Day: December 4, 2006

KARACHI: Participants of a rally organised on Sunday by the Markazi Jamaat Ahle Sunnat, Karachi chapter, reiterated their resolve to resist any move to make the newly-passed bill on women protection a part of the Constitution. The rally was addressed by President of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan Shah Anas Noorani, chief of the Sunni Tehrik Serwat Ejaz Qadri, Sindh chief of the Markazi Jamaat Ahle Sunnat Mufti Jan Mohammad Naeemi and JUP leader Shabbir Abu Talib, besides several other leaders. Raising slogans against the introduction of the bill, the participants marched from M. A. Jinnah Road up to the Jamia Masjid Qassaban at Jamia Cloth Market. They were holding placards and banners inscribed with slogans against the bill and the government. Some of them were also holding portraits of Allama Shah Ahmed Noorani, Maulana Saleem Qadri, Maulana Abbas Qadri and other Ahle Sunnat leaders.

Addressing the protesters, the speakers said that Ahle Sunnat leaders from various parties had offered great sacrifices for Pakistan and played a key role in giving the country a Constitution. “We will not allow anyone to trample over the 1973 Constitution or make amendment to it in a way to change its Islamic basis,” they said.
Serwat Ejaz Qadri said the women protection bill was against the tenets of Islam and the Holy Quran, as well as Shariah. It got through the parliament because ulema of Ahle Sunnat were not there in the house, they claimed. They said that all ulema belonging to the Ahle Sunnat would have to unite for the protection Islam, the Holy Quran and Islamic values.Mufti Jan Mohammad Naeemi said that his party would not hesitate to offer any sacrifice for the cause.

Shabbir Abu Talib said that those who had ruthlessly been violating the rights of womenfolk in the past were now posing themselves as ‘champions of women rights’.
Meanwhile, the Sunni Tehrik held a general workers meeting of its women wing on Sunday. Speaking on the occasion, ST chief Serwat Ejaz Qadri said that the party was facing the state-sponsored terrorism and vandalism. In this context, he recalled the Nishtar Park tragedy in which the entire ST leadership had been wiped out in a terrorist attack.He told the party’s women workers that Islam had given all due rights to womenfolk. ST women wing leader Naheed Bhatti and Perveen Qadri also addressed the meeting.
Source: Dawn
Date:12/4/2006

PESHAWAR: More than 30,000 mothers and 200,000 newborn children are dying in the country annually due to lack of awareness, health facilities and political will.
Gynaecologists and paediatricians at a city hospital told this correspondent that there was an urgent need to control preventable ailments among women and newborn babies.They said that about 100 women of 10,000 died of delivery-related complications in the 2005 year and such deaths were preventable.Five gynaecology wards in the Khyber Teaching Hospital, Lady Reading Hospital and Hayatabad Medical Complex has obtained the service of about 100 doctors which is being termed adequate.“The situation concerning mother and neonatal health in rural areas is very poor. On average, a woman dies of pregnancy-related complications in the country after every 20 minutes and such deaths are avoidable,” said a gynaecologist.

He said that only 18 per cent of the deliveries were performed by trained birth attendants (TBAs) in the country and the rest of 82 per cent were carried out by traditional and unskilled Dias.“Pakistan is required to ensure that 90 per cent of the total deliveries are performed by trained birth attendants by the year 2015,” he said, citing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).Under the MDGs Pakistan is also under obligation to improve its maternal mortality rate (MMR) indicators from the current 350 to 140. “The commission for macroeconomics and health has recommended expenses of $34 per capita per year on health, which at the moment is only $6.4. Pakistan is spending only 0.6 per cent (Rs50billion) of the GDP on health, while the UN has recommended 8 per cent”, he said.He said that the NWFP needed more hospitals for children and mother care, where both mothers and neonatal could be provided specialised treatment.
Source: Dawn
Date:12/4/2006

SUKKUR: Two members of a family were killed and four injured in an armed attack in the Ruk village of the Shikarpur district on Sunday morning. According to reports reaching here, Mahar tribesmen and women were working in their fields when a group of 20 armed persons appeared on the scene and opened indiscriminate fire, killing a woman and her son and injuring four others, including a minor girl. The assailants fled. Those killed were identified as Shahid Mahar, 20, and his mother Zarina, 40. The injured, including Fahmida, 12, and Behram Mahar, were shifted to a hospital in the Lakhi town. Nazim Union Council Ruk Ghulam Mustafa Mahar told newsmen that Jatoi tribesmen were behind the attack.
Source: The News
Date:12/4/2006

SIALKOT: The Sialkot city’s main government colleges for women are facing a lot of problems and the concerned officials of the Provincial Education Department have miserably failed to chalk out any effective strategy for the amicable solution of these problems, including the shortage of teaching staff and classrooms besides other basic facilities.Govt Post Graduate College for Women Sialkot has more than 7,000 students on role and there are only 55 teachers available to teach such a big number of the students in this college. The overcrowded classrooms present a scene of a public meeting, when some teachers give them the lectures.

As many as 110 posts of lecturers and professors of different subjects are sanctioned for this college, out of which the college has only 65 teachers and 10 teachers are on a long leave. Thus, only 55 teachers are available to teach more than 7,000 girl students in this college.The students and their parents have expressed grave concern over this critical situation and urged the provincial government to make sincere efforts for overcoming the shortage of teachers in this college. Meanwhile, there are only 14 teachers for more than 4,000 students of Govt Allama Iqbal College for Women Sialkot due to which the students were facing great difficulties in getting education.
Source: The News
Date:12/4/2006

LAHORE: In the centre of Beit Hanoun, there is nothing left of the 800-year-old mosque but the minaret. It looks like a lighthouse stranded in a sea of rubble. People whose homes were demolished during the latest Israeli army incursion sit on plastic chairs around bonfires. At night they bunk down with the neighbours. One of them is Watfa Kafarna. ‘I saw the Israeli soldiers eye-to-eye,’ she said. ‘They took my four-year-old grandson, Mahadi, who has Down’s syndrome. They shook him and yelled: “Where are the guns?” Now he is traumatised and wets the bed every night,’ according to a report in The Observer. Not his own bed – the Kafarna family is homeless, living off the charity of friends. Tears run from Watfa’s eyes as she looks at her son, daughter-in-law and grandchild huddled around a brazier.

Her husband, Diab, shuffles across the ruins towards his wife. ‘Bossa!’ he says, ‘A kiss!’ In a highly unconventional move, Diab kisses his wife on the mouth. ‘She is my heart, my eyes, my light. We have lost our house but not each other.’ During the incursion, Israeli soldiers detained all men aged 16-40, including Watfa and Diab’s sons and grandsons. The army targeted the mosque, attempting to arrest militants hiding there, the report says. The women put up their own resistance, gathering as human shields around the mosque to help the militants escape. ‘I am 72, says Watfa, ‘but by doing this I felt 20, young and useful and ready to act.’ She pulls off her long veil and holds it high in her right hand. ‘I waved my hijab as a white flag and prayed with the other women in front of the holy mosque. But the Israelis continued to destroy it.’

Two women were killed by the Israeli Defence Force that day. Watfa was bruised, as was 70-year-old Fatma Najar, hit by a bulldozer. Three weeks later, Najar blew herself up near Israeli soldiers, wounding two. In Gaza she is seen as a heroine. ‘If the Israelis came to my house to gun down my children and I had a belt, I would do the same,’ says Watfa. ‘The woman is the biggest loser here,’ says Khola, a neighbour, standing on the remains of a kitchen where flour is mixed with pulverised masonry, the report adds. Two hundred homes were destroyed in Beit Hanoun. ‘Fatma Najar, an old woman, did what many people don’t have the guts to do. If you go back and research Fatma,’ says Khola, ‘you will see her home was destroyed on top of her head, her sons jailed, her grandson killed.’ ‘I know at least 20 of us who want to put on the belt,’ said Fatma Naouk, 65. ‘Now is the time of the women. Now the old women have found a use for themselves.’
Source: Daily Times
Date:12/4/2006