October 06, 2008	Monday	Shawwal 06, 1429

MIRPURKHAS, Oct 5: The Society for Development and Human Rights, an NGO, has condemned the decision of a jirga held in Khairpur, declaring a woman as kari and ordering that she be killed.

The society’s secretary Akhtar Hussain Baloch said in a press statement that the jirgas, which were functioning parallel to judiciary were now issuing orders to kill innocent people in the name of outdated and black customs.

He urged the government to immediately stop the jirgas which were flourishing in Sindh. The practice would not stop until all the politicians, landlords and criminals who took part in them were brought to justice, he said.

Mr Baloch said that the jirgas were challenging the writ of the state and were in blatant violation of the historical order issued by the Sukkur bench of the Sindh High Court in 2003, which made it binding on police and other government functionaries to take initiatives to stop the practice.

He said: “The roots of the jirga have deepened in the corridors of power as some of the politicians belonging to ruling party are also involved in holding them. Nothing has so far been done to stop it.”

Mr Baloch said that his organization had received information that an influential landlord through a jirga in the Razidero area had issued death sentence to a young married woman Naheed, declaring her kari with her cousin Aziz Lashari.

He pointed out that Naheed’s husband Ghulam Abbas had rejected the allegations against her wife and said that her wife was innocent.

He said that the influential person wanted Naheed’s five-year-old daughter Farzana to be married with seven-year-old Naseer but Naheed had rejected the proposal which had infuriated the landlord and motivated him to hatch a conspiracy against the innocent woman.