Ike, is this true about the karo-kari tribal custom? In Sindh of any places. That's Bhutto's province. If true, it just shows how Benazir always tried to look and appear international but is completely out of touch with domestic laws and turn the other way on this karo-kari custom taking place in her own backyard.
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Pakistan Girls Fall Prey to Barbaric Rites
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Ahmad Naeem Khan,OneWorld South Asia
LAHORE, Jan 13 (OWSA) - According to a Human Rights Commission of Pakistan report, 24 minor girls were killed for having illicit relations in the southern province of Sindh in 2002, victims of a feudal custom called karo-kari upheld by both courts and the police.
• Amnesty International
• Asian Human Rights Commission
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The report stated that girls aged between three and ten years were killed in this south Asian nation in 2002, many of them allegedly chopped into pieces and thrown into the river Indus.
Worse, of the 200 people arrested for their involvement in these honor killings, only eight could be prosecuted and punished while 70 murderers remained at large. Infact, due to the victims reluctance to lodge police cases, the first ever First Information Report (FIR) of a karo-kari murder under Section 302 of the Pakistan Penal Code was registered in Larkana in Sindh only in November 2001.
Under the barbaric laws of this custom, a girl suspected of having an extra-marital affair is labeled kari or black woman, while the suspected man is called karo or black man. Regarded as blots on the honor of the woman's family or tribe, instant murder of the accused is considered to be a social obligation.
According to the norms of the karo-kari custom, the mutilated body of the woman killed as kari is not even buried properly, but carelessly dumped or discarded.
The report said only ten percent of the victims appeared to be guilty of the offence they were accused of. Social activist from Hyderabad city in Sindh, Ahmad Raza, maintained that most cases were fabricated, fuelled by family and property feuds.
Dr Khalid Mehmood Soomro, general secretary of religious body, Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam Pakistan, stressed that the custom had no religious sanction. " Islam doesn't permit anyone to kill a woman on the mere charge of having illicit relations, material evidence is required and even if proved, the law does not allow her to be killed under the subterfuge of karo-kari " he said.
According to social worker, Waqas Mahmood Khan, there is no final bath or funeral prayer for the accused girl. No one is allowed to cry over her dead body. Infact the village honors the murderer. Separate graveyards for such women proliferate in the province of Sindh, one of the most famous located near the town of Nau Dero, the home town of former Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Khan said that " These incidents are usually ignored by government officials, especially in rural areas, where the culprits are either powerful or well connected or simply pay their way out of being caught and prosecuted."
He lamented that even the police attitude towards the killers was sympathetic. They were treated as though they had done something noble, so no serious investigation was carried out.
. To make matters worse, the courts too were lenient to offenders. Pakistan Supreme Court lawyer, Naveed Saeed, said, " The legal courts, where the trials of the murderers of the alleged karo and kari are held, grant them special concessions either by remitting their imprisonment, or bailing them out. Such relaxation of state laws regarding the most inhuman crime is wholly illogical, for rather than deterring the criminals, it encourages them."
Sir Charles Napier, British governor of the Sindh province in 1843, had ordered that the hand of the person who killed a woman under this brutal custom would be chopped as punishment, but even he failed to abolish it.
Director of child welfare organization Small Hands, Wajid Syed explained the root causes of this inhuman tradition, " They are multi-faceted and rooted in the cultural fabric of Sindhi rural society. They include exchange marriages, early marriages, forced marriages, family feuds, old tribal enmities, widespread illiteracy, poverty, and so on. The feudal lords here oppose any mass awareness to perpetuate their hegemony over the illiterate and suppressed masses." |
