned her eight-month-old baby, which may not be until 2004.
A number of countries have threatened to withdraw from this year's Miss World beauty pageant in Nigeria's capital Abuja in November unless the sentence against Kurami is withdrawn.
At the ceremony at which Hussaini received her citizenship, Nigeria's ambassador to Italy, Etim Jack Okpoyo, appealed for the international community to ease up pressure on the Kurami case.
"Let me appeal to the entire community to give a respite on Amina Kurami. We have a process in Nigeria that we have to go through in the interests of peace. So please don't write any letters, don't make calls - as you have been doing - Amina also will be free one of these days, for the grace of God," he said.
Participants at the conference on Hussaini's case at Rome's Dionysia Centre for Arts and Culture said the developed world had to look beyond the religious aspects of the Nigerian cases.
"The problem is lack of education. If the developed world helps us, by the grace of God this kind of thing won't happen anymore," said Hauwa Kulu Sagir-Kumasi, Hussaini's lawyer.
"This is not a problem of religion," said Okpoyo, the Nigerian ambassador.
"This is a problem of development and education. When Safiya is educated she will know her rights, when she is educated she will know what to do at a given time, when she is educated she will not have an unwanted pregnancy," he said.
"You can see now what happens when events in a tiny village in Afghanistan can cause inconvenience for the whole developed world. So, you can no longer close your eyes and be satisfied with where you are," he added.
REUTERS
