|
[Peshawar] Civil organizations and women’s rights groups are marching in the main streets of all major cities of Pakistan to try to force the government to put an end to honor killings and to take immediate and strenuous action against the perpetrators.
Reports of the live burial of five women, including three girls, to protect family honor in South Western Baluchistan Province of Pakistan, has deeply shocked the nation.
The girls, who were apparently planning to marry men of their choice, were allegedly killed by their relatives to uphold family honor and to punish them for their “illicit” behavior.
Immediately after the gruesome incident was reported in the local media, civil rights groups started protest demonstrations in front of the parliament building in the country’s capital Islamabad.
Pro-establishment senator Sardar Israrullah Zehri, from Baluchistan province, defended the killings as “centuries-old tribal custom,” and asked senators to refrain from “politicizing the issue.”
According to information collected by the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), the five women – Fatima, wife of Umeed Ali Umrani, Jannat Bibi, wife of Qaisar Khan, Fauzia, daughter of Ata Mohammad Umrani, and two other girls, aged 16 and 18 – were buried alive in a remote village.
Media reports say the gory incident occurred on July 13, when it is alleged that Abdul Sattar Umrani, the younger brother of Mir Sadiq Umrani, a provincial minister in the Baluchistan cabinet and a senior leader of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), along with a band of armed men, forced the five women into their vehicle bearing the number plates of the Baluchistan government, and transported them to a desert in the remote area of Nau Abadi, in the vicinity of Baba Kot.
The AHRC states that Sattar Umrani and his six accomplices took the three girls out of the jeep and tortured them before opening fire on them. The girls were seriously wounded but were still alive. Umrani and his accomplices hurled them into a wide ditch and covered them with mud and stones. When the two older women protested over the burial of girls while they were still alive, the enraged perpetrators also killed them.
The matter was hushed up for six weeks by the local authorities due to the strong political influence of the brother of the alleged murderer who supervised the killing.
On August 29 the incident was brought to the notice of the upper chamber of the Pakistani parliament by a female senator, Yasmin Shah.
Defending the brutal action, Senator Zehri remarked, “These are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them."
However, Senator Sanaullah Baloch, a nationalist leader from the province where the act occurred, said that burying girls alive had never been a custom in the Baloch society.
Wazhma Frogh, a women’s rights activist, observed that the live burials of the women in Baluchistan was reminiscent of the pre-Islamic era in Arab countries, when people would bury their daughters alive to save family honor.
“It has never been embedded in our culture and social traditions,” she maintained.
The delay in action against those responsible, who enjoys perks and privileges as feudal lords in the area, has called into question the credibility of erstwhile pro-women policies of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) of slain premier Benazir Bhutto, who always advocated civil and political liberties for women.
Official sources in the country‘s capital Islamabad say that the PPP-led government had been reluctant to take action against the perpetrators as it feared it might lose the votes of a number of legislators sympathetic to Sadiq Umrani, who is also deputy parliamentary leader of the party in Baluchistan Assembly, in the just-held September 6 presidential elections.
Rahman Malik, adviser to the Pakistan Interior Ministry, announced last Monday in the Senate that three suspects in the honor killings of three young girls in Nasirabad district of Baluchistan had been arrested.
Malik added that, “a complete report will be presented before the House within three days.”
However, in its editorial on September 3, the Pakistan Daily News International wrote: “But, sadly, even as the Senate passed a unanimous resolution condemning the incident and demanding punishment for its perpetrators, an attempt at a cover-up is on. The government presented an extremely dubious report before the Senate, stating three women and not five had been killed, that the incident involved a property dispute and was not a case of 'honor' killing and that the women had been killed before being buried.”
The paper claimed Tariq Khosa, who was assigned to probe the gory incident, had been quietly prevented from visiting the scene of the crime and made to sit in Islamabad, with a limited mandate to only monitor investigations.
Meanwhile, Baluchistan minister Sadiq Umrani, while addressing a press conference, said that only two women, and not five, had been killed.
“My family has nothing to do with the incident and my rivals have launched a smear against me,” he added.
Last Monday the Baluchistan High Court ordered the police and the Human Rights Commission to submit their reports relating to the murders by September 22.
In 2005 the government of then president Pervez Musharraf passed a law banning honor killing, with a penalty of death for those who violate it. But in many cases the law has been poorly enforced and perpetrators of violence against women have been freed due to political influence and their connections with the local administration.
In Pakistan’s rural areas, where 70 percent of the country’s population lives, tribal councils known as jirgas or penchayats decide on issues of honor. While these tribal councils have no legal standing in the country’s constitution, a tribal council can seal the fate of a woman if she rebels against the tribal traditions by having her stoned in public or allowing her to be killed by her own relatives. She has no representation in the council and has no right to protest.
“Despite the fact that the high courts and the Supreme Court have declared such jirgas illegal and their judgments invalid, in both cases no police or judicial action has been taken against the jirga members or the perpetrators,” the Women’s Action Forum said in a press statement.
The action forum also condemned a recent jirga judgment because of which three minor girls – Tasleema (five), Aneela (three) and Shaneela (two) – from Sindh were still in hiding with their family following the local jirga’s decision to hand them over as compensation in an alleged “honor” case.
Similarly, another jirga held in June on the Balochistan-Sindh border issued a verdict that 15 minor girls (one only four days old) were allowed to be given away as compensation to end a long-standing dispute between two rival tribes.
According to the Aurat Foundation, a women’s rights NGO working in Pakistan, at least 90 women were murdered in honor killings in the first three months of 2008. Moreover, it claims there are thousands of such cases that have not been referred to the police or exposed by the media due to medieval tribal traditions and the conservative nature of the society.
Copyright © 2008 The Media Line
|