Murder in the Name of Honor (15 page)

In Peshawar, in the North-West Frontier Province, twenty-nine-year-old Samia Sarwar was married off to her first cousin in 1989. During her decade-long marriage Samia was subjected to all forms of abuse by her husband. She left her husband briefly in 1995 after he pushed her down the stairs while she was pregnant with their second son.

During this time she stayed with her family. Her father was a businessman who had headed the Peshawar Chamber of Commerce and Industry, while her mother was a gynaecologist. Samia herself had a law degree and her sister studied medicine.

Although Samia and her husband both wanted a divorce, family pressures meant that the unhappy couple were forced to stay together. When Samia told her family she had fallen in love with an army captain and wanted to leave her husband, they allegedly threatened to kill her.
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Her parents sent her back to her husband and eventually, unable to stand a life of abuse any longer, she ran away on 26 March 1999, while her parents were on a trip to Saudi Arabia. She hoped to secure her divorce before they returned.

That's when Samia went to see a pair of remarkable lawyers, Hina Jilani and her sister Asma Jahangir, who were known for helping abused women.
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They had founded an all-female law firm in the early 1980s, which included a training school for lawyers along with a shelter for abused women. They were also the
founders of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, which they had established in 1986.

Jahangir, at just over five feet in height, was a tiny woman with an enormous mission. Along with her sister and her colleagues, they defended people sentenced to death by stoning (including a fourteen-year-old boy condemned to die for scribbling blasphemous graffiti on a the wall of a mosque) and sheltered women whose families wanted to murder them because they had deserted cruel husbands. She investigated the fate of prisoners who vanished in police custody and battled for their release through the courts and in the press. Needless to say, they had made plenty of enemies on the way. ‘People aren't willing to believe that these injustices happen in our society,' Jahangir told
Time
magazine, ‘but it's all going on next door.'

Their work was controversial and they were often threatened. Extremists once smashed Jahangir's car, attacked her driver and took her family hostage (they were released unharmed). As a result, the government assigned the two sisters their own police escorts.

The sisters took Samia in. She lived in their shelter and refused to meet with any of her male relatives. Her family then sent word through a government contact that they were willing to allow the divorce to take place and asked if they could meet her.

They also met with lawyer Aitzaz Ahsan, leader of the Opposition in the Senate (the Upper House of Parliament) and showed him the divorce papers they had brought from Peshawar, and assured him they only wanted their daughter to be happy. Samia agreed to meet her mother in the presence of Hina Jilani, but refused to see her father because she ‘hated him'.

Samia arrived at Jilani's office at around 6 p.m., while her mother, walking with a stick, arrived a few minutes afterwards, accompanied by Samia's uncle, Yunus Sarwar, and Habibur Rehman, their driver.

Jilani instantly sensed something was wrong and asked the two men to leave the room but Samia's mother said she depended on the driver to help her walk. At this moment Yunus Sarwar stood up and Rehman drew a gun, marched up to Samia and shot her in the head. He then fired at Jilani and fled down the corridor.

Samia's mother screamed and ran out of the room after the killer, her ‘limp' forgotten. Someone rang the alarm for the guards downstairs. Samia's uncle took an employee hostage to use as a shield to hide behind in case the security guards tried to stop him.

As he reached the exit, in a desperate attempt to escape the building, the driver fired at the plainclothes policeman who was supposed to be guarding Jilani. The policeman ducked behind a nearby reception counter and returned fire, fatally wounding Samia's killer.

Meanwhile, Samia's uncle and mother escaped with the abducted employee and drove to a hotel where the father was waiting. When they entered the room his first question was: ‘Is the job done?'

Back in her office, Jilani was relieved to find herself unharmed – but Samia lay face down in a pool of blood next to her desk, dead. The following day, demonstrators marched to the Lahore High Court, where several prominent citizens addressed the gathering and promised not to ‘let Samia's blood be spilt in vain'. They said that even if her own family had disowned her, she would be ‘buried honourably by us'.

Asma Jahangir proposed to erect a monument outside her office honouring the memory of women killed for ‘honour'. ‘We will cherish and treasure their names,' she vowed.

After the shooting Jilani spoke to reporters, saying:

On the two or three occasions that I met her personally to discuss her case, she repeatedly expressed fear of death at the hands of her family … She seemed well-educated. However, I had the
impression that she lacked confidence. I was surprised that a timid woman like her had resolved to take on the enmity of her family by resorting to legal action for divorce, which, according to her, the family was opposed to even after five years of separation from her husband … Samia was a frightened, unhappy woman who felt very alone in a predicament that she couldn't deal with confidently.

The fact that the shooting incident occurred in my office during a busy afternoon, it is obvious the perpetrators were convinced they were doing the right thing, were not afraid of publicity as they could count on widespread support and were therefore not inclined to hide their identity. They were possibly convinced the state would not take measures to hold them to account.

Jilani's comments proved accurate. Samia's father, who was the head of the Chamber of Commerce in Peshawar, was released on bail along with her uncle and mother. The investigation into their involvement was achingly slow because, the police said, ‘the case was complicated'.

The Minister of Women's Development made a statement in Washington on 10 April, four days after Samia's murder, pledging the government's commitment to women's rights in Pakistan. A representative from the Pakistani government also condemned the killing before the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

It is remarkable just how different this reaction was, performed in front of the eyes of the world, compared with the government's reaction at home. The local government didn't issue a statement for three weeks and then produced only a few noncommittal lines.

Pakistani newspapers reported that local people overwhelmingly sided with Samia's family. Many Pashtun said the murder should not be considered a crime since it was committed in accordance with tradition.

Both Jilani and Jahangir demanded proper legal investigations, a fair trial and a judicial inquiry headed by a Supreme Court judge to investigate almost three hundred cases of honour killings reported in 1998 in Pakistan. Instead, the Senate of Pakistan heavily criticized them for interfering. Pakistan People's Party Senator Iqbal Haider tried to present a resolution condemning the killing of Samia but Senator Ilyas Bilour's reaction was typical: ‘We have fought for human rights and civil liberties all our lives but wonder what sort of human rights are being claimed by these girls in jeans.'

Israrullah Zehri of the BNP, a secular, nationalist party, and Ajmal Khattak, the supposedly progressive leader of the ANP, shouted Haider down. Zehri held the view that Samia Sarwar had disgraced her family who had acted according to tradition. Some senators physically attacked Haider. Only four senators stood in support of the resolution: the PPP's Iqbal Haider, Aitzaz Ahsan, then leader of the Opposition in the Senate, the late Hussain Shah Rashdi, and the MQM's Jamiluddin Aali. Twenty-four senators, including recent presidential candidate Mushahid Hussain Syed and luminaries like Javed Iqbal and Akram Zaki, stood to oppose it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Senate rejected an amended resolution on so-called honour crimes in August of the same year.

The Sarhad Chamber of Commerce, of which Samia's father was the president, and other religious groups demanded in April that Jilani and Jahangir be arrested in accordance with ‘tribal and Islamic laws' for ‘misleading women in Pakistan and contributing to the country's bad image abroad'. Other religious organizations issued fatwas against the two lawyers, promising financial rewards for anyone who killed them. Even the then President, Pervez Musharraf, railed against Jilani and Jahangir, calling them unpatriotic.

Not long after this, five gunmen burst into Jilani's house, searching for her and her young son; luckily, neither were home. On another occasion, according to a report in
Time
magazine, a
policeman was caught creeping up to her house with a dagger in his hand.

Then – incredibly, unbelievably – on 11 May 1999, Samia's father filed a case at the police station accusing Hina Jilani and Asma Jahangir of abducting and murdering his daughter.

But despite this seemingly insurmountable opposition, Jahangir said that all the publicity was helping them to reach women across the country, to let them know that someone was fighting for them. The publicity also led to several television documentaries being aired about so-called honour crimes and violence against women, which have also helped to publicize the case.

Today, in addition to her work for the Human Rights Commission, Jahangir works as a UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, a job that has taken her to Afghanistan, Central America and Colombia.

In an interview for
Time
magazine in 2003, Jahangir said, with more than a little optimism, ‘Eventually things will have to get better. However, the way they will improve is not going to be because of the government or the political leadership, or the institutions of our country, most of which have actually crumbled. It will be the people of the country themselves who will bring about the change in society because they have had to struggle to fend for themselves at every level.'
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Jilani often tells the press that she will never forget Samia's murder. ‘I will probably never get over Samia's death. I have never witnessed that kind of violence first hand,' she said. ‘But as activists we have to fight back.'

As I wrote this section of the book in August 2008, I read a report about a dreadful killing. This atrocity took place in a remote region of the vast Pakistani province of Baluchistan. Initially, reports said three teenage girls, named Hameeda, Raheema and Fauzia, attempted to marry men of their own choosing, and were then
reportedly kidnapped by armed local tribesmen, as were two older women who were with them.

The five women were driven away to a desert area by men belonging to the Umrani tribe. The three teenagers were hauled out, beaten and shot. According to Human Rights Watch, they were thrown into a ditch, injured, but still alive. When the two older women, aged forty-five and thirty-eight, protested at what was happening, they too were forced into the ditch where they were buried with the teenagers.

Unbelievably, these killings were defended by senior politicians. Reacting to a female colleague's attempt to raise the issue in Parliament, Senator Israrullah Zehri said such acts were part of a ‘centuries-old tradition' and that he would ‘continue to defend them', adding, ‘only those who indulge in immoral acts should be afraid.'
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Iqbal Haider of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission said the two senators should be removed from Parliament. ‘They are as obscurantist as the Taliban ... these men have violated the constitution,' he said. Details of the incident only emerged after the local media began to draw international attention to the crime.

As I wrote this section, women's rights protesters gathered outside Parliament and government buildings in the major cities of Lahore and Karachi. I believe this is the most effective way to make their voices heard and to provoke a response from the government. Three suspects were finally arrested six weeks after the murder, as condemnation and protests against the outrage spread steadily across the country.

Pakistan has one of the worst records when it comes to so-called crimes of honour. As in Jordan, campaigners have fought a long and difficult battle to change the law – specifically to amend the heavily criticized Hudood Ordinance Laws, which governed the punishment for rape and adultery in Pakistan. These laws, enacted by military ruler Zia ul-Haq in 1979, criminalize adultery and
non-marital consensual sex. The most appalling aspect of these laws is that a rape victim can be prosecuted for adultery if she cannot produce four male witnesses to the assault.

The new Women's Protection Bill brought rape under the Pakistan Penal Code, which is based on civil law, not Sharia law. The Bill removed the right of police to detain people suspected of having sex outside of marriage, instead requiring a formal accusation in court. Under the changes, adultery and non-marital consensual sex are still offences but judges are allowed to try rape cases in criminal rather than Islamic courts, eliminating the need for the four witnesses and allowing convictions to be made on the basis of forensic and circumstantial evidence.

The amendments change the punishment for someone convicted of having consensual sex outside marriage to imprisonment of up to five years and a fine of ten thousand rupees. Rape is punishable with ten to twenty-five years' imprisonment, but with death or life imprisonment if committed by two or more persons together, while adultery remains under the Hudood Ordinance and is punishable with stoning to death.

Research by the Asian Human Rights Commission makes it clear that there has been almost no change in the number of incidents of violence against women since the Bill came into force in 2006. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan recorded over six hundred cases of ‘honour' killings in 2007, compiled from media reports. The actual number may be higher (various human rights organizations quote a figure of one thousand) as not all cases are reported. Figures presented to the Senate by the Federal Minister of the Interior provide evidence in favour of this. Between 1998 and 2003, the government states that 4,101 people were killed in so-called crimes of honour.