In Yakima Washington, an 18-month-old boy died when a dresser apparently fell on top of him, according to police. I cannot imagine the feelings the parents have. It is beyond imaginable, the pain they feel and endure. It is an unimaginable pain for the rest of us, and one that never abates, but is embraced. A parent has a child and would give their life for their child, and to have a dresser or dog, or pool, or anything take the life of that child ... we weep for the child and for the family. Yet, there are places in the world where the people who give birth to you, raise you, teach you, protect you ... will kill you if they feel slighted.
There is no protection and the people we trust most - our mother and father, end up being the killers. What do we say about any civilization or culture that tolerates, perpetuates, permits ... this to continue!
Washington Post
December 17 at 7:00 AM
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — It
was just a few seconds, a video clip of several young women laughing and
clapping to music, dressed for a party or a wedding in orange headscarves and
robes with floral patterns. Then a few more seconds of a young man dancing
alone, apparently in the same room.
The cellphone video was made six
years ago, in a village deep in Kohistan, a rugged area of northwest Pakistan.
It was the last time the young women, known only as Bazeegha, Sareen Jan, Begum
Jan, Amina and Shaheen, have ever been definitively seen alive.
What happened to them remains a
mystery. Their fates have been shrouded by cultural taboos, official inertia,
implacable resistance from elders and religious leaders suspected of ordering
their deaths, and elaborate subterfuges by the families who reportedly carried
out those orders.
Even in Pakistan, where hundreds
of “honor killings” are reported every year, this
case was extreme. According to court filings and interviews with people who
investigated it, the families confined the girls for weeks, threw boiling water
and hot coals on them, then killed them and buried them somewhere in the
Kohistan hills.
Later, when investigators appeared,
relatives and community leaders insisted that the girls were still alive and
produced a second set of similar-looking girls to prove it. They even
disfigured one girl’s thumbprints so she couldn’t be checked against the
identity of the victim she was supposed to impersonate.
The story illustrates many of the
reasons Pakistani officials have failed to curb the problem of honor killings.
These include the cruel sway of traditional tribal councils, known
as jirgas, over uneducated villagers; the lengths to which such leaders
may go to defy state authority; and the casual worthlessness they assign to the
rights, lives and even identities of young women.
Today, the truth is finally
beginning to emerge, mostly through the efforts of a few individuals including
Afzal Kohistani, a young man whose brothers were killed as a result of the
incident. He spent years seeking help from local and provincial officials, then
petitioned the Supreme Court. In 2012, his case was dismissed, but last month
the high court reopened it and ordered a new investigation that has produced a
chilling report.
“This has destroyed my family. The
girls are dead, my brothers have been killed and nothing has been done to bring
justice or protect us,” said Kohistani, 26, who has received death threats. “I
know I will probably be killed, too, but it doesn’t matter,” he said in an
interview last week. “What happened is wrong, and it has to change.”
Renewed judicial interest in these
long-ago events coincided with another encouraging development: the passage of a law in
Parliament that strengthened judicial powers in honor-killing cases. Often,
even when such crimes manage to reach the courts, there is no punishment
because the law allows victims’ families to “forgive” the perpetrators — who
are often their own relatives.
The new law, passed in October,
gives judges more ammunition to impose life sentences for honor killings in
extreme circumstances, allowing them to overrule personal deals by making the
murder a crime against the state. But supporters fear that cultural and
political resistance will continue to prevent justice being done.
“We don’t know yet whether the law
will make much difference. Punishment is still not mandatory, and forgiveness
can still negate justice,” said Benazir Jatoi, a lawyer who works on women’s
rights. “Until there is more political will, I don’t think the lives of ordinary women threatened
with honor violence will change.”
The Kohistan case unfolded in a
conservative rural region where social mingling between genders is taboo. The
girls’ participation in a coed singing party was risky enough, but someone
posted the video on the Internet, where it spread rapidly, bringing shame on
their community before the vast virtual world.
The mingling of young men and women
at a village singing party, along with the spread of this video, was considered
a dishonor to their community in a conservative rural region of Pakistan. (TWP)
The head of the local jirga, a
Muslim cleric, allegedly issued a religious decree ordering the five girls to
be killed for dishonoring their tribe, along with the boy seen dancing and
every member of his family. There was no resistance from the community. After
the girls were disposed of, several brothers of the boy were also caught and killed.
The rest of the family, including Kohistani, fled the area.
There things stood for more than a
year. No crimes were reported, and no one came to investigate. Kohistani, a
college graduate from one of the area’s wealthier families, said he repeatedly
approached local and provincial officials, reporting the killings and seeking
protection, but was chided for opposing the jirga’s verdict.
“No one in my district or my
province has ever spoken against honor killing. They tell me I have defamed my
culture, my religion, my tribe,” Kohistani said this month. “Everybody knows
what happened, but no one is ready to come forward. This is an illegal,
unconstitutional and un-Islamic tradition, but people don’t even consider it a
crime.”
With assistance from a lawyer in
Islamabad, Kohistani appealed directly to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice
Iftikhar Chaudhry, a liberal activist, personally took up the case in 2012
and ordered two fact-finding missions sent to the remote area by
helicopter.
When the visitors demanded to see
the girls, their families at first refused but eventually presented three girls
and said they were the ones in the video. The three delegates had no chance to
speak to the girls in private, but they compared their faces with images from
the video. Two were convinced of the likenesses; the third, Farzana Bari, said
she had doubts.
“I was upset and confused. We had no
translators who knew their dialect, and everyone there insisted these were the
same girls,” recounted Bari, an academic in Islamabad. “When we got back the
second time, I filed a dissenting report, but the judge closed the case. I
still feel terrible.”
After that, life in the village
apparently returned to normal for several years. One journalist sent photos of
both groups of girls to analysts in England, who found only a 14 percent
chance they were the same individuals. That evidence was taken to a provincial
court, but it declined to take action. Kohistani, in the interview, named each
of the original girls and their replacements, who he said were similar-looking
sisters, cousins and sisters-in-law.
Finally, last month, Kohistani’s
crusade got an unexpected break when the Supreme Court, under a new chief
justice, agreed to accept his petition. Once more, a fact-finding mission was
sent to the village. This time, it included a district judge and two police
officers, armed with government ID records with the heights and thumbprints of
the missing girls.
What they encountered was
hair-raising.
In his report afterward, Kohistan
Judge Shoaib Khan said the village elders were “unanimous” in insisting that
the girls were alive. But two of the girls they produced were much younger than
the victims, according to their official birth dates. A third could not be
identified because both thumbs had been burned; her parents insisted that it
was from a cooking accident. He concluded that at least two girls did not match
the ones in the video and that the others were probably also impostors.
“All this leads to the suspicious
conclusion that something is wrong at bottom,” Khan wrote. The case, he
advised, “needs exhaustive inquiry.”
On a recent day, Kohistani, wearing
a conservative suit and carrying a copy of the judge’s report, walked up to the
Supreme Court. He smiled slightly as he shook hands with his attorney, and they
went inside to wait for the next hearing.
Posts
