Unlike the many private instances of abuse of women, the publication of this lynching by the perpetrators and bystanders shocked the general public and led President Ashraf Ghani to order an investigation. Two days afterward, the Ministry of Religious Affairs declared Farkhunda to have been innocent of the charge of burning the Koran but also declared that had she done so then the attack would have been justified.
The investigation led to the arrest and trial of 49 people - 19 of them police officers - and, at first, it appeared as if the rights of women would be respected, at least by the legal process following the murder. Things turned out differently ... The arrests were almost a random process with several men well-known and recognisable on the videos allowed to escape.
The trial itself was a shadow play of what we in the West would consider fair. All 49 were tried at once, most without any representation by a lawyer - a common practice, it appears - and the trial lasted three days. The three presiding judges then handed out four death sentences, while the police were given slaps on the wrist.
On appeal to a higher court, the death sentences were overturned on grounds that the crime had been one of desecration of a dead body as no one in the police investigation had determined who actually killed her. Public sentiment shifted as people felt that 49 men should not be punished for killing one women.
In fear of reprisal, Farkhunda's family fled Afghanistan. Their hope for justice lies with the Supreme Court where their lawyer had asked for a new trial. The Supreme Court has not yet decided.
This case is proof, if any more is needed, that the Afghanistan folly needs to end. The notion that the US could export democracy with its operational rule of law and protection of minorities and women has proven to be wishful thinking. The US and Europe spent more than US$1 billion in over a decade sending teams of lawyers to instill a rule of law and to improve the legal status of women, but Afghanistan remains a country where ties of kinship and clan trump justice and the money brought by the West has only made an enhanced corruption into a way of life.
The rule-of-law programmes were often designed in ignorance of Afghan legal norms. And Western efforts to lift women's legal status provoked fierce resentment from powerful religious figures and many ordinary Afghans.
The New York Times interviewed Leena Alam, an Afghan television presenter. Her statement says it all: "If she (Farkhunda) gets justice, all women in Afghanistan who were harmed or killed or abused get justice. If she doesn't, then all these years of the international community being here, all the support they gave, all the money, this whole war, means nothing - it all went to waste." That verdict, long overdue, is already in.
-Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
