| Dishonourable death
More than one thousand women in Pakistan are slain each year over matters of family 'honour'. The stories are horrifying. Mark Sylvester investigates their plight Ghazala lived in the Joharabad region of Pakistan's Punjab, a mountainous area of small farms run by tenant farmers. She was just 16, and the chances are she'd never been kissed. But her family noticed the looks she gave her young neighbour - and that was enough. On 6th January 1999, Ghazala's brother burst into her room and dragged her, screaming, into the dusty street. In front of onlookers he poured kerosene over her and set her alight. The passers-by did nothing to stop the barbaric act; most of them had seen this sort of thing before. Ghazala didn't die easily, but in slow and unimaginable agony as the flames consumed her. When she finally gave up the fight, her charred and naked body lay in the street for more than two hours before anybody bothered to move it. According to her brother, Ghazala had been having 'illicit relations' with her neighbour and brought dishonour on the whole family. Only her death could restore that honour. What Ghazala's family did is known in Pakistan as Karo-kari, or 'honour killing'. According to the most conservative estimates of the Human Rights Commission for Pakistan, more than 1,000 women die this way every year. Most human rights campaigners believe the number is much higher. Women as possessions Karo-kari has no basis in religion - although it has been encouraged by the rise of fundamentalist Islam - and under Pakistani law is murder. However, it is deeply rooted in Pakistani society and culture, with origins in the old tribal customs of the Baloch and Pashtun ethnic groups. The basis of Karo-kari is the belief that women are little more than household possessions to be bought or sold, at their males' whim. As the English language newspaper Dawn reported in January this year: 'A woman in Upper Sindh has no individual identity. She is just a chattel. She can be killed on mere suspicion.' Women are seen as the repository of family honour - although not regarded as honourable in themselves - and any perceived slight to that honour, whether true or not, must be punished in the most brutal way. Hina Jilani set up the first all-female law firm in Pakistan, along with her partner Asma Jahangir. She says: 'Women are killed on the flimsiest of suspicions. There is the often-cited example of the man who dreamt that his wife was having an adulterous affair, and so when he woke up he killed her. Women are killed for having, or being suspected of having, 'illicit sex', refusing an arranged marriage, or trying to get a divorce - often from an abusive man.' Terrifying Jilani speaks from first hand experience. On 6th April 1999, she was sitting in her office in Lahore consulting with her client, Samia Sarwar, when the door burst open. Samia, 29, was seeking to divorce her violent husband of 10 years. Gunmen charged in and shot Samia dead, her blood splashing across the documents meant to help set her free. Despite overwhelming evidence that Samia's family were responsible for the killing, no one was ever arrested. Karo-kari is at the most extreme end of a spectrum of habitual violence carried out against women in Pakistan. A survey by the Human Rights Commission in 1998 showed that 82 per cent of women in the rural Punjab feared regular violence from men, often their husbands, for the slightest of displeasures. Women are beaten, burned, starved and humiliated. Shahnaz Bokhari, chair of the Pakistan Progressive Women's Association, has recorded 4,000 cases of women being badly burned in the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi between 1994 and 1999. She believes it is only the tip of the iceberg. Bokhari says: 'I'm sure there are many cases that go untreated, and unheard of. When these women end up in hospital the family normally says that the stove exploded.' In February 1999, delegates from the human rights group Amnesty International saw a 17-year-old girl in a hospital in Hyderabad. She had suffered 70 per cent burns and was dying. At her bedside her mother wept quietly as she explained how the girl's scarf had caught fire on the stove. A doctor told the Amnesty delegates that the girl was six months pregnant and the 'accident' had happened as soon as the pregnancy began to show. Because women are seen as possessions, they can become victims simply as a means of revenge against their menfolk. In 1998 the commission recorded 54 cases of women being stripped and dragged through the streets of the Punjab in 'revenge' attacks. There are incidents of landlords stripping the wives of tenants who refuse higher rents. The courts Murder might be murder in both Pakistani law and Islam, but the police and courts in Pakistan nearly always accept 'extenuating circumstances'. Barely 10 per cent of such killings lead to arrests and far fewer to charges and convictions. The attitude of a large section of the law community in Pakistan is demonstrated by an incident when Asma Jahangir was in court on a divorce case. Suddenly the judge rounded on her and shouted: 'You have no right to be in this court, it is you who should be in prison.' The situation was made worse by decrees passed in 1979, which made adultery and sex outside marriage a religious offence. Reform Attempts at reform are being made, but most simply scratch the surface. In January this year, under new laws passed by the secular government of General Pervez Musharaf, women stood for election to local village councils for the first time in Pakistan's 50-year history. But even then, women could only stand with the permission of their nearest male relative. Article 12 of the Pakistani constitution guarantees equality on grounds of sex, but to really affect change in the country the government would have to totally transform Pakistani society, root and branch. So far it has been unable, or reluctant to do that. Although the Qur'an guarantees equality between men and women, and actually states that no woman should be forced against her will to marry - although it does call on parents to be the prime movers in choosing a husband - its teaching has been perverted by fundamentalism. Some Islamic scholars believe the rapid spread of the Islamic religion meant it was sometimes interpreted wrongly, and nailed onto existing pre-Islamic customs, many of which were misogynistic. The government can pass what legislation it likes but, in practice, many of the old laws continue to hold sway. Most attempts to change the position of women have provoked a male backlash. Amnesty has produced a three-point plan for change, which it is attempting to get the Pakistani government to adopt. It calls for the full protection of the law for women and provision of proper refuges where they can receive care and counselling in a safe environment. It also asks for a campaign of education in schools and through the media to change society's perception of women. Without these the plight of women in Pakistan remains appalling. As Hina Jilani says: 'At the moment the very right to life of women in Pakistan is conditional on their obeying a whole raft of social norms, customs, and traditions.' |