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GENDER
The Mukhtar Mai story Brutally raped, a courageous woman turns the tables on her country’s conflicting legal systems and puts Pakistan’s judicial system and its male politicians on trial
by Sarajun Hoda Abdul Hassan
She was a 33-year-old illiterate women from an unknown dusty rural village in Pakistan. On 2 November 2005, Hollywood star Brooke Shields announced her name as the recipent of the ‘glamour women of the year award’ and told the poignant story of the woman’s unrelenting courage. The evening was hosted by one of the biggest fashion magazines, Glamour, in one of the biggest cities of the world, New York. People in expensive suits and cocktail dresses stood up to welcome and hail the Asian ‘Rosa Parks’ as she walked up on stage in a plain simple cotton dress. It was a prestigious award. Among the previous winners were former Irish president and UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and Hollywood stars Catherine Zeta-Jones and Goldie Hawn. What a contrast it was. The woman was Mukhtar Mai, also known as Mukhtaran Bibi, who shot to instant fame from an unknown victim of gang rape to ‘glamour woman of the year’, and went on to become an advocate of women’s rights. Her gang rape was ordered by a tribal court that still illegally functions in Pakistan. It was the most outrageous case in Pakistan’s legal history and created shock-waves around the world. An eye for an eye On 22 June 2002, during a Mastoi tribal council ‘panchayat’ meeting in the village of Meerwala, in southern Punjab, Pakistan, four men, including one of the tribal council members, raped Mukhtaran Bibi, a member of the ‘lower caste’ Tatla Gujjar tribe. It was intended as ‘punishment’ for the conduct of her 14-year-old brother, Abdul Shaqoor and as a restoration of honour to a 21-year-old woman, Salma Bibi with whom Shaqoor was earlier allegedly seen with. Salma was from a politically powerful higher ‘caste’ tribe and the rape, the Jirga Tribal Council adjudicated, was justice their style, ‘an eye for an eye - zina (fornication) for zina’. The real story is some Mastoi people sodomised Shakoor. Fearing retaliation from his family, they kept him incarcerated with police espousal. His father then summoned the ‘jirga’ panchayat (tribal jury) to seek his release. In order to pre-empt the threat of a police report, however, the Mastois who sodomised Shakoor concocted the story of him having an affair with Salma, a sister to one of them. It took a different twist and went awry. The tribal court proposed that Shakoor had to marry Salma. And as a punishment, ‘an eye for an eye’, Shakoor’s family had to offer a girl (Mukhtaran) for marriage to a member from Salma’s family together with a piece of land. But the Mastois were reluctant to give their daughter to a lower ‘caste’ boy. The powerful Mastois who were there with 40 hostile guards armed with Kalashnikovs demanded instead justice on the principle of ‘zina for zina’ and the Jury was forced to decree that Shakoor had to offer a sister to be raped. His elder sister, Mukhtaran, a village religious teacher, who was there pleading for mercy for Shakoor, became an easy prey. ‘I begged and pleaded with them but they were like animals,’ said Mukhtaran, who looked pale as she struggled to come to terms with her ordeal. Her screams of terror were drowned by the jeers and raucous laughter from the 500-strong crowd. She pleaded in desperation, ‘I am like your daughter, your sister. Don’t do this to me.’ But her entreaties fell on deaf ears. An elderly jurist joined two brothers and a cousin of Salma took 90 minutes to carry out the barbaric verdict. Mukhtaran was then thrown naked onto the street where her father, Ghulam Fareed, who covered her with a shawl and led her home as a large crowd gazed on. The poor farmer, totally distraught by his daughter’s humiliation, had not dared to challenge the powerful and politically influential tribal jury. For the next few days, armed men prevented her family from leaving their home. The incident only came to light when the local Imam mentioned it in his Friday sermon. This was then picked up by the local media and went on to become an international story. President forced to intervene Pakistan President Musharraf was forced to hurriedly hand-pick a Judge, who was provided with a team of special security force personnel and quickly dispatched to convene a special anti-terrorist court. The local police chief, the district administrator and the magistrate who had earlier refused to entertain Mukhtaran’s complaint were suspended from their respective offices. The Chief Justice of Pakistan under the Supreme Court’s suo moto (powers) took up this issue of great public interest and publicly condemned the rape of Mukhtaran Bibi as a ‘violation of human rights and human dignity’. He issued directions to the Punjab police authorities to regularly report to the court on any action taken by them. Punjab Governor Khalid Maqbool also directed provincial ministers Rana Ijaz and Shaheen Attiqur Rehman to visit the Meerwala village. They were tasked with personally ascertaining details from the victim’s family and probing the attempt by police to cover up the crime and given 72 hours to report back to the governor.. Most of the police personnel, together with all the tribal council members and politicians involved, scurried into hiding. Prompted by the local IGP, they got together at a hideout and planned a compromise to save themselves from the wrath of the military government. They decided that the four who raped Mukhtaran would apologise to her family. One of them would take her as a second wife. To equal the score this time, the Mastoi clan would give four women to be married to the Gujjar clan. A women each from the family of the rapist to men from Mukhtaran’s family. The youngest offered was 12 and the eldest, a 55-year-old woman. An announcement was made that the matter had been amicably settled. It did not help. The anti-terrorist court that sat still found the four rapists guilty. All four rapists and two of the tribal elders were finally sentenced to death. The arrest of the six only became possible after the local police chief was sacked and taken into custody. Barred from travel This case kick-started an important national debate illustrating the horrific abuses Pakistani women have to endure and shed light on the sorry state of women in Pakistani society. More horrific stories came under the spotlight when a human rights organisation reported that 150 rapes had taken place in the same Southern Punjab area during the previous six months. Earlier, in June 2005, when international women’s organisations arranged for Mukhtaran to tell her story in the United States, she was rushed to meet the prime minister’s advisor on women’s development, Nilofer Bakhtiar. Nilofer notified her that Musharraf had barred her from foreign travel for fear that the bad publicity might tarnish the image of the country. She was forced to withdraw her passport that she had submitted to the US Embassy to obtain a visa and it was taken away from her. The act was widely condemned, both locally and internationally. ‘Has Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf “gone nuts”?’ asked the New York Times on 17 June 2005. `The move [to ban her from travelling] was shocking because Ms Mukhtaran is a genuine Pakistani heroine,’ wrote The Guardian. It was generously reported in all major media. She made international headlines once again. ‘The Pakistan government went berserk,’ wrote New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. And his advice: ‘Ms Mukhtaran, a symbol of courage and altruism, is the best hope for Pakistan’s image. The threat to Pakistan’s image comes from President Musharraf for all this thuggish behavior.’ It took no less than Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to personally call the Pakistan Foreign Minister and firmly demand that the government stop its harassment, and that Mukhtaran be allowed to travel. That changed Musharraf’s stand, and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz personally saw her, and ordered the ban to be immediately lifted. Odds stacked against women Mukhtar Mai is not the only rape victim in Pakistan. There are many, many more women still facing such situations mainly in the remote areas of Pakistan (and in other Third World countries such as Afghanistan, India and Bangladesh), where they continue to be severely subdued and still seeking justice. Rape and gang-rape are notoriously widespread in Pakistan. Police records, which were presented to the government inquiry into the Meerwala rape case, showed that in the Muzaffargarh district of Punjab province alone, 22 women were reportedly raped by 53 men in June 2002, fourteen of whom were gang-raped (AFP, 18 and 22 July 2002). At least two of the victims were dead within weeks, one shot dead as she was probably able to identify the rapist, another committed suicide reportedly because the police took no action against her attackers. The non-governmental Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) reported in 2001 that one woman is raped every hour in Pakistan as a whole; this included one woman raped in Punjab province every six hours and one woman gang-raped in the province every fourth day. An average of 300 women annually have been known to suffer from ‘karo kari’ the gang rape order by the pancayat system in Pakistan’s feudally dominated interior areas. More than 500 are killed in the name of honour. The real figures, however, may be even more frightening. This happens because victims do not report the crime - due to patterns of intimidation and threats by the perpetrators, ignorance of the law, lack of access to justice and fear. Women have well-founded fears that victims of rape may be accused of zina, an offence punishable with death by stoning or public lashes, if they cannot prove absence of consent. The whole justice system is against them. Under current Pakistan law, if a women is raped and reports the crime or gets pregnant, she has to prove that she was raped. What constitutes proof in Pakistan is the man admitting to the crime, or four witnesses who saw the man force her into having sex. If she cannot prove this, she is charged with having an illicit sexual relationship with someone and is punished. Under a tribal code, women are perceived as men’s property and the repositories of their honour, and thus they are deemed a legitimate sacrifice when dishonour is to be redressed. An inter-tribal dispute is often resolved under the ‘jirga’ system by giving a woman in marriage to the rival group. In such a social milieu, a woman’s life, let alone her happiness, has little worth. In Pakistan, many tribal leaders are themselves parliamentarians, members of the civil administration or have family links with the administration. In their official capacities, they speak the language of good governance, of the separation of powers, which entails respect for the independence of the judiciary and of human rights. But, in their constituencies, they preside over tribal courts. The nightmare continues Mukhtaran’s nightmare has not yet ended because The Lahore High Court in March 2005 acquitted the five accused while the death sentence of the sixth was commuted to life imprisonment. The Highest Shariah Court of the land then took over, claiming jurisdiction over the case. But Pakistan’s Supreme Court swiftly came in and overturned the decision and, later, suspended the acquittals, pending a retrial. What was originally Mukhtaran’s fight for justice has instead put Pakistan’s very own justice system on trial. Mukhtaran has been through a traumatic time, embroiled in one of the most controversial cases in Pakistan’s legal history. But being the fighter she is, she successfully pitted the ancient tribal system against Pakistan’s judicial system, which became further complicated with the introduction of the Islamic Sharia, the ‘Hudood Ordinance’ when former president, Ziaul Haq began Islamizing Pakistan.
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Mukhtaran has been through a traumatic time, embroiled in one of the most controversial cases in Pakistan’s legal history.
