honour killing in pakistan

The dead don't lie

Thursday, September 04, 2008 As if the original reports of five Baloch women being buried whilst still alive after being shot in the name of honour were not horrific enough; the post-mortem on two of them � three bodies are yet to be located � reveals yet more horror and exposes the lies of the police. The pathologist who carried out the post-mortem said that the women, aged about 20, had been severely tortured and then beaten to death. There were no marks of bullets anywhere on their bodies. This directly contradicts the statements of the Balochistan police who said that the bodies bore multiple bullet-wounds, including wounds to the head, and that the women must have been dead before they were buried. The Balochistan police have � under pressure from the centre � arrested at least two men who are said to have confessed to the crime, but the very last thing that they want to come out of all this is anything approaching the truth of what happened. Not everybody has behaved dishonourably in this 'matter of honour'. The interior minister had the good sense to reject the original report that the Balochistan police sent him, which was a cut-and-paste of extracts from newspapers � he rejected the second report as well and awaits a third. The federal law minister, Farooq Naek, caught the mood of the public and said on Wednesday that � 'those behind this crime will be given exemplary justice.' The media, despite the deprecating comments of Jan Mohammed Jamali, acting chairman of the Senate, has shone a light where light is rarely seen and where many would rather it was never seen at all. Credit must also go to the common man; as for perhaps the first time there is an honour-killing case that has finally brought out a sense of disgust and revulsion among a broad and deep cross-section of the wider population. It is not only the pundits and civil-society activists who are outraged, it is ordinary people as well; and this might be the case that finally tips the balance towards the rejection of such 'cultural practices' by those who had hitherto either condoned them or simply turned a blind eye. Let us now see robust support for the rule of law from the centre as well as from the provincial authorities. Let us see the lying and corrupt police officers who are complicit in this awful act brought to book as well as the murderers. Let us see those who committed the crime in a court of law in front of a judge who will not be swayed by culture or bhatta. What we will never see or hear is the written or verbal evidence of the women who were murdered � yet they did not die in vain, and the dead cannot lie. Their remains are yielding a truth that exposes the barbarity of their killers, a truth that is a dagger in the heart of the 'culture' that saw them to an early and miserable grave.