honor2

In August 1998, Zarina 0and her alleged paramour, Suleiman, were killed in village Gul Mohammad Brohi, Larkana district, by Zarina's three brothers.

In April 1998, a young man in the Punjab village Chak No. 65, axed his mother, Ghulam Bibi, to death after she was traced by her family and brought back home following her supposed elopement with a man.

In Kot Addu, near Multan, Naziran, a mother of six was axed to death by her brother on suspicion of an illicit relationship in November 1997.

On 29 April 1999, Shama Bibi, 16, wife of Saif Khan, living in Kahuta, Punjab, was shot by her husband on suspicion of her having an illicit relationship. She received bullet injuries in her abdomen and her condition was stated to be critical; it is not known if she survived.

On 6 January 1999, Ghazala was set on fire by her brother in Joharabad, Punjab province on suspicion of illicit relations with a neighbour. The burned and naked body reportedly lay unattended on the street for two hours as nobody wanted to have anything to do with it.

In Pakistan, hundreds of women, of all ages, in all parts of the country and for a variety of reasons connected with perceptions of honour are killed every year. The number of such killings appears to be steadily increasing as the perception of what constitutes honour - and what damages it - steadily widens. Often honour killings are carried out on the flimsiest of grounds, for instance when a wife does not serve a meal quickly enough or when a man dreams that his wife betrays him (see below). As state institutions - the law enforcement apparatus and the judiciary - have dealt with such crimes against women with extraordinary leniency, and as the law provides many loopholes for murderers in the name of honour to get away, the tradition remains unbroken. In fact, more and more killings committed for other motives take on the guise of honour killings on the correct assumption that they are rarely -- and if so, only lightly -- punished.

Originally a Baloch and Pashtun tribal custom, honour killings are now reported not only in Balochistan, the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Upper Sindh which has a strong Baloch influx, but in Punjab province as well. Honour killings are no longer only reported from remote rural areas but also - though less frequently - from towns and cities. The modes of killing vary somewhat. In Sindh, a kari (literally 'a black woman') and a karo ('a black man') are more ritualistically killed and hacked to pieces, often in view of and with the implicit or explicit sanction of the community. In Punjab, such killings usually take place by shooting and appear more often based on individual decisions, occurring in an urban context and not always perpetrated in public.

The victims include young pre-pubescent girls, unmarried young girls and women, old women, including grandmothers, married women and widows. The mere allegation of girls and women having entered illicit sexual relationships usually suffices for their male relatives to take the law into their own hands and to kill them. The women are usually not given an opportunity to respond to such allegation. An allegation is enough to defile a man's honour, and therefore enough to kill a woman - and the man with whom she is alleged to have behaved 'improperly', if he can be found.

According to the non-governmental Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), 888 women were reported deliberately killed in 1998 in Punjab alone. Of these, 595 killings were carried out by relatives; of these 286 were reportedly killed for reasons of honour. The Sindh Graduates Association said that in the first three months of 1999 alone, 132 honour killings had been reported in Sindh. Everyone contacted by Amnesty International about the incidence of honour killings in Pakistan held that the real number of such killings is vastly greater than the number reported.

An analysis of data on karo-kari killings collected by the Special Task Force for Sindh of the HRCP during 1998 highlights several remarkable features of honour killings in that province: In a total of 196 cases reported in Sindh, 255 persons were killed, including 158 women and 97 men. The data does not in all cases include information about the perpetrators, but of 154 persons killed for reasons of honour where the relation of the perpetrators to the killed person is given,

· in 46 instances when both a karo and a kari were killed, exactly one half of the killings were carried out by the husband of the kari and the other half by male relatives of the women concerned;

The fact that male relatives of the women concerned are so frequently perpetrators of the killings reflects the conviction that marriage and fidelity are not a matter between husband and wife but relate to the family and that a woman's assumed infidelity reflects on the honour of the entire family. While in the majority of cases, husbands, fathers or brothers commit the killings of girls and women in the name of honour alone or together with male relatives, in some cases, tribal councils or jirgas decide that they should be killed and send out men to carry out the deed. A jirga of members of the Afridi tribe living in Karachi decided that Riffat Afridi and Kunwar Ahsan were to be killed when they got married against Riffat Afridi's family's wishes. In March 1998, the husband, Kunwar Ahsan, was shot at by his wife's relatives. He remains permanently disabled. While the couple are still seeking a way to settle in another country, the jirga has vowed to find and kill them wherever they go.¹¹

Large sections of society share traditional conceptions of honour and approve of honour killings - even mothers whose daughters have been killed on grounds of honour. Journalist Nafisa Shah reported the response of family members of women killed for honour: After Zarina and her alleged paramour, Suleiman, were killed by Zarina's three brothers in August 1998 in a village in Larkana district, Zarina's mother said, "there is no grief in ghairat [honour], it was right to kill them. They saw them together and they killed them." She and other women of the family were more concerned about her sons' arrest and the fact that their wives and children had no one to look after them. In another village near Warah, district Larkana, 18-year-old Aminat and her alleged paramour Azizullah were killed by Aminat's brothers and brothers-in-law. Aminat's mother-in-law expressed similar sentiments to the journalist: "Look, it was here that she was killed. We were all here. We saw them together all the time... I have been robbed, my honour has been robbed, I have been violated. This was a zulm [oppression, injustice] against me. So we axed her." Aminat's killers expressed the same conviction that they had done the right thing. Others in the two villages doubted Zarina's and Aminat's guilt but the common assumption was that if they were guilty their killing was justified.

Even educated women appear not to have dispensed with internalized customs and traditions which directly deprive them of dignity and often of life itself. Samia Sarwar's mother, a doctor, facilitated the honour killing of her daughter in April 1999 when Samia sought divorce from a severely abusive husband (see case details below). Shahtaj Qisalbash, witness and hostage during the killing, reported that Samia's mother was "cool and collected during the getaway, walking away from the murder of her daughter as though the woman slumped in her own blood was a stranger". Similarly a woman activist in Karachi told Amnesty International how a woman near Sukkur refused to give police a charpoi [string bed] to carry her dead daughter who had been killed as a kari in front of her mother's house.

Honour killings are by no means confined to remote rural areas. They have been reported, though less frequently, in urban settings, sometimes among the urban elite. Samia Sarwar was killed on grounds of honour in April 1999 in Lahore (see below); Riffat Afridi and Kunwar Ahsan were attacked in Karachi for having defiled Riffat's family's honour by marrying against their wishes. A Faisalabad-based film producer on 16 February 1999 allegedly strangled his 28-year-old wife and mother of a small child at his rented studio office at Allama Iqbal Town on suspicion of her illicit relationship with another man.¹²

The frequency and randomness of karo-kari incidents contribute to an atmosphere of fear among young women in Pakistan. Human rights activists in Balochistan told Amnesty International that women facing the danger of being branded siahkari [black women] by the merest chance contact with a man not belonging to their families, are driven into ever more profound seclusion. Woman poet Attiya Dawood quoted a 13 or 14-year old girl in a small Sindhi village: "What is there to my body' ... Is it studded with diamonds or pearls' My brother's eyes forever follow me. My father's gaze guards me all the time, stern, angry ... Then why do they make me labour in the fields' Why don't they do all the work by themselves' We, the women, work in the fields all day long, bear the heat and the sun, sweat and toil and we tremble all day long, not knowing who may cast a look upon us. We stand accused and condemned to be declared kari and murdered."¹³

Everyone is entitled without distinction to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language...

- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 2

Standards of honour and chastity are not equally applied to men and women in Pakistan though the honour code in theory applies to both genders equally. In surveys conducted in the North West Frontier Province and in Balochistan, men and women stated that in their communities, men often go unpunished for 'illicit' relationships whereas women are killed on the merest rumour of 'impropriety', any form of sexual contact outside marriage . Some towns and cities in Pakistan reportedly have red light districts and the regional trade in women for prostitution is reported in the media and noted by human rights groups. A Sindhi journalist activist was quoted in a monthly magazine as saying: "Ninety per cent of the young men in my village are having affairs, but at the same time they talk of nothing but ghairat [honour]... They have affairs but they are ready to kill any man who they think may be having an affair with their sister - and they kill her too."¹⁴ Other male sexual activities, including homosexuality, reportedly occur in Baloch and Pashtun society but are ignored, perhaps tolerated and not punished.

Honour killings are also reported from the Pakistani community living abroad. In the UK, the Nottingham crown court in May 1999 sentenced a Pakistani woman and her eldest son to life imprisonment for murdering the woman's daughter, 19-year-old Rukhsana Naz, a pregnant mother of two children, in Derby in March 1998. Rukhsana was perceived by the family to have brought shame on them by having a sexual relationship outside marriage. Her brother reportedly strangled Rukhsana while her mother held her down.

British MP Ann Cryer in February 1999 in the House of Commons raised the case of Zena Briggs who had married an English man against her parents' decision to marry her to a cousin in Pakistan whom the young woman considered wholly unsuitable. Ann Cryer said: "To this day, a death sentence is hanging over them and through the years this otherwise decent Bradford Asian family have employed private detectives, bounty hunters and hit men to seek out their once much loved daughter for the purpose of killing her and her husband." A Pakistani woman and her British husband have described in a memoir the life they have had to lead in hiding for the last six years, following persistent threats to their lives when they married against her family's wishes.¹⁵

International support for women fleeing abroad when they fear for their lives from their families' death threats has been hesitant. The threat to the lives of women who refuse to accept their fathers' decisions relating to their marriages has only recently been recognized as a ground for granting asylum to such women.¹⁶ In a landmark decision, the UK House of Lords in March 1999 ruled that two women who had come to Britain after rumours about their having illicit relationships were spread in Pakistan, had a well-founded fear of persecution as members of a particular social group, namely women, who experience discrimination and oppression because they occupy a lower status than men in Pakistani society. They were consequently granted refugee status in the UK.¹⁷

¹¹ For details of the case see: Pakistan: No progress on women's rights, AI Index: ASA 33/13/98.

¹³ Attiya Dawood, "Karo-kari: A question of honour, but whose honour?", in: Feminista, 2 (3/4), April 1999.

¹⁶ See a recent Canadian decision: CRDD M97-06821et al., Michnick, Arvanitakis, July 14, 1998.

¹⁷ The jugment can be found on the web site http://www.parliament.uk/ under House of Lords, judgments.