When the Ku Klux Klan was at its zenith, each black American went to bed in fear f a midnight lynching and each morning black bodies were found swinging from the trees. In 1939, jazz legend Billie Holiday recorded "Strange Fruit", one of the most moving songs in her repertoire. "Southern trees bear a strange fruit," it went. "Blood on the leaves and blood at the root." Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. This was a fruit "for the sun to rot, for the trees to drop". Here was a "strange and bitter crop".
In 2004 in Pakistan, it is estimated that more than 1,000 women were killed for honour, their bodies in many cases stealthily buried in unmarked graves in the middle of the night. These women are our strange fruit, and they will yield a bitter crop. If the men who killed them had been more organized, perhaps they would have come up with their own KKK - the Karo Kari Klan.
The year 2003 ended bitterly with a news-cycle on Afsheen, who was killed for honour in November, and we started a new cycle on Shaista Almani that would continue well into the first quarter of 2004. By January 22, spurred by the misuse of Qisas and Diyat laws amongst others, the government-appointed but independent National Commission on the Status of Women (NCSW) published its report on the Hudood Ordinance, which it said must be repealed. Somehow it didn't matter that the Supreme Court had declared on Dec 19, 2003 that a woman could marry without the consent of her wali. Shaista Almani and Balakhsher Maher, who had married for love on June 4, 2003, were declared karo kari, forcibly "divorced" and threatened with death till they left the country for Oslo in July 2004. The Almani and Maher families were still bitter and there were at least six dead and nine women kidnapped in clashes by the middle of the year.
By now everyone was talking about honour killings and numerous seminars and forums had been held. The PPP galvanized its ranks and said it would present a bill that would do away with the damning lacunae in the law that allowed for murderers to get off scot-free in an honour killing case. But everyone's disappointment was thick in early March when the government reportedly struck a deal with the MMA that the Hudood Ordinance laws would not be tampered with. Removing the loopholes would now be like gaining leverage with a rubber crowbar.
But karo kari was the least of our worries this year. In early April, two wedding singers alleged gang rape in Multan and four-month pregnant Rozina Ujjan held a press conference at the Karachi Press Club begging for protection since she had been declared kari in her village. Jirgas were legally banned at the end of the same month but newspaper columns continued to carry the same headlines.
On July 21 a panchayat in Toba Tek Singh expelled three girls, 10, 11 and 13 from the village for being raped by a police constable and his accomplices. The girls had left their homes without a male guardian and were therefore considered unfit to live with the rest of them. August was marked by a scandal that women were being allegedly used for prostitution at a Darul Aman in Hyderabad. With all this competing for our attention we barely registered the importance of the inauguration of the first women's crisis centre in the same month.
Honour killings reverberated in the echo chamber of the news machine all of 2004. Some people in the media said it was good that this debate was finally making the airwaves; discussion and debate are after all the foundations of democratic norms. It was almost in bad taste to say that readers had grown numb. The numbers were pouring out of our ears and none of them matched up.
By the end of October it was all over because on the last day of the parliamentary year, the Criminal (Amendment) Law 2004 was passed. All it did was increase the punishment for honour killing to 25 years. The Hudood laws were not repealed and all the loopholes that had been the problem in the first case stayed loopholes.
With all this going on it is small wonder that many other issues were sidelined or given less coverage. One issue that started out internationally but played out only a little domestically was the hijab or headscarf controversy. On January 17, thousands of women flanked by men demonstrated in France, the UK and the Middle East, against a looming ban on headscarves (and "conspicuous" religious insignia) that came into effect on September 2 in France affecting more than 12 million people attending 60,000 schools.
On January 21, the local Hizbut Tehreer wrote a letter to the French ambassador to Pakistan against the ban and on Jan. 28 the women's wing of the Jamaat-i-Islami staged a protest. If nothing else it was a demonstration by local religious parties, a show of solidarity on an international issue. But this one was laughed off the air when security checks became a problem with veiled MNAs of the MMA. The women said that a green folder should be enough to identify them at the National Assembly. Who needs photo ID when you have a green folder?
This seemed trivial compared to the abolition of the five per cent job quota for women. The chairperson of the NCSW was very rightly perturbed when, despite the commission's recommendations for a 50 per cent quota, the quota was done away with altogether reportedly because the government wanted to fix a higher one. Little has come of it since then.
But what were women doing otherwise this year? And what was the good news? For starters a student named Syeda Saba Zehra Zaidi at a school in Rawalpindi beat everyone in the world who took physics, computer studies and Pakistan studies in the June 2004 O-level examinations. Women were chosen to head five out of 39 standing committees in the National Assembly and three were elected chairpersons of Senate committees. Zarine Aziz, the president of First Women Bank, and playwright and social worker Fatima Surraiya Bajiya were presented awards for their outstanding achievements. A 14-year-old, Maria Toor, became the world's youngest squash champion, and gang-rape survivor Mukhtaran Mai made it to Time magazine's Asian heroes under 40 list. (The men who raped her were sentenced in a Lahore High Court in June).
Musharraf Hai, the chief of Pakistan's fastest-growing consumer multinational company, came in at 46 on Fortune magazine's list of the 50 most powerful people outside the US. Girls consistently outclassed boys in the local board exams with more than 15,000 enrolling for higher education. For the first time, we also managed to send a female swimmer to the Olympics. Teenager Rubab Raza made history by becoming the youngest person to compete at the Olympics and by becoming the first Pakistani female to represent her country in swimming. These were only the achievements that were reported in the media.
On another front former prime minister Benazir Bhutto appeared in a Swiss court on June 30 to answer corruption charges against her. Eight days earlier Imran Khan and his wife Jemima announced their divorce and in August, Samina Malik became the first Pakistani singer to perform in a theatre in Srinagar. The federal ministry of education said that women's literacy doubled over two decades to 33 per cent by 2001 and first ladies from 17 countries gathered in Islamabad as part of a summit of the regional steering committee for the Advancement of Rural and Island Women of Asia Pacific Region. They adopted the Islamabad resolution urging their governments to do more for women and perhaps next year they'll come up with a shorter name for their organization.
On a sadder note many prominent contributors to the cause of women left us this year. Begum Majid Malik, the founder of the PECHS girls school in Karachi passed away at the age 91, and writer and social worker Mumtaz Rashdi, who was the first Pakistani female press attachi, died of heart failure, also in Karachi, at the age of 70.
How did women fare this year? What was their performance like? These are dicey gender-riddled questions. Do we usually ask how men performed this year? In 2003 there was an inordinate amount of focus on the new women in politics but it isn't probably necessary to ask this question about 2004.
We shouldn't be asking what women did because they were women, whether they were counsellors, ministers, heads of institutions or social workers. That would be succumbing to the miasma of biological rationalism. Assess public figures, both men and women, how they performed this year in terms of their official capacity and not because of their gender.
But if you do want to know how women parliamentarians performed then cheer them for going for the jugular, the Hudood ordinances. They got a raw deal in the end, but they did their job by making it their priority.
People often ask how long the good fight will take. I draw some comfort from the official numbers. Today we have 33 per cent of women in the local bodies and nearly 20 per cent in parliament. Twenty-seven thousand women councillors were trained under the Women's Political Participation Programme and there are plans for political schools for women. Out of a total of 234 women parliamentarians, 11 are ministers in the federal and provincial cabinets.
But there is another way of assessing the enemy. In the West, the first wave of feminism appeared at the start of the 19th century with A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792). (She was actually the mother of Mary Shelley of Frankenstein fame). The first wave gave rise to the women's suffrage movement in Europe and the US and culminated in the US in women's right to vote in 1920.
The second wave of feminism came shortly after the Second World War with Simone de Beauvoir's seminal text The Second Sex which she wrote in 1949. She brought about the shift in feminism from equality to freedom for women. In Pakistan, the thousands of women who have either been killed for karo kari or been affected as families have demonstrated that we haven't even reached the equality part. There are too many people, including women, who do not consider women equal to men. But this does not mean that we should not pursue freedom for women. Freedom means the freedom of movement for young girls and women in villages, the freedom to get a PhD, the freedom to decide to wear a hijab even if we think it is something men decided for women, and the freedom to have equal access to jobs and hence power.
Pakistan is fighting so many fights. But if we are to go by anything that the West has been through for its progress on women's rights, we can expect a fight for the next two hundred years. But will we stack arms, surrender and go home? Not a chance.
When the Ku Klux Klan was at its zenith, each black American went to bed in fear f a midnight lynching and each morning black bodies were found swinging from the trees. In 1939, jazz legend Billie Holiday recorded "Strange Fruit", one of the most moving songs in her repertoire. "Southern trees bear a strange fruit," it went. "Blood on the leaves and blood at the root." Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. This was a fruit "for the sun to rot, for the trees to drop". Here was a "strange and bitter crop".
