Cape Town - Shocking revelations of the abuse a Cape Town woman is suffering after being abducted by her husband to a remote part of Yemen has prompted a desperate plea for help by her parents, powerless to put a stop to the beatings and threats to their daughter’s life.
It’s a story not unlike that of US citizen Betty Mahmoody who escaped from her husband in Iran, made into the famous film Not Without My Daughter. But
38-year-old Masnoena Al-Taheri says there’s no escape for her, and that she’s just waiting for death.
Her parents, Yusuf and Fatima Adams, of Portlands in Mitchells Plain, say they get sporadic text messages from her begging for help. But they feel equally powerless after trying - and failing - to get any help locally.
For nearly 10 years they’ve dreaded her SMSes, like the one that said: “He said he’s coming 2 kill me. Pls. Help me daddy.”
Masnoena met her Yemeni husband Saleh Al-Taheri while he was working in Cape Town. The couple married after just a few months and now have two children, Dhaifallah, 11, and Rajeh, 8.
But their relationship deteriorated quickly, and now her parents wish they hadn’t given him the benefit of the doubt when he seemed to be changing for the better and allowed their daughter to stay with the parents for two weeks while he allegedly made plans to take her on Hajj to Mecca.
Hajj was never on his agenda though, and Al-Taheri abducted his wife and eldest son to Yemen.
Speaking this week from the home where she says she has been abused for more than nine years, Masnoena told of how even her sons beat her now, also “reporting” her to their father.
The saddest thing, she said, was that “my children aren’t my children any more”.
All Masnoena knows is she’s on a farm somewhere in the mountains in Shabwa Ayn in the north of Yemen, but she cannot direct anyone to find her because she’s rarely allowed to leave or see her surroundings.
The farm has no electricity, they only have oil lamps, and no running water, only salt water from a well that she says leaves sores in her mouth.
“Nine years I tried to come home now. Nine years, nine years,” she told Weekend Argus.
“It’s like somebody puts you in a hole and closes it. You feel empty.”
Women in Yemen cannot speak or walk anywhere without either a husband, son or father with them. In Yemen,
Masnoena said, “the husband is the law”.
Asked why she didn’t just leave, she said it was impossible.
“If I leave this place he will know,” she says, because the “Arab way” is to know where their women are and there are always people watching her.
Her passport has also expired, and she cannot renew it without her husband or father. Her use of a cellphone is also severely restricted.
Meanwhile, she is constantly bruised from repeated beatings – with either a sword or a gun.
“Each man here walks with a sword and a gun. (My husband) hits me with the sword. He hits me with the gun… He won’t stop until he sees blood.”
He had also threatened to kill her at times, and the desperate woman said she was tired and wished “I die now”.
Masnoena’s parents said they first found out she was being abused
six months after she gave birth to her older son, when she told them her husband had pushed her down the stairs while she was pregnant.
In August 2002 Masnoena and her family filed a Protection Order at Mitchells Plain Magistrate’s Court which was amended in October 2002. It ordered Al-Taheri “not to verbally and emotionally abuse the applicant”, and “not to threaten the applicant or children or family members of the applicant”.
The parents wept this week as they told how they had tried to secure help for their daughter for years.
“They keep saying it is a domestic issue,” Fatima Adams said.
In 2010 the Muslim Judicial Council wrote to the Yemen ambassador in Pretoria on behalf of the couple, but they said nothing came of it.
Efforts to secure comment from the MJC this week proved unsuccessful.
Asked to comment, department of International Relations and Co-operation spokesman Clayson Monyela said that he could not because it was “a domestic issue”, and so outside his mandate.
In respect of similar cases of South Africans in distress abroad, Monyela said “every case is different”.
The family feel like they’re back to square one. Masnoena’s father Yusuf Adams told Weekend Argus: “
She asks me, daddy help me. I can’t help her. I just cry.
I mean it’s not 10 weeks or 10 months since we’ve seen her - it’s 10 years.”
His daughter’s final appeal to Weekend Argus was: “I plead, if you can do anything to help. I’m on my knees for anyone to help.”
Weekend Argus