Pakistan: Muslim Honor Killings Confronted?
The following article originally appeared on May 28, 2006 on the website Western Resistance, now defunct. I have archived the text of the article because I originally linked to it from my post Tea with a Stranger:
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We reported on May 21 on the case of Ayesha, an 18 year old girl, accused of adultery by her husband of only one and a half months. She had left the marital home to stay with her brother, but Eisa Khan Khosa, her husband visited her there, accompanied by his own brother. They persuaded Ayesha to return to the marital home, and she agreed. Along the way, they cut off her nose and her lips, and left her in a field.
The incident happened in southern Punjab province in Dera Ghazi Khan, near the approaches to the Baluch highlands. The Pakistan Daily Times carries a picture of Ayesha (shown) and her account of the incident. Unlike the earlier account, it appears that her upper lip and nostril were not cut off but, slit, Chinatown-style. Nonetheless, without extensive plastic surgery, she will be scarred for life.
Ayesha Baloch said at Multan hospital: "First they tortured me and beat me. I started screaming. Akbar then caught my hands and pulled me to the ground. Essa sat on my legs and cut my nose and lips."
"I was bleeding and started screaming after they fled on a motorcycle. People heard me and rescued me and took me to my mother's home."
This act of mutilation at least left her alive. Such mutilations are connected with Muslim honor killings. We reported in November on the case of Shamin Mai, who committed the crime of marrying a man of her own choosing, rather than allowing her family to choose her marriage for her. For this "crime", her brother Bashir and her uncle Bilal, with four other individuals, chopped off her legs.
We mentioned on May 22 that a conference on honour killings had begun in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, entitled "We Can End Honour Killing". Various representatives from NGOs and rights groups were in attendance, and their statistics are dispiriting. Between 1000 and 1500 people, mostly women, are annually slaughtered because of suspected "impropriety" or refusal to engage in the forced marriages which are so common amongst Pakistani families, no matter where they live.
Just from media reports, between January and April this year, 158 women and 56 men had been killed nationally in honor killings. In North-West Frontier Province, a total of 76 women and men had been killed this year.
Further details of this conference can be found in Dawn and the Daily Times. Honour killing only became illegal at the start of last year. Officially, a minimum 10-year jail sentence is imposed on perpetrators of honour killings. In practice, however, there is a problem.
As we reported on April 6, the law includes a clause called "compoundability". This allows the perpetrator of a crime to legally bribe the relatives of a victim, and thus walk away free.
As many cases of honour killing involve the complicity of the victim's relatives in the murder, such a clause is not designed to bring justice. As I. A. Rehman, the director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) said at the conference: "The element of compoundability makes the law a joke."
Another speaker at the conference was Ms Farhana Faruqi Stocker of Oxfam. She said that although 10,000 people regarded as "change-makers" had signed up to the movement to end honour killing, but said that for honour killing to really end, two groups need to be behind the movement. She told Reuters: "The mindset of legislators has to be changed in order for good legislation to come out." The other group is less easy to subject to control, as they live in rural areas where they are treated as more important than officials of the law. They are the law. Stocker said: "In order to bring change, we have to engage with clerics."
Honor killings are known as "kari-karo". This comes from the word 'black". A "sinful woman" is regarded as a "black" woman. The female version of the word for black is "kari". The male equivalent is "karo".
Fida Hussain Mastoi, a deputy inspector-general of police in Sindh stated that the police can do little even to stop the increase in honour killings, let alone prevent the custom.
The blame is often laid at the door of "tribal customs" and people try to avoid the taint of Islam in honour killings. But the Hudood Ordinances, a set of Islamic laws, condone stoning a woman to death for adultery.
That honour killings also happen among people of culturally separate Kurdish, also Turkish and Palestinian ethnic origins, gives the lie to the notion that tribal customs are to blame. Islam is to blame, and Islam alone.
We told the story of Mukhtar Mai, a woman who in June 2002 was ordered by a Muslim panchayat to be gang-raped by a group of volunteers in her Punjabi village of Meerwala Jatoi. Her "crime" had been that her 12-year old younger brother had been seen walking with a girl of a higher caste.
On Thursday, March 2 her six gang-rapists, some of whom had earlier been sentenced to death, were all released from jail on appeal. At the appeal, their relatives had threatened to kill anyone who testified against them.
Mukhtar Mai states that: "Until women are allowed to get educated ... these crimes will continue." It will mean more than education to change attitudes. 70% of Pakistan's populations live in rural communities, and as they move into cities, they bring their village customs with them.
The Islamic councils, called panchayat in Punjab, and jirga in North-West Frontier Province, are the sole source of law in Pakistan's rural communities, and the maulvis or imams are merely individuals chosen by the communities. There is no need for a qualification or training to become an imam.
In many cases, the decisions of these Muslim rural courts are staggering. In November we reported on how a Punjabi panchayat ordered that five girls (three of them pictured) should be ordered to be abducted, raped or killed if they did not submit to forced marriages arranged for them when they were small children. The "marriages" were part of a tradition known as vani in Punjab, swara in Northwest Frontier Province. Vani is a "compensation" marriage. If a man has committed a crime, a Muslim village court can order his female relatives to be given away in marriage.
Vani, which is closely linked to the custom of honour killing, became illegal at the same time as honour killing. The law was changed after a Muslim court in 2004 ordered that a three year old girl should be married off to an old man of 60.
The fact that parents in so many Muslim societies decide that they must choose the future spouse of their offspring is a root cause of the problem. In Pakistan, arranged marriages are the norm, but ultimately, these are often forced marriages. And when a person in authority can decide that his own flesh and blood is a chattel to be bartered and bargained with, this acts to strengthen the authority of the rural Islamic councils.
We have described how children have been virtually "sold". More often than not, girls are traded as commodities, the "get-out-of-jail-free" token for a criminal man to publicly expiate his guilt. Vani and swara marriages are specifically used for compensation for the crime of someone else.
When girls can be treated so cheaply, as bargaining chips, the jirgas and panchayats are above any law. And for Muslims, the rights of women and girls are nothing. When Mohammed the "prophet" bedded a nine-year old child bride, before she could decide her own fate, a dangerous precedent was set. It led to the teachings of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who said: "A man can have sexual pleasure from a child as young as a baby. However, he should not penetrate. If he penetrates and the child is harmed then he should be responsible for her subsistence all her life. This girl, however would not count as one of his four permanent wives. The man will not be eligible to marry the girl's sister."
Islam is the problem, and when communities give all power to Islam, their representatives can order whatever they wish. We reported on April 29 that in Dir, in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, a Muslim jirga, attended by 4,000 people, declared that not only was honor killing permissable, but if anyone disagreed and reported cases of honor killings to the authorities, they would be killed.
Honor killings are part of a larger constellation which in Pakistan includes vani, swara, forced and arranged marriages. And beyond Pakistan, though it is regarded as a sin to commit suicide, Muslim girls are often encouraged to commit suicide when they are seen to have become "tainted". In Ramallah, "Palestinian" territory, on January 2, 2004, Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud gave her daughter Rofayda a razor blade and ordered the teenager to kill herself by slashing her wrists.
Rofayda's crime was the fact that she had been raped by her two elder brothers and had become pregnant. The child of the rape had been born and given up for adoption. When Rofayda did not obey her mother, Mrs Qaoud put a plastic bag over her daughter's head, sliced her wrists with the razor blade, and when her daughter went limp, she finished her off with a blow on her head from a stick.
And such incidents are not unique. The Italian news agency AKI and the UK Independent report that in Turkey, girls have killed or attempted to kill themselves this year in record numbers. These suicides are happening in the eastern parts of the country. In the city of Van this year, 20 young women have committed suicide, more than happened in the whole of 2005. In the Kurdish city of Batman, 10 women and girls under the age of 23 have committed suicide.
Activists state that Turkey has increased the sentencing for honour killings, to be in line with the European Union which it wishes to join. Formerly honour killings got light sentences, because they were thought to involve mitigating circumstances.
But activists are now claiming that, rather than see a man going to jail for a lengthy period for committing an honour killing, girls are being made by relatives to commit their own honour-killings, upon themselves. On 24 May, Yakin Erturk, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women, travelled to Batman to investigate this increased suicide incidence of young women and girls.
The life of a girl is virtually worthless in Islam. She may be desirable for a brief period in her life, often well under the age that would be considered moral, but her position is always going to be inferior to a man. In Islamic law, a woman's testimony in a sharia court is considered as worth half that of a man. A woman cannot divorce her husband, yet he can divorce her merely by saying "talaq" three times. A woman can only have one husband, but in sharia, he can have up to four.
And for young women in Pakistan, some of whom are promised in vani marriage before they are even born, no amount of legislation or education is going to change a thing. Islam always favours the boy children in a family, and girls are to be traded off, forced into marriage to satisfy their parents' desires and not their own.
And for the young bride, Ayesha Baloch, whose face will forever be disfigured, whose reputation will now forever be tarnished, there will be no justice. Her assailants, the husband and his brother who mutilated her, are in custody. But she knows that they will not be there for long. Ayesha said: "They are powerful people with money, and will get out on bail."
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