Nawaz Sharif Plays Lady Macbeth

While public discourse about Kosovo continues and may never reach exhaustive heights, domestic violence in Pakistan
remains a silent cry -- a cry that sometimes creeps up on you with its haunting loudness and shakes you to the core. I read a
domestic violence story from Dawn and was enveloped by nightmares later.

A woman was set aflame right outside my school. She shrieked and cried for help in her tortured pain, as her body, an
orange blaze, floated as if in another dimension. I felt young and helpless, yet acutely observant of her face, the way the fire
pierced her body, charring her skin, melting her bones, and through the smoke and red, I saw her face. Her chacha stood
nearby with his back towards this restless living fire. His glasses held in his hands, he wiped his eyes and silently wept. She
looked at me and us as we stood protected in our school courtyard, horridly mesmerized by the spectacle. She didn't seem
needy and helpless anymore. The pain of her body had dissolved any instinct of self-preservation. She now panicked for
death to come swiftly. The uniformed chowkidar held us back saying this was a private and not a police matter. He chacha
turned around to see if death had come swiftly so he could pick up her remains, his property, for a burial.

When I woke up I thought of Samia Sarwar who was shot dead in the law offices of Asma Jahanghir and Hina Jilani.
Awakened from my nightmare, I stepped warily into the living reality of women like Samia Sarwar. Seeking dissolution of
her abusive marriage, she appears at her lawyer's office on April 6th, 1999 and is killed with a bullet through her head. That is
it! That is the end of her life, the end of motherhood for two little boys, and the end of any sense of autonomy that she miserably enough
thought she could assert. Her father's brother flings out a gun and at the end of a gory drama, there is only blood, bullet holes,
and a sad episode of domestic violence (for the story see Dawn article).

Domestic violence in Pakistan is a crime in which the government is complicit. I have often heard Pakistanis, representative
of the government or not, dismiss domestic violence as a private matter. People tend to blame culture and societal attitudes
as if these are non-transient things that we ve inherited historically and now these form an innate part of our existence.
While people can shake their hands in as much apathy as they want, the government of Pakistan at least needs to respond
immediately. Unless and until it does so, its hands are as bloody as anyone else s.

First, Pakistan does not have domestic violence laws that can be used to specifically prosecute crimes of domestic violence.
Although enacting such laws will not eliminate the problem overnight, not enacting such laws reflects a condoning of
domestic violence by Pakistan. India has enacted specific legislation for dowry deaths and although this does not in any
meaningful way affect the prevalence of such deaths or other instances of domestic violence, at least the government has
postured itself against a gender oppressive institution.

There are criminal provisions in the Pakistan Penal Code pertaining to grave bodily injury that can be used by victims of
domestic violence, but these are not sufficient. The government needs to talk of domestic violence in criminal terms,
keeping in sight that law and governmental stances can potentially shape social consciousness.

Second, we need to call domestic violence a crime at every level -- not just when we converse about relatives and friends
who experience it, but at every governmental level. During several visits to Abbassi Shaheed hospital in Karachi recently, I
was horrified by their records of domestic violence. There is one little room cramped from floor to top with dusty steel
shelves and journals which are falling apart with time and neglect. These thousand or so journals record the crimes suffered
by the people of Karachi including poisoning by accident or deliberation, road traffic accidents (abbreviated RTAs), first to
third degree burns with a column signifying the percentage of the body burnt, assaults with or without objects, and the
conveneient miscellaneous injuries and casualties. The most common assault weapons were described as sharp metal objects
or blunt object . The most common poison employed were chemicals found in household products, includung phenyl, dettol,
and certain lotions and aspirin overdoses.

Any attempt to decipher the status of domestic violence in Pakistan was futile. It would require sifting through incoherent
logs, separating females from males, and determining what was an authentic accident versus what was labeled so under
family and bribal coercion. A handful of cases were actually labeled as domestic violence.

To put things briefly, these were the government s records of crimes of domestic violence which could later be used for
prosecution. Prosecution begins with medical data, and when such data is so grossly recorded, the government's complicity in
violence against women is not merely speculative. For the government to be unaccountable for crimes committed on
women's bodies, it must clean up its books and implement and monitor an effective recording system that would at least
create the semblance of a starting point for prosecution.

Of course hospitals are just an example of the governmental system that dismisses and hence perpetuates domestic violence.
The shambles and disarray of the room at Abbassi Shaheed are perhaps a metaphor for the system at large. Our judges,
prosecutors, courts, police stations and police surgeons are no better and together form a systemic public culture that
condones domestic violence.

Third, Pakistan must fulfill international obligations. It ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of
Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in March 1996. While the government may have ratified such a convention for
political reasons, it is grossly violating its international obligations by not submitting annual reports to the convention or
changing matters domestically. Such a submission would initiate a dialogue about domestic violence.

Lastly the government of Pakistan needs to engage in a long term internal and cross cultural dialogue about domestic
violence. The purposes of such dialogue would be multi-fold, but specifically a search for long-termed solutions and
awareness raising. While this is the most important point in some sense, I need not say more because people in the field
would have numerous ideas.

Amidst all this Nawaz Sharif is too busy shopping in London and closing down the New York embassy indiscriminately.
Nawaz Sharif has quick and short sighted fixes for problems that are so engraved in society. Domestic violence is so
pervasive that women's groups conservatively estimate 70% of Pakistani women are subjected to domestic violence (see
Amnesty International article). Among quick fixes, Pakistan's favorite solution is the cruel
and inhuman death penalty. Instead of finding real solutions, the government thinks the fear of the noose will shake
everybody into obedience. For example in 1996 Nawaz Sharif increased the penalty for gang rape from 25 years behind bars
to the death penalty. But of course domestic violence isn't even a crime, so the fear of the noose for obedience to what?

While there were protests against the tragic death of Samia Sarwar, there were other kinds of protests as well. Hundreds of
jamat-e-ulema-e-islam (JUI) protesters demanded the immediate closure of Asma Jahanghir's Dastak which they alleged
was being used for brainwashing innocent Pakistani girls to revolt against Islamic laws and customs and demanded her
hanging (see article).

Nawaz Sharif and various government institutions have women's blood on their hands while taliban style jamatis train us
about women s rights. We re truly being ushered into a new millenium.