On August 2nd the Senate refused to discuss a proposed resolution condemning the tribal practise of killing women for “honour” in Pakistan. Worse, a majority of the members of various parties in the Senate blithely abandoned the field to a retrograde minority unwilling to decry a despicable custom that is against all secular norms and religious laws. This has confirmed the international community’s fears that Pakistan is an uncivilised country.
In April 1999, a young woman from Peshawar (Samia) was killed in Lahore in a lawyer’s office by a gunman hired by her father because she sought a divorce from her abusive husband. The event so shocked the nation that at least 20 senators from the opposition and treasury benches issued a signed statement against the practise of killing women “to save the honour of a family”. A watered-down resolution came up before the Senate in August. But by now many of the Senators had revised their allegiance to the law and ideology of Pakistan. The worthy Speaker of the Senate, Mr Wasim Sajjad, was also no longer keen to support the resolution. So he agreed to take a vote on whether or not it should be discussed at all. This was a signal to most Senators to slink off to the cafe so that the few who were most adamant about the righteousness of “honour-killings” could strike it down by a “majority” of 20 to 2. In all this, the most shocking behaviour was betrayed by the ‘secular’ ANP Senators and their leader Mr Ajmal Khattak, who were all in favour of defending the murderous actions of Samia’s influential killers.
This is a disgraceful day in the history of Pakistan. The message to the women of Pakistan is that they should not trust the law to save them against the primitive tribal custom of killing for honour. This concretises the investigations of a recent BBC documentary on karokari in Sindh which reveals that “women-killers” tended to be let off in Pakistan because state institutions are inclined to put the dubious custom of “honour” above the law of the land. It is ironic, of course, that when the BBC documentary was shown, the reaction of many in Pakistan was that of incredulity and suspicion. Indeed, some people actually wrote to say that the BBC had been deliberately negative because of Western prejudice (how often do we hear such holier-than-thou comments these days!)
The Senate has now proved that the law in Pakistan is worth no more than the ‘flatulence of a camel’, as they say in Urdu. In fact, Islamic family law is explicit in its edict that a wife may seek divorce from her husband as an inalienable right and Islamic jurists opine that a wife seeking divorce may not even give any reason for so doing. Of course, under Pakistan’s Penal Code no one may murder to seek revenge or satisfy honour.
But conditions in Pakistan openly and violently militate against the law. Every day, newspapers report the murder of women by male family members on suspicion of ‘dishonour’. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that the lower judiciary has begun to interpret the “honour-killing of women” as a mitigating factor in murder cases. This is jahiliya, pure and simple, the pre-Islamic dark-age which the Holy Prophet (PBUH)sought to end.
The Senate, instead of choosing to stand by the Prophet (PBUH) in his mission to end male savagery against women, has chosen the jahiliya as its model. In so doing, it has confirmed the general Western misperception that “Islamic” law targets women unfairly. Therefore those who are angered by this Western opinion should take another look at our honourable Senators and decide whether they should be covered with glory or tarred and feathered.
On 6 August 1999, the World Bank Resident Mission in Islamabad presented finance minister Ishaq Dar with a memorandum on the violation of human rights in Pakistan on behalf of the ambassadors of the Pakistan Development Forum which keeps Pakistan afloat. Their message is clear. The Human Rights Commission in Geneva will take a dim view of the ruling party’s handling of the Samia case, of the relentless attacks on civil society by representatives of state institutions, of the persecution of NGOs working for the welfare of the minorities and women, and of the abduction, imprisonment and harassment of journalists in Pakistan.
What kind of image is the state of Pakistan presenting to the world on the eve of the new millennium? How can we now argue that the decline of state institutions and the rise of a culture of cruelty towards human beings is owed more to ‘functional’ aberration than to law-making?
The human face of Pakistan is being systematically disfigured by our politicians, thereby inviting punitive measures from the world. That is why, for example, our just cause on Kashmir has been rejected internationally because we, rather than our cause, are seen to be lacking in morality. Now the Senate has veritably killed whatever “honour” we had left in the eyes of the world. Shame. Shame. Shame.