| 13 January 2005 | Thursday | 02 Zilhaj 1425 |
No honour in the honour killings bill
Intellectual stagnation
Baghdad, a city of fear
"This is the high growth year", declared Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz as 2005 dawned. Buoyed up by the various indices of economic progress, he is confident of Pakistan achieving seven per cent economic growth this year exceeding the original target of 6.6 per cent which was later revised to 6.4 per cent because of the record rise in world oil prices with all their unsettling impact.
Having passed on the burden of the additional prices to the people in two instalments so far, the government feels greatly relieved, though that is contrary to its earlier promises.
He is confident of achieving seven per cent growth this year and eight per cent next year and eventually 10 per cent, reasons being the record output of cotton of 14 to 15 million bales against the target of 10.1 million bales and the anticipated wheat output of 20.1 million tonnes against the target of 20.2 million tonnes, and the double digit rise in manufacturing output as it was last year.
All that encourages him to visualise the per capita income of the country rising to 1,500 dollars by the year 2015 from the current 600 dollars plus. Of course our per capita income can be a misleading index of our prosperity in a country with extremes of riches and excessive poverty or where a third of the people live below the poverty line of a dollar a day.
Shaukat Aziz himself has said the biggest challenge is to take the benefit of all this growth down to the people at the lowest level. For that, specific and special measures have to be devised and their implementation monitored diligently.
Conventional systems will not do as has been shown in the case of enhanced agricultural credit from Zarai Taraqqiati Bank and commercial banks ending up with the feudal lords or big farmers in 90 per cent of the cases. They have a way of grabbing everything offered to the small farmers, in addition to what is meant for them.
He expects an agricultural growth of four per cent despite the shortage of water which Irsa says will now be 40 per cent for the Rabi crop instead of the 47 per cent projected earlier.
There are reports from the Indus Delta region that a million acres will go waste for want of water. But Shaukat Aziz is confident of a good wheat crop because of the recent rains and the higher procumbent price announced by the government to boost production.
He is confident of a high industrial growth because of the higher machinery import which formed 25 per cent of the additional imports and the bank loans of Rs. 190 billion given to the manufacturing sector against Rs. 132 billion last year.
There has been more of external assistance as well. Japan's minister for trade and industry Soichi Nakagawa has indicated the Official Development Assistance and Yen credit suspended in 1998 following Pakistan's nuclear explosions, will be resumed by March.
Assistance to the extent of 500 million dollars would be available from then onward. When the yen credit was available that was the single largest aid, far exceeding the US assistance as well. But since it is the only country in the world to have suffered from effects of a nuclear attack, it could not give aid to any country that makes the bomb. That is part of the Japanese Constitution as well. But now in view of the prominent role Pakistan is playing in the US-led war against terrorism the aid will be resumed after six years.
Japan will also assist the small and medium enterprises in which it has a great deal of expertise and experience. That can be very valuable assistance if we make use of that well.
Mr Shaukat Aziz wants far larger cooperation with Japan and has suggested setting up of a joint study group for devising measures to enlarge trade between the two countries, reduce Pakistan's trade imbalance with Japan and to increase Japanese investment in Pakistan.
The group will also explore preferential trade arrangements between the two countries as well as free trade areas. But the Japanese with their collective deliberations take a long time to come to such decisions.
The offer of Japanese assistance follows a year after the US committed itself to provide an aid package of three billion dollars spread over five years, equally divided between military assistance and economic aid.
And now Canada and Germany have offered to turn their loans into grants. The Canadian debt is 447 million dollars and the German debt is 50 million euros. The Canadian assistance will be spent on training school teachers and the German aid on primary schools in Punjab and the NWFP.
That means while the country's debt and debt servicing cost goes down the two provinces will have far more funds for education. In addition, a billion dollars on an average are available from the World Bank for various projects and another billion dollars from the Asian Development Bank to help Pakistan in areas where it is doing the right thing. Even the IMF is ready to give more funds with its heavy riders.
What matters is how well we use that aid and whether we are able to develop the capacity to use the large aid well and the one in the pipeline. How can we eliminate corruption from the system? The manner in which the Karachi Water Board has misused the World Bank funds is well known.
Also glaring is the way the aid funds have been misused or embezzled in the National Drainage Project. Imagine a handful of the officers embezzling Rs. 1.94 billion out of the EOBI funds of the poor employees and dodging the legal process!
We are seeking foreign investment from almost every source. Shaukat Aziz says foreign direct investment last year increased by 51 per cent, but at 328 million dollars it is far below the potential of the country.
Foreign investors seek security or better law and order, not freedom from terror alone. At a time when the largest development outlay ever has been allocated to Balochistan, violence is on the increase in the province.
The Sui Gas main was flown up on Friday and Saturday and there were lasting gun battles on Sunday with loss of human life every day. Women and children too were killed as a result of rocket attacks and shoot-outs on Monday.
At the same time 14 persons were killed as a result of sectarian violence in Gilgit, which is frequented by foreign tourists and at a time when we want more tourists to visit Pakistan. All this happened when the Japanese trade minister was in the country and we were urging him to help in promoting larger Japanese investment in Pakistan.
Despite a stronger law made to prevent karo-kari killings, murder of several persons in each incident continues. The law does not seem to have put fear into the hearts of the would-be killers.
Such killings and the adverse publicity that comes with them does not do any good to promote tourism or foreign investment in Pakistan. There are no reports of adequate police action following each incident. In fact, there is a popular uproar in each locality in the wake of each ghastly incident.
The prime minister, while addressing the civil servants in Sindh, has spoken of speedy justice, better governance and improved service deliveries. He talked about the economic diplomacy the government is pursuing now instead of geo-political ends.
He called for transparency in public administration. There can be transparency if the officials are honest and fair in their dealings with the public, and diligent in the performance of their duties, and not otherwise.
He spoke of the need for values vision and conviction among the civil servants. He called on the senior officials to provide leadership to their juniors and said that 50 officials were being sent abroad for study in top universities.
Senior officials have been going to foreign universities ever since the birth of Pakistan. But all the education they got at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard have not done much good to them or made them better officials.
It is not a question of knowledge and new expertise, but the will to do the right thing, and at the right time. There is a great deal of talk about capacity-building to handle large development funds and manage mega projects.
Capacity-building will come if the officials are ready to work hard and believe in transparency and good governance. Such officials can provide leadership to their juniors and give the country a good administration. In the absence of such virtues among the officials, privatization of major public enterprises becomes imperative.
The fault is not entirely of the officials. The leadership has considerable blame to share. A total of 771 rockets were fired in Balochistan in the last two years. The year 2004 has proved to be the worst year with a total of 650 rockets fired.
The rocket attacks started after the government decided to construct military cantonments and launch defence housing schemes in Dera Bugti, Kohlu and Gwadar. Nawab Akbar Bugti says the cooperation of the people of the area should be secured before any major project is undertaken. In the absence of such an understanding the violence would continue.
What is not obvious is whether it is the people whose cooperation should be secured or that of the sardars. And the latter do not have uniform demands. What one sardar likes is not what another sardar wants. That creates real problems for the government.
The government pins great hopes on Gwadar which it expects to become a gateway to Central Asia and serve Afghanistan as well. But if the rocket attacks continued even after the port comes into operation this year the foreigners would be reluctant to visit and invest there.
So it may be better if more of civilians than the military personnel deal with Baloch leaders. The province and the country have to get the best out of the large investment Pakistan is making in Balochistan. Statesmanship is more desirable than mere firm handling. And the Baloch sardars should also see beyond their own narrow interests.
No honour in the honour killings bill
There comes a time in every nation's history when its citizens have to face the mirror of its collective conscience. The first entitlement we owe ourselves is the right to survival and recourse to justice.
Yet what haunts half of the country's population these days is that many of us are still regarded as chattle, vulnerable to attack or murder as the mediaeval repositories of family, clan or tribal honour.
At least for some of us, it is a moment of great shame that in the 21st century we still countenance among our midst the gruesome and repugnant practice of killing, maiming, selling and injuring women in some misplaced concept of honour.
What makes matters worse is that the national media is told by the government that now honour killing has become a capital offence. This is dangerously double-speak because it misleads people into believing that somehow, the death penalty has just been introduced for this crime, or that the new bill represents a serious attempt at curbing honour killings across the country.
The fact of the matter is, and any NGO worker or lawyer will tell you this, that the death penalty was always available as a sentence for judges hearing an honour crimes case in the Pakistan Penal Code, but the issue has always been the lack of convictions, or the acceptance by the lower courts of an honour killing case as premeditated murder where the heirs of the victim are allowed to forgive each other, or exchange money and walk away.
In fact, as an effect of this new law, the few convictions that were awarded in such cases will dwindle to even less, because the problem was never just the sentence, but the absence of actual convictions.
It will mirror the justice delivery experience in gangrape cases, where just to sound politically effective, death penalty has been made mandatory, yet no convictions have been awarded since then.
Because of such problems in the law, the scourge, instead of dwindling over time, has spread like a disease with an escalating body count all over the country. In Sindh itself, government statistics testify to one woman killed every single day in the name of family honour.
In Punjab the spurious morality of 'zan, zar and zamin' continues to produce spectacles like the one in which a female local councillor was paraded head-shaved and disrobed only a few months ago with impunity, in a case of biradari revenge which had nothing to do with the poor woman in question.
In Balochistan and the Frontier province, for victims of 'honour' crimes, little chances for either escape or reporting exist, as in some areas, the bodies of the victims, both man and women, are considered too tainted for a normal burial.
The worst part of this narrative is that most cases of honour killing or crimes have little to do with marriages of personal choice. The lacunae in the laws, which continue to exist after the government's new legislation, are used to justify killings that clear the way for property acquisition, and most often, revenge cases where the women abused or killed are simply used to warn or humiliate another clan in grisly vengeance.
At present, despite the ratification of the government's tragically inadequate 'honour killings' bill in the National Assembly the law allows criminals to get off with light or no sentences on the basis of compound ability.
Basically, the government bill, despite extending a little relief to the victim, still crucially shies away from confronting the Qisas and Diyat laws introduced by a military regime more than twenty-five years ago under the larger ambit of the Hudood Ordinances which have become a rallying cry for Islamists who seek to divert attention from real issues by appropriating the power to interpret all Islamic law.
After these laws were put into effect, acquittals went up to 92 per cent and convictions to less than 8 per cent. These are not in accordance with either the spirit of justice prevalent throughout Islam, nor do they stand up to the standards of the freedoms and equality enshrined in our battered constitution.
This is the main law that condones clan killings by privatizing justice, and it still remains un addressed. In other words, the perpetrators are able to obtain forgiveness from the heirs of the victim, and the state no longer remains the sole decision-maker in dispensing justice, as was the case under the 1973 Constitution.
The central problem in justice-delivery for even reported cases is related to the fact that almost always the victim's extended family, direct family, kith or kin are not just the heirs but also the perpetrators or accomplices to the murders, so that giving up the right of punishment is often pre-planned.
Although the mitigation of crimes committed under 'grave and sudden provocation' has been removed from the Pakistan Penal Code, judges still apply the obsolete clause when defending murders as crimes of passion.
Before the Qisas and Diyat laws were introduced, the state was a clear party to all such murder cases, which were non-compound able in line with the principle that the state has to ensure the right to life of all citizens, irrespective of class, creed or gender.
The existing laws, however, allow poor litigants or parties to a dispute to be coerced into accepting blood money under the argument that what is done now cannot be undone, so they might as well surrender all claims to justice for the victim and accept the sum given out to them by the killer for compromising.
A culture of condoning crimes against women therefore proliferates under this law, and devalues the life of an honour victim as not quite a life worth saving or seeking full justice for.
The obvious question to ask at this stage is really this: what steps can we as a society take to stem the tide of such incidents in the future, as well as to ensure at least the bare minimum of justice through the formal legal system? First of all, at this point it is crucial that the government stop using such serious issues for political grandstanding and modify its honour killings bill.
For this, it has no extra work to do, nor re-invent any wheel. All it has to do is reach out for the PPPP bill from the committee graveyard where it has been thrown, as this bill was drafted in consultation with all stakeholders such as women's activists, Aurat Foundation and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.
This bill ensures that a minimum penalty is guaranteed for honour criminals, because unlike what the government likes to say, a death penalty option was always available to the courts; but more importantly, the PPPP bill ensures that no-one is allowed to get off on compromise clauses, nor does it allow justice for honour crime victims to amount to private deals that can be cut between family or tribe members.
The bill also plugs lacunae by removing the wide discretionary powers of the judiciary in negatively interpreting Islamist laws with respect to such cases, because even under Islamic law, the state is supposed to be the vali or heir, and not a family member.
The fact of the matter is that the high courts rarely, if ever, award acquittals in such cases. To the contrary, they are correctly harsh in meeting out full punishments and life sentences to such criminals, but the ground reality is that very few cases like these ever reach any court, let alone the higher courts.
But there is much more the state must do, or at least attempt to do after fixing this flawed law. First, it has to turn its attention to mandatory gender-sensitization workshops for both our police and judiciary so that perpetrators of such crimes are not given special treatment in police stations or the courts as 'honour murderers.'
Secondly, state-controlled media like PTV should be encouraged to run regular programmes to inform the public about the injustice and cruelty of this crime, and also the status of women about who are openly called repositories of family honour or chattel by state ministers like Manzur Panwhar, in support of such crimes against women in the name of culture and tradition.
Thirdly, and most importantly, the government must establish crisis centres in each provincial capital to provide protection and rehabilitation to victims of such abuse.
Safe shelter is one of the most critical deficits that women face when they visit darul amans, because when they are threatened or mistreated they have no recourse to alternative environments where protection is minimally provided to save them from being recruited as sex workers.
Fourth, the jirga decision-system that reinforces such privatization of justice should also be strictly disallowed as a parallel and feudal system of justice.
Without a doubt, the welcome discourse raging among educated Pakistan today acknowledges and condemns the objectification of women in roles that restrict their life choices and often reduce them to little more than movable property.
For once, the electronic media too has played a strategic role in bringing several such cases like the Almani and Shazia Khaskheli cases to public light. What is needed now is not a series of piece-meal bills that skirt around the fundamental problem.
Instead, it is time we all put our money where our mouth is and support legislation that allows no compromise on any such murders, whether they are crimes of passion or dispassion. The government threw out the PPPP's Hudood Repeal Bill after hemming and hawing for one year.
At least let us have the courage to recognize that we have waited too long to roll back the disastrous effects of Ziaul Haq's spurious Islamization, and that there is no honour in turning a blind eye to the murder of innocent and powerless people in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Let us at least put some honour, and some teeth, back in the honour killings bill.
The writer is an MNA and mover of the PPPP bill on honour killings.
Intellectual stagnation
No matter how much sweat and toil is devoted by the peasant in tilling the land, the eventual determinant of the fate of the harvest is the vicissitude of weather. Such hopeless dependence of his livelihood, and thus survival, on the caprice of circumstances beyond his control, naturally makes the peasant gullible to superstition.
The inability to exercise any vestige of control over the weather that ascertains his survival instils in him, fear and thus dependence. He is more ready than the common man to seek divine and mortal leadership, often confusing the two.
Furthermore, he is disposed to an implicit belief in the infallibility of the deified, in a desperate attempt at reassurance of his own fate. Similar assertions hold for the entire agrarian society, grasping for faith in the uncertainty of its endurance and settling for eternal subservience.
This explains the strong theistic roots of medieval society. Indeed, primarily comprising agrarian civilizations, the ancient world needed the comforting assurance of mortal and immortal deities shielding them from the wrath of nature.
Consequently, the commencement of the crumbling of theistic foundations in the West with the ascent of industrialization may be seen as no mere happenstance. For perhaps the first time, man had found a way to ensure his own survival independent of divine benediction. This virgin act of defiance gave way to an era of religious, political and cultural upheaval, one that continues to this day.
Significantly enough, the Muslim society remained largely agriculture-based throughout this time, and thus maintained its strong theological character and vertical power structure.
Instead of weakening, the deification continued to solidify among Muslims. The deities, primarily symbolizing ideals, theologies and people, were understood to epitomize perfection, and were thus beyond critical mortal scrutiny.
The Muslim penchant for persistence with long-held ideals is understandable, given the political and cultural developments following the western Renaissance. Not by coincidence, Muslim decline the world over came with the rise of the industrialized West.
Shocked by such a dramatic political and military submission, the Muslim world feared an equally fatal ideological and cultural invasion, granted credence by several Christian missionary movements in the conquered regions.
Throughout their history, Muslims had always been the conquerors, and so construed this novel, unenviable position of the vanquished as a threat to their very socio-cultural existence.
Their general reaction was an evasion of all cultural, educational and scientific advancements introduced by western advent into the Muslim world. The boycott was implicit to all modern ideals, whether good or bad.
Driven into a corner, Muslims, out of fear, became defensive to the point of hostility. Modern innovations in science and learning were shunned as religious seminaries crammed eager young minds with archaic texts of Aristotle and Euclid, a curriculum followed even today.
On the religious front, the avenues of Ijtihad - already deserted for around three centuries - were bolted to disallow any evolution in religious law with the progression of time.
Terrified of losing their heritage, the Muslims clung desperately to established practices and beliefs in all quarters, advertently overlooking their eroding practicability with age. Lacking the resources to develop and armed with a defeatist mentality the still-agrarian Muslim society sunk further into the abyss of intellectual stagnation.
Wary of protecting their culture and ideology, scholars and leaders sought to make ideals conceived and interpreted by humans, sacred. Such mental rut gave credibility to preposterous European claims to the manifest destiny.
Even though the Muslim world has since been more or less liberated from the shackles of imperialism, the blitzkrieg of the modern West has left indelible prints on Muslim socio-political thought.
The consequence is a society with a penchant for infallible deities. Generations of self-imposed theological and intellectual impasse has engendered and nurtured acute intolerance among Muslims. The pluralism of Roomi has given way to the scholastic communalism of today.
In a distorted interpretation of religion, rationalism in its entirety is condemned. Independent thought today is stifled upon its very conception, and plurality is subjected to the wrath of brainless lynch-mobs under rash accusations of heresy and apostasy. In a world of creative thought, the order of the day in our society is silent conformity and blind adherence.
This long-standing cognitive stagnation has brought about a noticeable change in individual religious convictions, from belief in God and conquest of nature (science) to an unquestioning fidelity to opportunistic theologists with their own axe to grind under the sanctimonious pretext of religion.
The need for the preservation of faith in rapidly crumbling ideals has caused the people to tacitly licence a greater patronal role for the elitist leadership. The general distrust of democratic polity prevalent in the Muslim world today is partially a by-product of this pernicious compromise.
Such a collectivist isolationist approach has led to the demise of the individual mind in our society. It has spawned a mindset whereby a son is expected to adopt the beliefs of his father by mere virtue of posterity.
The emphasis is on preservation of decrepit convictions rather than their evolution. Justice takes a grudging back seat to the predominant views of a public remiss of the value of pure thought, and such travesties as the Blasphemy law and Hudood laws are granted official benediction.
Of course, it is society which reaps the stale fruit of its creative intransigence in the form of a nation of vacuous yes-men, instead of individuals with substance. Indeed, our sins have come to haunt us.
Baghdad, a city of fear
Journalism yields a world of cliches but here, for once, the first cliche that comes to mind is true. Baghdad is a city of fear. Fearful Iraqis, fearful militiamen, fearful American soldiers, fearful journalists.
January 30, that day upon which the blessings of democracy will shower upon us, is approaching with all the certainty and speed of doomsday. The latest Zarqawi video shows the execution of six Iraqi policeman. Each are shot in the back of the head, one by one. A survivor plays dead. Then a gunman walks confidently up behind him and blows his head apart with bullets.
These images haunt everyone. At the al-Hurriya intersection, four truck-loads of Iraqi national guardsmen - the future saviours of Iraq, according to George Bush - are passing my car. Their rifles are porcupine quills, pointing at every motorist, every Iraqi on the pavement, the Iraqi army pointing their weapons at their own people.
And they are all wearing masks - black hoods or ski-masks or kuffiyas that leave only slits for frightened eyes. Just before it collapsed finally into the hands of the insurgents last summer, I saw exactly the same scene in the streets of Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad. Now I am watching them in the capital.
At Kamal Jumblatt Square beside the Tigris, two American Humvees approach the roundabout. Their machine-gunners are shouting at drivers to keep away from them. A big sign in Arabic on the rear of each vehicle says: "Forbidden. Do not overtake this convoy.
Stay 50 metres away from it." The drivers behind obey; they know the meaning of the "deadly force" which the Americans have written onto their checkpoint signs. But the two Humvees drive into a massive traffic jam, the gunners now screaming at us to move back.
When a taxi which does not notice the US troops blocks their path, the American in the lead vehicle hurls a full plastic bottle of water onto its roof and the driver mounts the grass traffic circle.
A truck receives the same treatment from the lead Humvee. "Go back," shouts the rear gunner, staring at us through shades. We try desperately to turn into the jam.
Yes, the Russians would probably have chucked hand grenades in Kabul. But here were the terrified 'liberators' of Baghdad throwing bottles of water at the Iraqis who are supposed to enjoy an American-imposed democracy on January 30.
Lest anyone doubt this extraordinary scene, the rear Humvee has "Specialist Carrol" written on the windscreen. Specialist Carrol, I am sure, regards every one of us as a potential suicide bomber - a killer on wheels - and I can't blame him.
One such bomber had just driven up to the police station in Tikrit north of Baghdad and destroyed himself and the lives of at least six policemen. Round the corner, I discover the reason for the jam: Iraqi cops are fighting off hundreds of motorists desperate for petrol, the drivers refusing to queue any longer for the one thing which Iraq possesses in huge amounts - petrol.
I drop by the Ramaya restaurant for lunch. Closed. They are building a 20-floor security wall around the premises. So I drive to the Rif for a pizza, occasionally tinkling the restaurant's piano, Air on a G-string, while I watch the entrance for people I don't want to see.
The waiters are nervous. They are happy to bring my pizza in 10 minutes. There is no-one else in the restaurant, you see, and they watch the road outside like friendly rabbits. They are waiting for The Car.
I call on an old Iraqi friend who used to publish a literary magazine during Saddam's reign. "They want me to vote, but they can't protect me," he says. "Maybe there will be no suicide bomber at the polling station. But I will be watched.
And what if I get a hand-grenade in my home three days later? The Americans will say they did their best, Allawi's people will say I am a 'martyr for democracy'. So do you think I'm going to vote?"
At Moustansariya university, one of Iraq's best, students of English literature are to face their end of term exam. January marks the end of Iraqi semesters. But one of the students tells me that his fellow students had told their teacher that, so fraught are the times, that they were not yet prepared for the examination. Rather than giving them all zeros, the teacher meekly postpones the exam.
I glance at the Iraqi press. Colin Powell is again warning of "civil war" in Iraq. Why do we westerners keep threatening civil war in a country whose society is tribal rather than sectarian? Of all papers, it is the Kurdish "Al Takhri", loyal to Mustafa Barzani, which asks the same question.
"There has never been a civil war in Iraq," the editorial thunders. And it is right. So 'full ahead both' for the dreaded January 30th elections and democracy.
The American generals, with a unique mixture of mendacity and hope amid the insurgency, are now saying that only four of Iraq's 18 provinces may not be able to 'fully' participate in the elections.
Good news. Until you sit down with the population statistics and realize - as the generals, of course, all know - that those four provinces contain more than half the population of Iraq. -(c) The Independent