Friday 24 July 2009

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http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/life/2006/01/20/stories/2006012000160300.htm

Cosmopolitan Karachi?
Hasan Mansoor
The growing influence of anti-women `tribal customs' in Karachi, a cosmopolitan city in Pakistan, is a cause for great concern.
It is better to die than to see criminals and sinners set free," shouted Mariam Bano as she attempted suicide at a courtroom in Karachi, when she heard the judge grant bail to men who had accepted money for letting off those who gang-raped her. The sessions court judge granted bail to two of the elders who had held a jirga (tribal council) in Karachi, accepted a fine of Rs 1.5 lakh ($1=Rs 60) from the men who raped Bano, and exonerated them from the crime.
Bano, 33, smashed herself against a glass window in the court and would have jumped from the two-storey building had her brother, Hussain, and husband, Rasheed Chandio, not held her back. Younus Sial, his friend Asmatullah Abro, a teacher by profession, and two other men, whom Bano did not recognise, kidnapped her in July 2005. They drove her in a car to an unknown location where another man was waiting for them. The five then stripped and gang-raped her.
"Sial beat me up with an electric wire and forced me to keep quiet and do whatever they ordered. The five men raped me, one after another," recalls a veiled Bano. She told her sister-in-law and husband Chandio about the incident. Chandio informed his uncles, Moharram and Hussain Chandio, who asked him not to report the matter to the police, as they wanted to decide the matter in a jirga. (Summoning a jirga can be lucrative to some groups.) At this jirga, which a local councillor also attended, Abro's father appeared on his behalf, while no one represented Sial.
The jirga imposed a fine of Rs 1.5 lakh on each of them. Sial's family refused to pay it while Abro's did. The jirga elders gave Rs 50,000 to Chandio, asking him to forget about the incident, while they kept the rest for themselves. However, Bano's elder brother reported both — the gang-rape and holding of the illegal jirga by the family elders — to the police. The police arrested the jirga elders and Abro, and produced them in court. Sial is still at large.
Moharram and Hussain Chandio were also arrested, but released on bail. The case became public when Bano attempted suicide in court. Police sub-inspector Shahid Qureshi says the rapists sent Bano home only in a burqa (veil). It is difficult for the police to produce evidence in court as her clothes are still missing.
The jirgas are common in Pakistan's rural areas where the feudal system is menacingly powerful. But the increasing influence of anti-women `tribal customs' in Karachi, a city that has successfully retained its cosmopolitan nomenclature since it emerged as a modern city around 200 years ago, has disturbed the civil society immensely. "This form of parallel judiciary is undoubtedly an alarming development, and it can be countered only by the government with the assistance of civil society," says Justice Nasir Aslam Zahid, a former Supreme Court judge now working for reforms in the women's prison at Karachi.
Assembling a jirga has been declared illegal by the provincial High Court of Sindh since April 2004. "Some rights organisations have conducted surveys about this development and are worried about the increasing influence of tribal customs in urban centres," says Nuzhat Shirin, Regional Director for Legislative Watch Programme of the Aurat Foundation. She says the Sindh provincial government was itself involved in spreading the menace. A jirga was held inside the Sindh chief minister's house over a marriage dispute in 2004. Chief Minister Arbab Ghulam Rahim, a tribal leader from the Thar Desert, has repeatedly justified the jirga system, saying there should be no objection to giving legal cover to jirga judgments. Recently, another jirga declared Dr Shazia Khalid a kari (a woman deserved to be killed for honour). Dr Khalid, an army doctor, was raped by a captain in Sui town of Balochistan. She was forced to flee to London along with her husband, after being threatened by her family members and some influential people in the government.
A few months ago, the provincial government drafted an ordinance granting powers to tribal leaders in Sindh to decide inter-tribal disputes, and sent it to the Governor for approval. However, due to pressure from human rights groups, the governor has not yet signed the draft.
The jirga system is not the only tribal custom that has blurred Karachi's modern image. "In the past, couples here could get married in court even if their parents were against it. But now parents forcibly stop such marriages," says Khawaja Naveed, a local lawyer. Once a marriage is registered in court, the police has to accept the couple as lawfully married. But often, the police arrests them outside the court, before they can register their marriage. Recently, the son of a car dealer managed to evade punishment for killing a young couple — Sumaira and Anila — after his father held a jirga, where the girls' relatives and other elders were invited. Sumaira's father, a taxi driver, was given some money as compensation for the murders.
Karachi is a cosmopolitan city and home to at least 14 million people, belonging to every community and region of Pakistan. "Each year a new city of around 400,000 people is created in Karachi, and half of them come from outside — mainly from areas where feudal and tribal customs dominate," says Tasneem Ahmed Siddiqui, an expert in urban housing planning.

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