Editorial today...
in Daily Times..fighting injustice against the people of jihad..
No ‘ray of light’ for Zafran Bibi, Yunus Sheikh, Aslam Masih et al?
General Pervez Musharraf has declared that his victory in Tuesday’s referendum has brought a “ray of light” to Pakistan. Although his success is so “extraordinary,” to quote him again, that his exuberant supporters in the NWFP can brandish weapons in broad daylight, it’s no ray of light for either Zafran Bibi or Dr Yunus Sheikh or Aslam Masih or countless others in a similar predicament in their prison cells.
The 26-year-old girl will still be stoned to death for “adultery” if the sentence passed against her this month by a civil court in the NWFP under Zia-ul-Haq’s Hudood Ordinances is carried out. On Thursday, the same day that General Musharraf addressed the nation to make his tall claims, human-rights activists protesting the ruling against Zafran Bibi outside his office were baton-charged by the police, the same police which did nothing against the crime of public display of weapons by his exuberant supporters.
There is much about the ruling against Zafran Bibi to make compassionate people indignant. She says the basis of her supposed adultery was that her brother-in-law raped her. Unfortunately, the court did not accept her defence. Worse, it acquitted two male suspects in the case, without reasonable explanation. Perhaps the judge has never come across reports and figures of family sexual abuse – sexual abuse by males, that is – which appear in our press regularly; one may also wonder how many husbands he has sentenced for cutting off their wives’ noses – a lingering practice in Pakistan’s rural areas – under suspicion of adultery. However, to declare someone a liar is one thing, to condemn her or him to a horrible death without sound reason is quite another. It is a judgement no court in a more civilized society will accept as legal, because it is parallel to the rulings of judges in the Middle Ages who condemned criminals to be “hanged, drawn and quartered”.
Dr Yunus Sheikh was sentenced to death for a fictional crime under another of Zia-ul-Haq’s handiworks, the Blasphemy Ordinance. Like the Hudood Ordinances and the Zina Ordinance, this is a legislation against which human rights organizations in Pakistan and across the world, including Amnesty International, are up in arms. He was condemned to die – not through stoning, for which perhaps he ought to be grateful – by an additional judge of a trial court. Indeed, he was deemed to be already guilty before he received his dubious sentence because his hearings had to be conducted inside the jail for fear that in a regular courtroom some fanatic would “execute” him before the verdict.
Admittedly, President Musharraf has taken some positive actions during his rule. The ban on the jihadi and sectarian groups, however lukewarm, has restored a degree of sanity to Pakistani society which before Zia was, in so many ways, a model of secular restraint despite officially being otherwise. Now at least we can once again welcome in the New Year without worrying about landing up in the slanger, something our clerics had declared un-Islamic, with their armed goons making sure that Pakistanis would not participate in a universal rite of passage. Other than that, the General’s oft-proclaimed “liberalism” has been mostly symbolic – like that photograph with the dogs in his arms which he would rather not care to recall – and about as effective as his government’s celebrated campaign against illegal weapons.
The cases of Zafran Bibi and Dr Shaikh and Aslam Masih are test cases for General Musharraf following his overwhelming “victory” in the referendum. With ninety-seven-point-something percent of the seventy-one-point-something percent of the voters who turned out saying yes to his continuance in office, his mandate is far “heavier” than that of Mr Nawaz Sharif, who, in any case, didn’t have the army under his thumb. They are test cases also because the action he took against the jihadis were at least partly under pressure form the United States and other Western powers. Thus these cases need his personal intervention, and there is no reason he cannot intervene if he has the will to act. In fact, Aslam Masih’s blasphemy case comes up for hearing before the Additional and Sessions Court in Faisalabad on May 7 and a ray of light would definitely bring joy to his life.
General Pervez Musharraf must deliver on his promise and move on from lauding Atatürk’s reforms to undoing Zia-ul-Haq’s legacy of witch-hunts (there are over 300 blasphemy cases pending to date). He has been in power two-and-a-half years and it’s about time he started the process of removing from the statute books all the unjust laws that have oppressed and victimized innumerable individuals like Zafran Bibi and Dr Sheikh and Aslam Masih et al. If he doesn’t, his supporters will conclude that he is merely engaged in perpetuating his rule rather than bravely charting the desired course for Pakistan. |
