05/07/2016
05/07/2016
LAHORE, Pakistan, July 4, (AP): Parveen Rafiq closed her hands around the neck of her youngest daughter, Zeenat, and squeezed and squeezed until the girl was almost dead. Then, in the tiny apartment where the family lived, she doused the 18-year-old with kerosene and set her on fire. Neighbors saw the smoke and rushed to the home. Someone inside, apparently one of Rafiq’s daughtersin- law, was screaming, “Help her! Help!” But the door was bolted from within. Moments later, they heard Rafiq scream from her rooftop: “I have killed my daughter. I have saved my honor. She will never shame me again.” Zeenat’s crime was marrying a childhood friend she loved, defying her widowed mother’s pressure for an arranged marriage and, in the mind of her mother and many of her neighbors, tarnishing her family’s honor. Her macabre death on June 8 in the eastern city of Lahore was the latest in a series of increasingly gruesome “honor killings” in Pakistan, a country with one of the highest rates of such killings in the world. In one case, a mother slit the throat of her pregnant daughter who had married a man she loved. In yet another a jilted suitor doused a teenage girl with kerosene and set her on fire.
In the city of Abbottabad, a teenage girl was tortured, injected with poison and then strapped to the seat of a vehicle, doused with gasoline and set on fire. Her crime was helping a friend elope. A jirga, or council of local elders, ordered her killing and dictated the manner of her death. The vehicle was parked in a public place, outside a bus stop as a message to others. The brutality and rapid succession of killings horrified many Pakistanis. The numbers of such killings have climbed in lockstep with their sometimes-public spectacle.
Last year, three people a day were killed in “honor” crimes in Pakistan: a total of 1,096 women and 88 men, according to the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. In 2014, the number was 1,005 women, including 82 children, up from 869 women killed a year earlier. The true numbers are believed to be higher, with many cases going unreported, activists say. Some human rights and women’s rights activists believe honor killings have been inching up and showing greater brutality as the older generation tries to dig in against creeping change. Over the years, more women have been going to school and working outside the home, even among lower and lower middle class, and use of social media has helped women raise their voices. “The old order of misogyny and extremism is falling apart, is really crumbling,” says Marvi Sermid, a political commentator and women’s rights activist. Conservative Muslim clerics are furious over the creeping change and are fighting back with regressive changes targeting women, she said.
Changes
They had met when she was 12 and he was 14 and quickly became playmates. They lived about two blocks apart in Changi Amar Sadhu, a crowded Lahore shantytown where electrical wires and phone lines crisscross overhead in a crazy jumble that obscures the sky. As they grew older, friendship became romance. “We were in love,” Khan said, his voice barely a whisper. He fumbled through his phone until he found a collection of selfies that Zeenat had put together to the rhythm of their favorite song, an Urdu pop tune called “You Made Me Your Lover.” She loved taking selfies, loved music and poetry, he said. As the music played, Zeenat in the photos struck different poses, sometimes coy, sometimes playful or teasing, but always smiling, her long black hair falling loosely past her shoulders. She also taught the neighborhood children the Quran, Islam’s holy book. She could recite the entire book from memory. Her mother knew about Khan, and she and Zeenat were constantly fighting. Zeenat told him her mother beat her. Over long hours on the phone, Zeenat pleaded with him to marry her so she wouldn’t be forced into an arrangement.
Marriage
Successive governments have been reluctant to toughen the laws, fearful of Islamic hard-liners who oppose anything they see as weakening enforcement of Shariah, undermining the family’s authority or promoting women’s rights seen as “Western.” Sermid, the women’s rights activist, has felt their wrath. During a televised debate in June exploring the phenomenon of honor killings, lawmaker Hafiz Hamdullah, who belongs to a Taleban-affiliated religious party, Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam, threatened Sermid with rape and called her a whore. A burly, bearded man, Hamdullah was escorted out of the TV station by security guards when he tried to take a swing at Sermid, who has since filed charges.
Female politicians have also felt resistance to efforts at raising their voices. When lawmaker Shireen Mazari last month tried to speak up during a parliament debate, the defense minister insulted her appearance and demanded she use a “more feminine” tone. Mazari, the parliamentary leader of Pakistan’s Justice Party, has furiously demanded an apology. Still, outrage over recent honor killings and other violence against women has fueled a bold outcry against the establishment.
One target in particular has been the Council of Islamic Ideology, a body of conservative, elderly Muslim clerics that advises the government on laws to ensure they don’t stray from Shariah. When the government proposed a law aimed at protecting women against violence, the council in May put forward an alternative that would allow men to “lightly beat” their wives. Young activists fired up a Twitter campaign with the mocking hashtag #TryBeatingMeLightly.
On TV talk shows, guests denounced the council, which has opposed laws against child marriage and denounced using DNA evidence in rape cases, as irrelevant, misogynist and out of touch. In Parliament, some lawmakers called for it to be disbanded. The outcry appears to be having an effect. The council in June decreed that honor killings are un-Islamic. A few days after Zeenat and Khan were married, her mother and uncle showed up. They pleaded with her to come home.
Just for a few days, they said. During that time, they would arrange a proper wedding for her and Khan. That would save their honor, showing neighbors she left “respectably” from her mother’s home, instead of eloping. As is tradition, Khan’s elders did the negotiating, and eventually they agreed that Zeenat would go with her mother. Zeenat’s uncle gave his promise she would be safe.