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What Ails the BPO Industry in Pakistan? What about these dogs?

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007 02 05 story_5-2-2007_pg3_3

For Mukhtaran, Kainat et al —Angela Williams

Over the last week the national news has been even more horrific and cringe-making than one would have imagined possible in a country not actively under siege by marauding, raping enemy troops, nor groaning under some overt form of totalitarianism. Words almost fail me...but not quite.

In Sindh, a sixteen-year-old girl has been publicly humiliated and raped by eleven men because her cousin married a woman whose men-folk didn’t like it. So the scum men-folk naturally decided to take out their grievance against one little girl, eleven of them. (One report states that fifteen men were involved.)

When will this cease, this organised, unashamed bullying and hurting of girls and women, sanctioned, or indeed instigated, by criminals referred to as ‘village elders’? This is a strange name for them, suggesting as it does that there is some traditional, time-honoured sagacity behind gang rape. And in case anyone is under the idiot misapprehension that there is anything ‘sexy’ about this particular form of male violence, the young girl is in a very un-sexy hospital recovering from her injuries; her mental scarring will never completely heal.

How many Mukhtaran Mais must become the innocent victims of male gang viciousness and have their lives marred forever? When will the ubiquitous ‘influential people’, who seem to crop up like fungus in every case, perverting and distorting the process of law, develop a sense of decency, justice and conscience, good Muslims that they no doubt are? Apparently there is currently a bunch of them pressurising the injured girl’s father to drop his complaint, perhaps because the eleven (fifteen?) rapists come from ‘good’ families. (And when will people stop using this silly phrase! ‘Good’ is not a synonym for ‘monied’. I’m an English teacher and I’m telling you: it’s not.)

It’s no good our getting all excited and showing off to Hillary Clinton our mixed marathons, as Body Shop, Next and MacDonalds set up shop in Pakistan’s major cities, giving the impression that all is enlightened modernity and Western moderation, when pre-medieval stuff like this goes on and attitudes to women are barbaric and apelike. On second thoughts, I don’t think apes behave this badly and I apologise to any ape who may be reading this.

Everyone perhaps knows that Mukhtaran Mai was awarded the Fatima Jinnah Gold Medal for Bravery in August 2005 because she had become the torchbearer for abused and powerless women who might be encouraged by her example to stand up and demand justice instead of committing suicide as many women do, in the West as well, after being raped. Whether this medal was actually awarded in recognition of her courage, or as a form of whitewash is not fully clear to me. She had, after all, only two months earlier, been put on the Exit Control List and had her passport removed by the embarrassed, jittery government of Pakistan to prevent her taking up Amnesty International’s invitation to go to London and speak of the plight of women in rural Pakistan. New York was also ready to hear her story, but what use was the American visa stamped in her passport when the passport was confiscated?

Such harassment by the government of an uneducated, impoverished village woman whose adolescent brother had been kidnapped and sodomised by three men for allegedly committing zina (for which no evidence was ever produced) and who was then herself seized and repeatedly raped while her father and uncle were forced to stand helplessly by! Sensitive.

Mai has recently stated that the ordeal of the sixteen-year-old last week appears to render null and void all Mai’s campaigning over the past couple of years against such barbarity.

But there’s more. In Multan, a man and a woman in their forties were tied to a tree last week by the woman’s brothers and two ‘helpers,’ and were hit with bricks until they were dead. One of the arrested brothers said that he and his fellow avengers could not tolerate the immoral act of the couple sleeping together. Reasonable enough, I suppose. Especially if you live in a place called Donga Bonga.

As I write, today’s newspaper has just been delivered and I can scarce believe my eyes. Another little girl, this time aged thirteen, was reportedly abducted from Larkana on 10th January and repeatedly raped in several different localities by a number of men, but police are reportedly reluctant to arrest the alleged culprits because they are supported by members of the ruling party in the area. Now these blokes must come from really good families; they’re way above the law. Shame on these ruling damn parties, and shame on Pakistan for its festering, antiquated system that has fostered such chaos for decades. Is this what Quaid-e-Azam, a barrister, had in mind sixty years ago for the Muslims of India, when Pakistan was created with such fervour and high hopes for a secular and just society?

But it seems that they’re going to have to mint Fatima Jinnah Gold Medals for Bravery on a conveyor belt quite soon, because the thirteen-year-old, Kainat Soomro, and her parents went on a hunger strike outside the Larkana Press Club, despite the fact that Kainat was threatened with death by her attackers if she breathed a word of what happened to her. Her alleged attackers are Shahban Shaikh, Naomi alias Ihsan Thebo, Roshan Thebo and Kalimullah Thebo.

Greetings to these fine, brave men; may Allah grant them justice.

The writer is the Academic Co-ordinator and a founder of Bloomfield Hall Schools. She has been teaching in Lahore for the past 20 years and has directed numerous highly acclaimed stage plays.