Human rights violations have spiked, but this
'honour killing' stands out, because the victim was seeking justice
Aisha Sarwari Guardian/UK 29 May 2014
On 27 May 2014, as Farzana Parveen lay dead on the uneven floor of the Lahore
high court, it was not easy to ignore the blood-stained brick next to her. A
chador she had worn that morning covered her crushed head. Police investigators
said that members of her family had attacked her and her husband with batons
and bricks. Farzana was three months pregnant.
This murder stands out among the 900 honour killings committed over the past 12 months in Pakistan
because it happened at the very place she had come to seek justice. She was
apparently killed for doing something that was her right according to the law –
marrying the man she loved. She was there to record her statement against a
false allegation from her family that claimed that her husband had kidnapped
her. If her husband hadn't escaped the attack, he too would be dead.
The
crowd had looked on. This is what Pakistan is increasingly becoming now – a
country of 180 million or so onlookers. The papers reveal one violation of
human rights after another, and women are mostly the targets.
Perpetrators
of honour crimes mostly try to justify their acts by appealing to religious
doctrine. This is ironic. In pre-Islamic days, daughters would be buried alive.
Islam put an end to that ghastly tradition. Now, those with the same
pre-Islamic thinking just stone women when they are older.
If
one were to plot the human rights violations on a graph, 2014 would likely form
a spike. The geopolitical situation is not helping – neither is the choice to
negotiate with the extremist Taliban. With the kind of discourse flooding our
newspapers and airwaves, it might as well be the terrorists calling all the
shots.
No
surprise, then, that there are only muffled cries from an anaemic civil
society. People are now afraid of putting their necks on the chopper of
protest.
With
around eight million more women now in the workforce than there were 10 years
ago, one cannot help but hope that it will be women themselves who will break
the archaic mould they are forced into, and that it will be financial
independence that will eventually free them from oppression.
These
numbers, however, are less impressive when compared with those who have no
access to an education in the first place. Although a demographic dividend of
the kind Pakistan has – over 60% are below the age of 30 – is a blessing, the
kind of education emergency that exists could send the country to the brink,
making it a curse. Pakistan ranks second in the world for numbers of children
out of school.
What
can change this inevitable downward trajectory is a clear involvement of the
international community with Pakistanis – a people-focused engagement – be it
through developmental programmes, education via the media, or giving
law-enforcement agencies the teeth they need. The key is more engagement not
less.
It
was Simone de Beauvoir who said: "On the day when it will be possible for
woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself
but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself – on that day
love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal
danger." We need, above all else, to be taught how to love without death.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/29/farzana-parveen-killing-change-women-pakistan-human-rights-honour-killings
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