Voice of Gender News From Pakistan
LANDIKOTAL: Unidentified militants blew up a girls primary school in Bara. The unknown militants placed explosives which were later detonated that destroyed the government girls’ primary school in the Aka Khel area of Bara on Tuesday.
The total number of the destroyed government schools in Khyber Agency has gone beyond 80, sources said.
It is, in many ways, sad that it took the shooting of a teenage girl to wake the world up to the continued militant crisis in Pakistan and the lack of access to education for girls everywhere. It is also sad that as accolades pour in for 15-year-old Malala Yousufzai from around the world, in her own country, there are still people who seek to malign her and propagate theories that she is a puppet of foreign powers meant to serve other interests.
However, the latest honour in her name is a huge one. The Malala Fund for Girls’ Right to Education, set up at a Unesco-organised ‘Stand up for Malala’ event, in Paris on December 10, aims to raise billions of dollars to ensure that all girls around the world go to school by 2015, in line with the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. President Asif Ali Zardari, who met Malala in the UK hospital where she remains under treatment, got the fund in Malala’s name rolling with a $10 million donation.
Tributes for Malala poured in, with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the EU’s top diplomat, Catherine Ashton, sending special videotaped messages of support. Malala’s birthday, July 12, has been declared a special day of action for the rights of girls to education and her father, Ziauddin Yousufzai, has been appointed to help create a new ‘Malala Plan’ to get all girls into school around the world.
Malala has moved the world. It is a pity it took so terrible a crime to do so. The challenge ahead is also a big one. According to UN estimates, 61 million children do not go to school around the world; girls account for two-thirds of this number. Too many of these girls live in Pakistan. Female literacy in the country still stands below 40 per cent; in some parts of the tribal belt and Balochistan, even today, enrolment for girls at schools is dismally low. It is these realities that we have to change. More than any words, it is real change in her own country which would constitute a real tribute to Malala. For the sake of all girls, this change must come.
KARACHI: HRCP claims more than 8,500 women became victims of domestic violence. The Sindh Assembly should pass the domestic violence bill before its tenure comes to an end. This was the call that made the rounds at a conference held to observe the Human Rights Day at the PMA House on Monday.
“A debate on the bill is initiated after every few days in the provincial assembly but nothing has been done so far,” said the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) chairperson, Zohra Yusuf. Her organisation was among the nine civil society organisations, including the Aurat Foundation, PILER, Shirkat Gah, which came together at the seminar titled “Unite to End Violence against Women”.
“We were hoping the bill would be approved after it became a provincial subject. Now we have to pressure the government to pass the law before its term ends,” added Yusuf.
Last year, around 8,500 women became victims of violence and these figures are increasing, she quoted from the Aurat Foundation’s report though appreciating that cases are being registered in a better percentage. “In the past few years, seven pro-women bills have been passed but their implementation needs work,” Yusuf lamented.
Despite women parliamentarians and activists working together to draft the domestic violence bill, the law and home departments have come up with their own bill which does not include any punishments for the perpetrator, claimed Malka Khan of the Aurat Foundation.
Giving the example of Balochistan, Illahi Buksh, the director of Strengthening Participatory Organisation, remarked that human rights were the most violated rights in the country.
He suggested that next year, a larger convention should be held and reports regarding the state of human rights handed out to the masses so that victims get a voice.
With the general elections coming up, a movement should be started to encourage political participation of women, suggested Hina Tabassum from Forum Human Rights Pakistan. “In the 2008 elections, at 200 polling stations no women turned up to vote,” she said. “Human rights activists should work in such areas where women are deprived of their right to vote.”
Hassan Athar of the Asian Human Rights Commission stressed the need to recruit women as legal staffers as well as prosecutors in courts.
Citing the recent tragedy at garment factory fire that left over 250 people dead, Farhat Parween, the executive director of NOW communities, discussed the plight of women labourers. “A large number of women are employed at garment factories but these places are without health and safety provisions.
By: Harris Khalique
Believe it or not, the biggest challenge posed to the pre-modern state structures of the republic and the hierarchical, patriarchal and feudal mindset that has dominated us for ages comes from our school girls and young women from lower and middle-income social classes who work or go to college. It is a unique challenge, for this resistance to primordial norms has no nucleus. They may have some human rights defenders or women’s rights activists on their side but there is no political party or a recognised widespread social movement across the country that champions the cause of these girls and young women. And the custodians of the past, reactionaries and zealots, are terribly scared.
While there is an increasing tendency to fight the ideological war on the battleground of an oppressed Pakistani woman’s body and soul, girls and women continue to subvert these machinations in peaceful, non-threatening and sustained ways. I have said this before but when we mark the end of 16 days of activism for ending violence against women, it is important to recount the achievements of women in the face of all odds and remind us of the silver lining they have created for a country and society buckling under the overwhelming pressures of a crumbling economy and religious extremism.
These 16 days of activism are observed to commemorate the sacrifice of the Mirabal sisters in 1960. Out of four sisters, three were killed on November 25, 1960 by the forces of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. In 1999, the UN General Assembly declared the date of their murder as the international day of ending violence against women. Since then, from November 25 to December 10 – the international human rights day – 16 days of activism are observed globally by states, human rights groups, civil society organisations and women’s associations. The Mirabal sisters were fighting political oppression and struggling for democracy and freedom. These sisters, along with their husbands were interrogated, imprisoned and tortured on several occasions before being brutally killed.
Minerva was the first to become politically active among the sisters and then converted others to her cause. Organisations and networks across the spectrum have been holding events to mark these days across Pakistan for the past many years. A significant event this year was the coming together of all major networks and institutions in Islamabad on December 6. They organised a moot court where some celebrities questioned parliamentarians on pro-women laws, their enactment and enforcement. The jury comprised women who had been subjected to various forms of violence by their own families, husbands or in-laws. Most heart-wrenching were the accounts of acid burn victims.
But when we see that the extremists in our society fully recognise the threat to their idea of the world, there is need for us to acknowledge, celebrate and support the passion and tenacity of Pakistani girls and women. It is our school girls, heads bare or with scarves wrapped around, in cities, towns and villages who continue to go to their schools to be educated. Some of them walk miles, some take buses and vans and some are dropped off by their fathers or brothers on bicycles and motorbikes. They spend hours just to get to their schools – without boundary walls, toilet facilities, and decent classrooms. The bombing of hundreds of schools in Swat and other areas, the invasion of their school in Rawalpindi, the injuries inflicted upon their sisters like Malala fail to stop them.
They go to their colleges – ridiculed at times by community elders, teased and harassed on the way, sometimes finding no one to instruct them, without access to computers and libraries. These girls have not let a boy top any of the secondary or higher secondary examinations taken by various boards across Pakistan in the last twenty years. Their numbers in universities, medical colleges, architecture and engineering schools, law colleges and accountancy firms are increasing phenomenally. They dominate the student strength in places like Karachi, Punjab and Peshawar universities.
Women in our rural areas have always worked alongside men in farms and reared livestock. This was in addition to bringing potable water from an external source in case there was no water supply, which was usually the case. Raising children and running the household was not even seen as work. In recent years, more women from urban lower middle income families have taken to wage labour. Their work force participation is on the rise. From factories and retail outlets to offices and banks, women have made their presence felt. They continue to bear the full burden of domestic responsibilities in addition to bringing their hard-earned income home. A girl from a village in Nowshera, Khyber Pakhtunhwa, once told me that when she insisted on working in an office after completing her education and succeeded in convincing her father, the whole family was castigated. She said, “We were isolated from the whole family. Our relatives stopped coming to see us. They would tease my brother and called him baighairat (honourless). He would be scorned because his sister worked in an office where men also worked. Sometimes my mother and elder would get angry and frustrated. They wanted me to leave work. But I decided not to stop.”
Women offering domestic help to middle- and high-income families are in many cases sole breadwinners supporting their large families who live in squatters within cities or in villages they have come from. They are treated shabbily in many homes and work for more than 12 hours a day. Their men are either sick, addicted to drugs or have meagre incomes. On the other hand, it must also be recognised that professional women coming from more fortunate backgrounds are playing a more active role in the job market, and are making a mark for themselves in high profile jobs. They do not sit idle like the rich ladies of the past. Without the participation of women from different social strata, the country’s formal and informal economies will come to a standstill. In rural and semi-urban Pakistan, women provide basic services to their communities – whether as lady health workers or primary school teachers.
After decades of martial laws, with intermittent short-term civilian interludes, the democratically-elected parliament is completing its full term. But there is no denying the challenges faced by our economy and polity today. I maintain that there has to be supremacy of the elected parliament if the country is to remain stable. But this will not suffice if a civilian government’s performance is not improved in the areas of economy, governance, accountability and transparency. However, what a total of 22 percent women parliamentarians have achieved and contributed in legislative work over the past four and a half years is highly commendable. Across party divides, they have galvanised support for seven pro-women bills. They have dominated parliamentary proceedings in such a way that more than 70 percent of the total bills that were tabled came from them. They have been vocal in asking for the repeal or amendments to anti-women and anti-minority laws that were made a part of our system under Gen Ziaul Haq.
However, religious extremism is not merely a threat. It is a potent force capable of rolling back whatever women have achieved over the years. It is time for the state of Pakistan to be categorical and decisive in its support to women’s rights to education, employment, political participation and safe private and public spaces. Actions speak louder than words.
By: Jamal Khurshid
The Sindh High Court (SHC) on Tuesday issued notices to the advocate general of Sindh, the Thatta SSP and others on a petition filed on behalf of a couple seeking protection against a Jirga order for their killing in the name of honour.
The petitioner, Mohammad Ramzan Brohi, submitted that his son Wahid Dino married Rasheeda on September 3, but the Jirga in the Keenjhar Lake area refused to accept their marriage, and ordered their killing as Karo and Kari.
He said the couple were hiding to protect their lives as three influential persons of a tribe, Saleem, Fareed and Jummo, were bent on killing his son and daughter-in-law. Issuing notices to the prosecutor general, the advocate general and the SSP Thatta, the court directed the police to provide protection to the couple.
Meanwhile, the court issued notices to the SSP Khairpur Mir and others on a petition of another couple, Irfana and Nezam, against harassment. The petitioners said that they married of their free will on November 26, but they were facing harassment at the hands of police.
The court was informed that one of Irfana’s family members registered a case against her spouse and police were conducting raids to arrest him and his family. The court restrained the police from taking any coercive action against the couple, and directed the respondents to file comments on the petition.