2. NO BETTER THAN A MAN?: BENAZIR BHUTTO UNDER FIRE
3. PAKISTAN'S NEW ARMY: GIRLS IN SCHOOL
4. WHEN HONOUR BECOMES DISHONOURABLE
"I don't want to wear the burqa (a full body shroud with a net-like perforated cloth for the eyes)," my wife, Shazia, said emphatically. She was watching televised coverage of the National Assembly's passage of the 15th constitutional amendment last October which would make Islamic teachings supreme law in Pakistan. "I would rather die than wear it."
As Shazia, a 28-year-old college-educated primary school teacher, sees it she already dresses in compliance with Islamic dictates. She wears shalwar kamez (baggy pants worn underneath a long-sleeved and lose ankle-length dress) and hijab (an unstitched scarf covering her head and shoulders).
Shazia is among the many Pakistani women thrown into panic by the proposed new amendment. By making the Shariah (set rules as ordained in the Koran), and Sunnah (practices of the Prophet) supreme law in Pakistan, this amendment could result in a series of repressive measures against women including the way they dress, say women's activists. They fear that Pakistan will became like its neighbor and client, Afghanistan's Taliban regime in which women are denied fundamental rights including free movement, obtaining formal education and participating in economic activities like working.
"The government wants to impose a Taliban-style theocratic rule in Pakistan," said Asma Jehagir, Chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.
Added Rashida Patel, President of Pakistani Women Lawyers Association: If the 15th amendment passes "what then stops them [the government] from interfering in our personal lives and telling us how we should live? The repercussions of this bill are endless."
The 15th amendment still awaits passage by the Senate where the government lacks the required two-thirds majority needed. But if the Senate does not pass the bill, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who is determined to make the bill law, may seek to get it passed through a joint sitting of the parliament (National Assembly and Senate) or through a nationwide referendum.
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She was once a model for feminists: a Harvard University graduate chosen over two brothers as her father's political successor; an opposition leader who endured imprisonment and house arrest; the first woman to rule an Islamic country; and a populist who presided over her nation's transition from martial rule to democracy.
But these days former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is being viewed by many as proof that female leaders are no better than male ones.
Having lost elections for a third term almost two years ago after dismissal for widespread corruption and mismanagement, the 45-year-old Bhutto is now fighting for her political survival and her life. Pakistani investigators uncovered foreign bank accounts in her and her family's name worth a staggering $1.4 to 1.6 billion. Ample evidence suggests the money came from an extensive pattern of kickbacks from foreign companies during the Bhutto Administration, most received by the prime minister's husband, Asif Ali Zardari. Also, Zardari has been imprisoned on charges that he murdered his wife's brother.
The Bhuttos' troubles are not just in Pakistan. In mid-July, a court in Switzerland, where the couple has bank accounts, charged Zardari with money-laundering, and was preparing to charge his wife also.
Although she admits to being wealthy and having bank accounts abroad, Bhutto has denied having looted money. Bhutto believes she and Zardari are being framed by her successor, Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif. In the Western limelight, Bhutto has blamed her problems on sexism: "I feel that the venom directed against me in the corruption charges, or the so-called murder charges against my husband, are due to the fact that I had challenged the entrenched culture of tradition and pride which predominated in the subcontinent for centuries,'' Bhutto said during the recent first summit of the Council of Women World Leaders at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, as reported in Reuters.
But most Pakistani female activists are not among Bhutto's defenders. Rahila Tiwana, a former student leader in Bhutto's party, said Bhutto herself benefited from that "centuries-old system of the subcontinent" she now blames for her problems, having inherited political power from her father.
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As a teenager, Zohra caused her family to be virtually ostracized by their neighbors in their village in the Thatta Sindh region of southern Pakistan. Her sin? She was a student.
Braving a distance of 10 kilometers on foot with her younger brothers to the nearest high school, Zohra was the only girl among , 500 students.Because of the social system in which boys and girls are allowed minimal contact, she could not even have a male friend.
But Zohra was determined to become a doctor. Her dream was to start a clinic in her hometown that would prevent the many annual deaths caused by snake bites and other epidemics.
"I felt lonely in my school as I was not allowed to play games with my class peers," Zohra recalled. "But I was determined to face the challenge."
Zohra never made it to medical school. But now aged 22 and to her parents' dismay still unmarried, she is curing another of her village's problems. She is teaching in a primary school for girls recently opened by the provincial government.
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Near Shikarpur district in Pakistan's Sindh province, there is a cemetery with a special area lined with rows of unmarked graves.
Here burials were performed without religious rites or the presence of mourners. Everyone knows the spot as "karian jo qabrustan," (graveyard of the blacks), those killed for having had illicit relations with a member of the opposite sex.
Among the graves is that of a 14-year-old girl who had the bad luck of being outdoors when a strange man came to her village. He asked her for directions, and she obliged as others watched their verbal exchange. A few hours later when she returned home, her brother-- ho believed that even talking with a strange man tainted his sister's honour--hacked both her and the stranger to death. The brother went to the police station with the bloody axe and was later released without punishment.
The story is one of many related by Pakistani women's and human rights activists, printed in newspapers, on file at police stations, or discovered by this journalist. The so-called honour killings of "Karo/Kari" (black men/black women) is a common tribal custom in the Sindh region. Although both sexes are at risk, many men escape death by running away or persuading the woman's relatives to accept cash, land or even women in marriage. Women rarely have such alternatives.
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